The Awutu Ofaakor Circuit Court has handed a three-year sentence to the teacher who defiled his nine-year-old pupil at Kasoa in the Central Region.
The court presided over by Ebenezer Osei Darko charged the teacher with indecent assault and also ordered him to pay ¢20,000 to cater to the victim’s medical expenses.
The teacher, known as Sir Morrison is said to have inserted his fingers into the vagina of the Primary Two pupil after offering to teach her what she had missed when she reported late to vacation classes.
Unknown to the hapless girl, the teacher had an agenda. She recounts that the teacher asked all the other pupils in the class to go home so he could use the classroom.
Even a protest from the girl for her friend to be allowed to stay while she was taught, was rejected by the teacher.
“When I started writing, he came closer and rubbed his hands in my head and said my father has asked him to provide all my needs.”
“He put me on one of the tables and started inserting his fingers into my genitals. It was painful, I started struggling with him,” she told Joy News Maxwell Agbabga.
During the sexual act, however, the victim in her attempt to flee fell off the table and hit her pelvis on another table in the classroom.
For days she could not walk.
Joy News’ Maxwell Agbagba visited her at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital where she has been on admission.
She is still unable to walk, but her grandfather, thankful for the support they have received since Joy News broke the news is hopeful his grandchild will get better and go back to her normal life.
But the Executive Director of the Human Rights Advocacy Centre, Cynthia Nimo-Ampredu is unimpressed with the sentence.
Although happy about the swiftness of the court, she believes that three years is just not enough.
“Three years is not adequate. It is not adequate because this is an adult who has taken advantage of a minor. This is not an ordinary adult, this is a person who holds a position of trust with respect to this child.”
She expects that the teacher would have been sentenced to at least seven years in jail – a minimum sentence for a person charged with defilement.
“If he was charged with indecent assault, I can understand the three years because there the minimum sentence is six months sentence…but that is a wrong charge,” she added.
She is convinced that the appropriate charge should be defilement, and that should not be less than seven years.
Source: Ghana| Myjoyonline.com | Naa Sakwaba Akwa | E: faustine.akwa@myjoyonline.com
