Five years in prison suspended for five years, 24 months of correctional supervision and 16 months of community service.
This is the punishment imposed by Magistrate Kenneth Peters, a 51-year-old man who sexually assaulted his daughter (now 15 years old) over a ten-year period, in the Vredendal Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday.
The man was found guilty in January this year.
Peters said in his ruling it was just sexual assault and not rape and the acts did not justify jail time.
The girl’s mother said Thursday that her estranged husband had sexually assaulted their child from the age of three to 13 years.
The mother became aware of the abuse after she came across a letter that her daughter wrote to the Lord in which she wrote what her father was doing to her and asked for help.
The mother says the legal system failed her child. “After the verdict, I thought to myself, it’s typically a man who comes up for another man.
“How could he have imposed this punishment on him? This after my daughter testified that although she forgave him, she felt that he should go to jail because he who had to protect her would rather hurt her. “
The mother says that despite her conviction, her estranged husband also does not stop threatening her. “At our local police station, they don’t help me at all because he works there and they protect him. They didn’t even investigate my daughter’s complaint. I later had to go to the Vredendal police station and made the case there. “
She says he threatened her shortly after he was convicted of death. “His cellphone was seized and it was sent away to check forensics. He was jailed for a week for violating the protection order, but still the local police do nothing to protect us from him. “
Meanwhile, the col. Police spokesman Andrè Traut said the man resigned shortly before his sentencing.
He says there was an internal disciplinary hearing on June 2, but its outcome cannot be disclosed to the public. The man resigned before the internal disciplinary hearing.
Traut denied the allegations that local police were not investigating the charge against him.
