When Justice Fails: The Trauma of a Sexual Assault Case

When I was a teenager, one of my cousins, who was at the time probably eight or nine years old, told her mother (my aunt) that their neighbour - an older man - asked her to take off her shirt and let him touch her - while she was playing at his house. Instantly, as a kid, she felt something was not right, and she ran back to her house to her mom, where she disclosed what happened. My aunt was terrified but decided not to tell her husband - my cousin's dad - because she feared that he would do "something stupid" against the neighbour. As my aunt was putting pressure on her husband, they moved to a different neighbourhood only a few weeks after the incident, on the false pretence that the house "did not have good air circulation".