The stories do not come worse. A seven-year old girl (name withheld) has been put through a horrendous experience that would kill or mentally scar many an adult woman.
She has been defiled by a stranger. But what makes her situation much worse, is that she has also been brutally beaten and whipped by her parents, in an effort to torture her to give up the person who molested her.
Pictures of the child secured by Daily Searchlight demonstrate deep laceration marks scourged by a cane on all her body, from her neck, stomach, back, arms, and legs in what must have been a truly horrendous whipping experience.
The child was discovered at a gas filling station at Madina in Accra, where she had been brought to carry a gas cylinder and a Good Samaritan noticed the horrible marks on her body and raised the alarm.
Speaking the Good Samaritan, the child explained that she received the marks from a beating by her parents.
Asked the reason for the assault, she said that her parents had wanted to know from her the person responsible for defiling her.
The case has since been reported to the Police at Madina.
Child defilement or molestation remains one of the major problems of child abuse in Ghana. Often, distressed parents turn their anger on the victims in order to force the victims to give up the persons responsible for the abuse in the first place.Â
(The Daily Searchlight appears every day on the newsstands and for sale 24 hours every day and all week on www.ghananewstand.com. Visit www.ghananewstand.com for a wide variety of newspapers published in Ghana and from across the world.)
