Ma. Socorro Rojas, Zamboanga’s social welfare officer, told the Inquirer on Thursday that the girl backtracked on her earlier statement that her playmate had repeatedly raped her inside the Don Joaquin F. Enriquez Memorial Sports Complex here used as shelter for people displaced by fighting between government forces and Moro National Liberation Front gunmen last year.
When she pointed to the 11-year boy during police investigation on June 27, the girl was in the company of her grandmother, Rojas said.
Gamar Hassan, leader of a group of displaced residents opposed to relocation, said he was also told the same when he sought help on behalf of the girl.
“The girl was allegedly raped by a boy, whose family shared a duplex room in one of the bunkhouses at the grandstand,” Hassan said.
The girl’s ordeal was discovered when she was earlier rushed to a hospital due to a recurring fever. It turned out that she had sexually transmitted diseases.
Further tests conducted showed she had been repeatedly raped.
She initially insisted that her playmate had raped her. As a result, the boy was taken into police custody and turned over to the social welfare office.
But Rojas said when interviewed again without her grandmother the following day, the girl changed her story and identified her 60-year-old grandfather as the real culprit.
Authorities acted immediately and arrested the grandfather, she said.
“The grandmother was so mad and continued to defend her husband,” she said. Rojas said the behavior was puzzling and the authorities suspected she might be hiding something.
When the grandfather was implicated in the rape of the girl, Rojas said, the authorities decided to take into custody her two siblings and her deaf-mute mother.
“We brought them to a secure location for counseling,” she said.
Rojas said the authorities also found out that the girl’s mother was pregnant even though she had no husband.
“She had been abandoned by her husband long ago and she had been staying with her father and mother” along with the children, she said.
Rojas said the discovery made the authorities to suspect that the girl was not the lone victim of incestuous rape by the old man but her deaf-mute mother as well.
However, she said that the deaf-mute mother would have to undergo psycho-social counseling and healing first before being interviewed through sign language “to get the whole story.”
Senior Superintendent Angelito Casimiro, the local police chief, said they had released the old man from custody but proper charges will be brought against him through regular filing.
“The lacerations of the girl were already a week old that’s why we cannot just arrest the old man. Under regular filing, he would be given 15 days to answer the allegations against him,” Casimiro said.
Rojas said they were also studying the possibility of implicating the girl’s grandmother for “trying to hide the incident and even protecting her husband.”
Rojas said there were other incidents of sexual abuse documented in evacuation centers here.
Dr. Marcy Carpizo, director of Western Mindanao State University’s peace and human security program, blamed the crammed conditions of evacuation centers.
“A lot of things could happen under those conditions,” Carpizo said.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said that nine months after the violence involving Moro National Liberation Front gunmen and security forces ended, 40,000 people remain displaced from their homes and continue to live “in difficult conditions in overcrowded evacuation centers or hosted by relatives and largely dependent on humanitarian assistance.”
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