Xolani Koyana
IT was a day in March when the 3-year-old girl went missing for a few hours – and was later found crying in an open field 100m from her home.
It was eventually found that the toddler had been raped.
Five months later, the family are still trying to pick up the pieces. Neither the identity of the family nor the child may be revealed.
A man was arrested for the crime but, following numerous court cases in the Blue Down’s Magistrate’s Court, the State eventually withdrew the charges reportedly because the child would be unable to testify.
The man has since been released back into the same community as the toddler. When the Cape Times visited the family, the girl was playing with her friends outside the house under the watchful eye of her mother.
“Sometimes I feel like taking my children and leaving this area because being here brings up all the hurt into our lives – but there’s nowhere to go,” said the toddler’s 25-year-old mother.
She said when her other children, boys aged 6 and 12, heard that the man had been released, they refused to leave their one-roomed shack and did not go to school for a few days. The boys feared for their young sister.
The mother said both she and the community had been left confused by the withdrawal of the charges against the man.
Residents had written a letter to the police and the court, requesting that the man be forced to find alternative accommodation in a different community. The man lives a few houses from the child’s home.
The mother said her daughter was playing with other children during the day but woke up crying almost every night because of nightmares. She said a doctor’s report had proved her child had been raped.
She said she hoped that when her daughter was old enough, she would be able to explain what had happened to her, but she feared the child may be too old to remember then. “It doesn’t sit well with me that my child went through something like this and the person responsible is still out there. I fear for myself and my children,” she said.
A social worker from Eerste River had visited after the incident in March, but neither she nor the child had received counselling.