I want to know where the mother was! I want to know how this "mother" did not know her daughter was being RAPED! I want to know why she thought it was a good idea to leave her child alone with him. Babysitting? I am so not buying that. No sane mother would do that.
Are all men pervs? NO! But strangers are dangerous of any sex and the majority of child rapists are men! Did this mother not worry about her child???
This mother should be charged with neglect in this too.
pixies, I was molested for four months and finally raped when I was 12 years old. I never told my parents. My parents were loving, caring, the best parents in the world. They were never neglectful.
The man was a school counsellor and the reason I was seeing him was because my mother had cancer and was extremely ill. He told me that I was "forcing" him to molest me, that I was a bad girl and that if my mother found out it would kill her. Since my mother weighed about 80 pounds and was completely bald from chemo at the time, I truly believed him.
Some parents are neglectful, it's true. But the fact that a child is molested or raped by someone outside of the family doesn't automatically indict the parent(s) care for the child.
In my case, no one really noticed any change in my behaviour, I don't think. My stress meter was already pegged by my mother's illness, so I'm pretty sure I couldn't have acted any more stressed out. I'm convinced, in fact, that he probably first saw me as a victim because he knew my mother was ill--vulnerability is what predators look for.
I was assigned to see the school counsellor because my grades were sliding and I wasn't adjusting to junior high school (as it was called back then). In order to get away from him after he raped me, I sucked it up, requested that I not have to attend counselling any more since my mother seemed to be better and I worked like a maniac to get my grades back up to all A's.
Please don't automatically condemn every parent for not knowing everything about their child's life because it's not fair. It wouldn't be fair to condemn my parents for not noticing that I was upset at a time when the whole family was terribly upset.
I also disagree that this story is about a stranger raping this child. He was babysitting her for a period of at least three years, so he clearly was not a stranger. Rather, like the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases, he was someone well known to the child. The number of children raped by strangers is a tiny, tiny percentage of the number of children raped each year.
It isn't strangers that are the primary danger to children. I wish it were not so.