The Sunday News
THE abuse of a child — whether emotional, physical or sexual — is one of the most heinous of crimes. Child abuse leaves permanent scars that may prevent children from becoming healthy and productive adults.
Those who champion children’s rights say that when it comes to sexual abuse, children are abused by people close to them. These may be family or neighbours. But what society has failed to fathom is why fathers rape their own children. There are countless stories that have hit the headlines where fathers have sexually abused their own daughters, with uncles and neighbours joining the list.
Last week, we broke the story of a nine-year-old girl who is admitted at United Bulawayo Hospitals having been raped and impregnated. The girl is now less than a month from giving birth, in what has become an international story and a record as the country has never witnessed such a case.
United Bulawayo Hospitals (UBH)
During the week, we learnt that the father of the girl has since been picked up by the police “to help in the investigations”. That the father might be a suspect shocked the world, and furthermore, many people were questioning how the girl’s Tsholotsho family failed to notice that she was pregnant and that she had been sexually abused.
The story of the nine-year-old pregnant girl came a few weeks after a 13-year-old girl from Mkhosana Township in Victoria Falls wrote part of her Zimsec Grade Seven examinations on a hospital bed soon after giving birth at Victoria Falls Hospital. In the Victoria Falls case, the girl was not aware that she was pregnant until a month before giving birth.
UBH acting chief executive officer, Dr Harrison Rambanapasi, said the girl actually conceived when she was eight years old, which was made possible by a rare condition of precocious puberty (development of sexual maturation earlier than the normal age). Dr Rambanapasi said ordinarily puberty should start at 11 years.
The acting CEO said this was the first time he had come across such a case, arguing that to the majority in the medical profession, this was something they came across just in medical journals. Dr Rambanapasi, without shedding much information on the case in question, pointed out some of the challenges that come with issues of that nature.
“There are a lot of challenges, this is a child who is supposed to be in school, a child who should be playing with other children. She is supposed to be looked after by her parents as a child but now you impose on her, this extra responsibility. This is going to affect the other things that she should be working on at this stage, like going to school. It is going to be strange to her and also to her peers, people will be looking at her, probably laughing and mocking her and that affects her mentally as well,” he said.
Dr Rambanapasi said physically a nine-year-old is not prepared for sexual intercourse.
HIV and Aids awareness
“When we look at sexual intercourse, before the changes of puberty have fully occurred, intercourse will be very traumatic because the body has not developed enough for her to be engaging in sexual activities. The resilience of the genitals is not yet developed. Before we even talk about her falling pregnant, this is obviously a result of an abusive relationship. Is this child capacitated to negotiate for safe sex? At this age they are also prone to sexually transmitted infections, HIV, unwanted pregnancies because they do not know how to protect themselves. Even if they know, how do they negotiate with an adult for safe sex? They are not able to negotiate,” he said.
Other challenges that can be faced, he said, include Pregnancy Induced Hypertension (PIH) and molar pregnancies which are abnormal pregnancies which do not form a baby but form multiple cysts instead. Furthermore, the girl is unlikely to bond with her child because she is also a child who has given birth and the baby will become more of a burden to her than anything else.
However, after everything has been said and done, families and the community at large must protect children from any form of abuse. This heinous act must stop.
