Police are investigating claims that a 13-year-old Bethlehem boy impregnated his 11-year-old sister, after the girl gave birth to a two-month premature child, police said on Friday.
Captain Veronica Ntepe said the girl gave birth at home in Bohlokong on Tuesday.
The seven-month-old foetus was dead by the time an ambulance arrived.
Ntepe said police suspected the girl had been impregnated by her brother. The two apparently lived alone and shared a bed. Their mother passed away earlier this year and their father worked in Gauteng.
The girl’s father detected her pregnancy at five months after being told by neighbours, but he did not report the matter to the authorities.
Police have opened an inquest docket regarding the death of the foetus.
They have also asked for legal opinion whether to charge the brother with incest and statutory rape.
In terms of the Sexual Offences Act, sex with a girl younger than 16 is an offence. But the law also presumes that children, up to their 14th birthday rebuttably lack the capacity to commit a crime as they cannot sufficiently distinguish between right and wrong because of their youthful age.
To charge someone in this category would require prosecutors to prove he or she knew the nature and consequences of his or her conduct and that it was wrong, in addition to showing that he or she was capable of acting in accordance with that appreciation.
The children are apparently still at home, Ntepe said.
In another case in the same township, a 16-year-old boy was arrested this week for raping his two sisters, aged six and eight. They were apparently also living alone. – Sapa