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Allegations
of Sexual Abuse |
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A mother broke down in
tears yesterday as she told how her seven-year-old daughter came home from
school with bruises and bloody underpants, after allegedly being kicked and
raped by her male teacher. The testimony, in
Wellington District Court, occurred in the trial of a 43-year-old
primary-school teacher accused of assaulting, molesting, and twice raping the
girl in 1996. His accuser, now 17,
said she only began to remember and understand what had happened to her when
she was in her early teens. A chance sighting of
her former teacher at Te Papa Museum several years ago set off feelings of
fear and helped her remember the trauma she had suffered as a child, she told
told jurors on Monday. She also said a
classmate in high school had come up to her and repeated words the man had
said after raping her, even though she'd never heard them. The young woman
admitted it was an "extraordinary" event. "I found it very
strange and disturbing," she said. The court has
suppressed the accused's name and details that might identify the school
where the alleged crimes took place. Yesterday's testimony
involved cross-examination of both the accuser and her mother by defence
lawyer Paul Paino, who twice reduced the mother to tears. Mr Paino suggested the
mother and daughter had pieced together fragments of memory and imagined
details to arrive at the story of the girl being raped. He suggested the
accusations came from an unhappy girl absorbed in her own fantasy world, and
a mother who actively encouraged her daughter's imagined memories. Both women strongly
denied the lawyer's suggestions. The mother testified
that her daughter had come home on multiple occasions with blood and what
looked like semen and pubic hair in her underpants. She said she had talked
with her husband about it and washed the underpants but had not suspected her
daughter had been raped at school because it was too "ghastly" to
think a teacher might have done such a thing. The mother also told
jurors that her daughter said the teacher had kicked her and left a large
bruise on her leg. Afterward, the mother had withdrawn her daughter from the
school. On another occasion,
the mother said, her daughter came home from the man's house, where she had
gone to play with his daughter, shaken and pale. The girl said the teacher
had forced her to take a bath, the mother said in court. The alleged victim said
Monday the man had molested her in the tub. A pediatrician
testified yesterday she had examined the young woman in 2004 and found a
healed vaginal injury consistent with penetration by something blunt, such as
a finger or penis. Mr Panio repeatedly
focused on an incident in which the girl had fallen while climbing a tree,
landing on a branch and injuring her vagina. He suggested that was the cause
of her injury and the blood in her underpants. |
