A man charged with managing the youth programs of his local community centre has just been released after being acquitted on five counts of rape.
This man spent nearly two years in jail after being accused by five children of rape.
The children alleged that they often went to the community centre after school for gumboot dancing classes, and that this is where the accused first approached them.
They alleged that the accused had asked them to join him for a movie in the community centre, to which they agreed.
The children alleged that the man first watched a zombie movie with them, with an age restriction much higher than their actual ages, and that thereafter the man forced them to watch a pornographic film with him.
At this point the fifth child refused to testify further against the man.
The four children were not consistent in their testimonies regarding the content of the pornographic film, some claiming that it was child pornography whilst others denied this.
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The four remaining child-witnesses then alleged that whilst watching the pornographic film with this man, he sexually assaulted them, walking between the children and stroking their genitals as they watched the movie.
All four children alleged that the man had put his genitals between their thighs and buttocks and had moved it up and down.
Some children alleged that this had happened whilst they were fully clothed, whilst others alleged it had occurred after he had forced them to remove their clothing.
The children also alleged that the man had threatened to kill them and their families should they speak out about the rape.
The children told the court that the sexual abuse continued during the period between January 2015 and January 2016.
When the court asked the children why the continued to return to the youth centre if this man was abusing them there, they stated that if the man found them playing elsewhere within their suburb he would tell them to return to the youth centre and make menacing gestures towards them.
The children also alleged that the man bought their silence with small gifts. One child alleged that after a sexual assault, the man gave him R3.
Another alleged at the man gave him books, another that the man gave him two bicycle tyres and the final child alleged that the man had given him swimming goggles and a swimming cap.
The child who had allegedly received the swimming goggles and swimming cap alleged that he told his parents that he had received these goggles because of his excellent performance in a recent spelling bee.
One of the children also stated during cross-examination that the man had forced them to remove their clothes and dance for him in a sexually provocative way.
The children told how, when they warned the man that they would tell their parents, he would beat them with a pipe.
Just before the initial arrest of the man, two of the children arrived at one of their mother’s front doors after a day of playing outside alleging that the man had assaulted them by beating them with a pipe and by pouring water containing faeces over them.
The children were not wet, smelly or bruised when they told their mother this, but the case was opened regardless.
The man alleged that he had only very recently met the five boys after one of the children in his youth group had her bicycle stolen.
The five children had been spotted stealing the bicycle, and thus the man had confronted them and asked that they return the bicycle to its owner who used it as transport to get to school and back.
The children allegedly then told the man that they would not return the bicycle, and that if he told the community or their parents that they had stolen the bicycle that they would claim he raped them.
The man made the grave error of telling the boys’ parents and paid for it with two years of his life behind bars.
The court ended the trial by stating that the onus was not on the accused to prove his innocence, and called on the case law of a previous trial to illustrate how the testimony of children could often not be trusted due to “their vivid imaginations”.
Magistrate Hans Combrink stated that
“inconsistencies were not uncommon in verbal testimony, but that the untruths were of a material nature, and that this cast doubt over the reliability of the children’s accounts”
The court acquitted the man on all charges due to the fact that the medical evidence showed that no assault, sexual or physical, had occurred and due to the fact that none of the four children who remained to testify against the man had stories that agreed on the sequence of events, or content of the sexual assaults.
The court posited that these children had accused the man of rape just to escape the trouble they might have been in for stealing a bicycle, and that these children have essentially ruined this man’s career, which involved working with minors, due to their own selfishness.
