A Pretoria High Court judge has slated legislation that ‘discriminated’ between child r ape victims, with the rapists of boys facing far less severe sentences than those who r aped girls. Judge Eben Jordaan and Acting Judge E Tolmay set aside a three-year jail sentence imposed by a Pretoria magistrate on a petrol attendant who lured a six-year-old boy into his house and sodomised him. A News24 report says the man had been convicted of indecent assault and sentenced to three years imprisonment, by the magistrate. The High Court, however, set aside the sentence, and replaced it with a 15-year jail term that was even more severe than the 10-year minimum sentence presently prescribed by the Minimum Sentences Act for indecent assault. Jordaan described the discrimination between male and female child r ape victims as ‘ridiculous’ and said it could not be countenanced in a constitutional dispensation like South Africa's. He described the indecent assault on the boy as ‘male r ape’ and said there was no difference between the trauma experienced by male and female child victims of sexual assault.
Full report on the News24 site
Supplied courtesy of Legalbrief Today.
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