A young Tafelsig mother is reliving a nightmare as the man she says sexually assaulted her last year, now stands accused of having done the same to her five-year-old daughter.
The accused was arrested on Saturday August 3 after the mother, 23, originally from Rocklands, laid charges against the man she refers to as her “step-uncle”.
Three days later, he was released on bail, with the case relating to her daughter’s sexual assault, still pending.
Relaying her experience to the Plainsman, the woman recalls that it all started with an invitation to watch a movie.
While her family was away in August last year, she said, her aunt’s boyfriend had offered to take her and her siblings to watch a movie at the Liberty Promenade Mall. But when her younger brother showed an interest in going along, he was told that the movie had an age restriction. So the young mother went on her own with the man. It was when they were on their way home that the man started tickling her. She asked him to stop, but then he tickled her again.
And again, she asked him to stop.
Back at her stepfather’s mom’s house, the man asked the young mom to make him a cup of coffee, and while she was doing so, she told the Plainsman, he started touching her inappropriately. She tried to fight him off but he kept touching her and even offered to buy her cigarettes and use a condom so that “no one will know”.
“After the ordeal,I battled with myself, (uncertain) if I should share this with someone close to me. I did not want to inconvenience anyone or cause problems as I was already facing some of my own. I decided to share the ordeal, after my brother encouraged me to tell the truth,” she said.
But nobody believed her, she said. They blamed her for allowing it to happen. Her aunt told her to “let it go”, not to open a case, and to stop visiting the grandmother’s house where the aunt and her boyfriend lived.
But then, on Youth Day, Sunday June 16 this year, her daughter was allegedly molested by the same man.
The little girl had spent that long weekend at her maternal grandmother’s house, which is not far from where the paternal grandmother, aunt and the boyfriend live.
When the girl returned home, her mom said, “she started acting strange”.
“Her behaviour was odd, she was always looking down and then I just felt that something wasn’t right,” she added.
Her daughter later claimed that she had been playing outside and had ridden her scooter as far as the paternal grandmother’s house where the man had allegedly lured her into the garage of the house and sexually assaulted her.
Since the ordeal, the mother said, she and her daughter had moved to Tafelsig to be further away from the man.
Mitchell’s Plain police spokesman Captain Ian Williams said a man, 44, had been arrested for the alleged sexual assault on the mother, but was released on bail on Tuesday August 6. No arrests had yet been made in connection with her daughter’s alleged assault, he added.