By Allieu Sahid Tunkara
It happened in a tiny village called Walihun in the Bumpeh Ngao Chiefdom, Bo district, Southern Sierra Leone. A girl (name withheld) aged 15 grapples with the pains of an eight-month pregnancy. She looks pale and sickly and cannot get her words quickly when she speaks.
She was allegedly sexually penetrated by a staff attached to a German hospital in Serabu Town in the same chiefdom. The victim was impregnated at the time she was preparing for her Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE). A gloomy shadow hanged over her exams as she is now an expectant mother. Her background is too humble to provide the required medication she needs.
With all these painful circumstances, the victim is in possession of a voter identity card which she would present to officials attempting to probe her situation with a view of letting the perpetrator off the hook. Information filtering the Serabu Township depicts the perpetrator as a notorious pedophile. He has allegedly sexually penetrated a number of girls in the community but would not hesitate to spend money to suppress the matters to stop them reaching the police. The perpetrator ran out of luck this time when his nocturnal activities with girls was picked up and reported to the police.
The Family Support Unit (FSU) personnel acted swiftly on the tip-off through surveillance and information gathering. The information gathered was translated into an intelligence having undergone criminal processing and analysis. The victim would spend the day at home so that she could not go into contact with the law enforcement officials. But on a sunny afternoon, she was taken aback when she saw police officers in her house to dig deep into the alleged sexual matter. By their looks, the police were determined to arrest and prosecute the perpetrator to prevent further sexual violence on unsuspecting victims.
However, police effort to investigate the sexual allegation is counter-productive. They were subjected to two-hour period of invectives by parents so that the police could take their hands off the matter. This action is a deliberate attempt by parents of the victim to water down police investigation. As if the victim was taught about the key element in a sexual penetration offence, she showed a voter ID card to the FSU as an indication that she voted in the past election and therefore is no longer a child. The pens and papers for the investigation became smoking guns in the hands of the police.
At this stage, the police had no alternative but to close the investigation as the voter ID card has a damaging effect to the case. The perpetrator has been exonerated by the ill- advised action of the victim by presenting the voter ID card to the police. Should the police arrest the perpetrator after laying hands on the voter ID card, such arrest would have been questioned in a court of law and the police’s competence and integrity put at stake.
In a related development, a class-six pupil was also allegedly sexually penetrated by a headmaster in a primary school at Gbondapi in Pujehun district. The headmaster was initially arrested and charged with sexual penetration. Following his arrest, the accused was initially remanded at the state prison in Pujehun town but was later granted bail following application made by his counsel. During the trial, it was discovered that the victim was in possession of a voter ID card indicating that she voted during the past elections. Consequently, the accused was acquitted and discharged on the basis of such discovery. The acquittal legally implies that the accused can no longer be arrested for the same offence. The registration technicality restored the accused’s freedom even though he might have committed the offence.
The instances above indicate that most girls are currently in possession of voter ID cards that would fatally undermine police investigations into alleged sexual penetration matters. The girls use these voter ID cards to free sexual assault suspects from police nets. Most times, these suspects are their boy-friends. Romantic relationships have been nursed and nurtured for lengthy periods by both. They have got used to each other and girls would not like to see their boy-friends incarcerated. The girls would therefore leave no avenue unexplored to get their guys out of police cells. Before this time, the victims would go on hunger strikes compelling their parents to withdraw the sexual matters from the police. Since the victims’ ploy have been discountenanced by the police and their parents, they have found a new tactic: under-age voter registration as way to frustrate sexual assault investigations.
At Calaba Town community in the east end of Freetown, many under-age girls also possess voter ID cards that are crippling police investigations into sexual assault matters. The FSU Line manager at Calaba Town police station confirms to Politico that the possession of voter ID cards affects the fight against sexual abuse in his area of responsibility. Moses Fofanah explained that the parents are usually determined to prosecute these matters, but their daughters do not cooperate with the police.
“If you register with an age of 18 because you want to vote in an election, it is not an issue to me. I do not convict anyone. It is the business of the law office to peruse files we submit to them. My own business is to gather and collate pieces of evidence which I put forward to the law officers for legal advice,” the Line Manager explained. Although Fofanah could not offer the exact statistics of sexual matters he has charged to court, he told Politico that he had sent several matters there.
“This creates a deterrent effect in would-be offenders,” he said. He however expressed dissatisfaction with victims who present voter ID cards to FSU investigators considering the damaging effect such behavior may bring to the investigation.
“If parents try to prosecute sexual offences and their children undermine their effort, it is their business,” he lamented.
The voter ID card syndrome is a new phenomenon that is complicating investigations into sexual matters. By their nature, the offences themselves are very difficult to investigate and the new phenomenon of under-age voter registration has exacerbated the situation. These offences are committed in clandestine manner and the suspects usually do not admit the allegations during police investigations. Even when they are arraigned before the courts, perpetrators usually enter a ‘not guilty’ plea until the courts hear evidence from all parties to the case and pronounce a ‘guilty verdict.’ It is a well-established principle in law that the standard of proof for all criminal prosecutions in all civilized jurisdictions known to the law is “proving a case beyond all reasonable doubt.” This requires the police to put their shoulder to the wheel when conducting such protracted investigations so that no doubt could be occasioned when the matters are presented in courts. This lends credence to the philosophy of an eminent 19th century lawyer, Sir Matthew Hale who once argued: “Sexual offences are very easy to be made but difficult to prove but harder to be defended on the party accused…”
As these offences are rife and affect every facet of society, President Julius Maada Bio, few months back, declared a state of Public Emergency to demonstrate how serious these offences are. But the President’s effort was thwarted both by parliament and the Sierra Leone Bar Association (SLBA). Parliamentarians could not agree unanimously with the proclamation of a state of public emergency considering the dangers inherent in such periods. Similarly, the SLBA also checkmated the actions of the President in a press release describing the actions as “illegal.” The release urged the President to go for another alternative as a state of public emergency is irrelevant to the situation.
Whatever strategies adopted by the government to stop the spread of sexual offences, it must think of ways to fix the problem of under- age voter registration.
© 2019 Politico Online
