Police rescue girl from five years of rape by stepfather

DIGOS CITY, Philippines – Police have rescued a 13-year-old girl from an abusive stepfather who allegedly had been raping her for over five years, and placed the man under arrest.

Agents of the police’s Criminal Detection and Investigation Group raided the house in Bansalan, Davao del Sur, where the girl lived with her cancer-stricken mother, sisters and stepfather last Tuesday after receiving a tip from a member of a religious congregation, police said.

“We immediately acted on the report after it reached our office,” Senior Inspector Francis Sonza, the CIDG team leader, told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

He said Brother Moises Macalalag of the Order of St. Benedict had visited the ailing woman and found from her the plight of the hapless girl.

On Tuesday evening, CIDG agents backed by the Bansalan police, conducted an operation and arrested the 36-year-old suspect.

“The raiding team also rescued the victim, who is now a grade IV pupil,” Sonza said.

Sonza said the victim’s mother knew all along her daughter was being sexually abused by the suspect, “but she was too weak to even tell anyone about it.”

The visit of Macalalag a few days back provided a chance for the woman to relay her daughter’s ordeal to the police, Sonza said.

Macalalag had met the mother when she was a patient at the Benedictine Hospital here.

“It was a follow up visit,” Sonza said.

Sonza said the girl told investigators her ordeal started in 2005, when she was still eight years old.

“The last sexual abuse occurred on July 23,” he said.

The suspect is now under police custody and has been charged while the girl has been turned over to the custody of the Bansalan police’s women and children’s desk, he said.