Starting young
Posted: Wed May 12, 2010 10:39 pm
Two of the youngest children ever to be charged with rape in England and Wales went on trial at the Old Bailey today.
The boys, both aged 10 at the time of the alleged crime, are accused of forcing an eight-year-old girl to have sex with them repeatedly, in a hallway, a lift, a dustbin store and in a field near where all three children live in Hayes, West London, last October.
The boys, now aged 11 and 10, looked tiny sitting in the middle of the court between their mothers and solicitors. They deny two charges each of rape and two charges each of attempted rape of a child under 13. None of the children involved can be identified for legal reasons.
The jury of six men and six women were able to see the girl in a videolink from an ante-room of the court. She came in holding the hand of an usher, who lifted her on to a chair. At one point the judge told her to take a blackcurrant juice bottle away from her mouth so that he could hear her.
The court was played the girl’s video interview with specially trained police officers the day after the incident. She is seen clutching and playing with her teddy bear as she tells how she had been playing with the two boys and a younger child, a boy aged 5, when the older boys offered to take her to see her friend.
They led her into the hallway of a block of flats, where, she said they assaulted her.
Speaking in hushed and hurried tones, the girl said that she was taken to a bin shed and assaulted before being taken to the bushes and then a garden area where she was assaulted again.
Rosina Cottage, for the prosecution, told the court that when the victim’s mother and younger sister went to fetch her from the fields, they bumped into the mother of the younger defendant and the children’s five-year-old playmate.
When the boy’s mother asked the little boy where her son was “he said that he was in a nearby field and that he was with (the girl) and that he was hurting her”, said Miss Cottage.
He pointed over to the field and they went to find the children. The girl’s mother went into the field and hunted in vain for some time.
“As she was walking out she saw (her daughter) with the boys and asked what they had been doing. They all said nothing,” added Miss Cottage.
The mother asked for her daughter’s scooter back from the younger defendant.
But as they walked home, the woman “could see things were not right with her daughter”. In the car, she asked her what was wrong.
Miss Cottage told the jury: “She told her mother that they had taken her to some flats and taken her to the top floor.
“She said that she had been taken to a bin shed where they moved the bins across so she could not get out."
She told the court that the girl said she was assaulted at both locations before she was taken to the fields. The girl told the boys to leave her alone but they assaulted her again.
The woman went to see the boys’ parents, who were not in, but spotted the older boy. Miss Cottage said she asked what happened but he replied “nothing”.
The younger boy joined them, and allegedly said, without prompting: “I didn’t touch her.”
The older boy was said to have added: “It wasn’t me. It was (the other boy).”
The judge, Mr Justice Saunders, and lawyers in the case dispensed with their robes and wigs. The judge, wearing a dark grey suit, sat where the court clerk normally sits so that he was on the same level as the boys.
The jury was told that sitting hours had been shortened and other steps were taken because the defendants were so young.
In a second video interview two months later, the girl said that one of the boys had thrown her scooter into the bush.
She said: “They said if I didn’t pull down my pants, they won’t get my scooter from the bush.”
The trial continues.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 124170.ece
