“My daughter couldn’t hold her urine. Even when we would sit (as a family) she would take her potty, go to another room and just sit there alone.”
This was how a shattered mother detailed her 9-year-old daughter’s debilitating bladder infection, which was damaged when rape-accused Johannes Molefe allegedly sexually violated the child with his finger.
Molefe, 58, is a former patroller at Soweto’s AB Xuma Primary School, and is facing three counts of rape and 11 of sexual assault for crimes he allegedly committed on 13 schoolgirls aged between 5 and 13 last year.
He has pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Testifying on Tuesday at the South Gauteng High Court sitting in the Palmridge Magistrate’s Court, the 9-year-old’s mother said her daughter was put on treatment for her infection in June last year after the parent noticed a “problem” the girl had of going to the toilet at regular intervals.
“She couldn’t hold in her urine. She was always sitting on her potty,” the distraught mother said, tears streaming down her face.
She added that she checked her daughter, and realised that the
child’s vaginal area was itchy as well, which is when she took the girl to be medically examined.
The mother said her daughter was asked by nurses at a Soweto clinic whether she had been sexually
violated, to which the girl said she had not.
They were given antibiotics and were told that the infection could’ve been caused by what the girl had eaten, the mother said.
It was only in September last year, after other children had come forward about Molefe’s alleged abuse, did the mother hear about what her daughter said was done to her.
Earlier o Tuesday, the girl had given a graphic testimony of what she said Molefe had done to her.
The girl said she had gone into Molefe’s quarters just before the
school day began as she was cold outside and the accused had a heater in his room.
Then Mkhulu (Molefe) entered and sat next to me on the bench.
“He then moved my panty to the side and put his (finger) on my vagina,” the girl said.
“I said: ‘Mkhulu please stop.’ He refused to stop. After that, he pushed me outside (the guard-room),”
she testified.
Advocate Lumka Qoqo, Molefe’s lawyer, said the accused would
deny ever violating the girl, and that he was being framed as a way to punish the school’s principal, who is apparently disliked by a faction of
the teaching staff.
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