COMMENT: Let us be always alert and educate our children on abuse

IT is a human trait to trust those that we live with. It would be difficult in fact, to operate without entrusting some of your responsibilities to someone else when you are tied up with something else. However, this only applies in a normal world.

It would appear that many families are discovering the hard way that we can no longer afford to trust even close relatives. We have reported on many kinds of abuse perpetrated against young children by those expected to protect them.

This is quite a worrying trend, and arrests of such people give us a glimpse into this area that is often not talked about, with some families sweeping such cases under the rug. This tends to persuade us to think that many more cases could be going unreported as some prefer to protect the family name, a breadwinner or even their spouse.

Elsewhere in this edition we carry an article on a plea from the police for the public to report cases of sexual abuse involving relatives since these were on the increase. It is against this background that the police have warned that it was not wise to trust any male relative with your female child. Also worrying are cases of maids abusing boy children.

This means that the relaxed parenting approach whereby one could rely on relatives to look out for their children has to be revisited. Unfortunately, there are no apparent signs that one is a potential abuser hence this advice that you are better off safe than being sorry.

According to Bulawayo police spokesperson, Inspector Abednico Ncube, a week hardly passes by without the police handling a rape case where a member of the family is the alleged perpetrator.

“In certain weeks we receive about three cases of rape where for example an uncle would have raped his niece or a grandfather would have raped his granddaughter. This is worrying because these are the people who would have been entrusted with those children but they turn monstrous and sexually assault them.”

Just recently a stepfather from Emthunzini suburb raped his stepdaughter in order to fix her mother who was allegedly cheating on him while a grandfather from Ntabazinduna was thwarted by his granddaughter that he tried to rape. The brave girl fought back and grabbed his jewels until the old man cried for help.

Elsewhere in this edition we also carry a case of a maid that allegedly sexually abused her employer’s 10-year-old child. If she had not been caught in the act, she would have continued preying on the hapless child.

Our call to all families is to be always alert and educate our children on abuse so that they can report should anything out of line be done to them, or even suggested. Let us heed the police warning not to trust anyone with our children. We are living in evil times indeed.

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