Fourteen boys found to have been sodomising each other in a working-class suburb of Cape Town will not face criminal charges, police said on Sunday.
Superintendent Billy Jones said although they were investigating a case of sexual assault, the boys — aged between five and 11-years-old — would not be charged.
He said the children would be referred to social workers.
The Sunday Times quoted a parent as saying the case had come to light two weeks ago, when an eight-year-old was caught naked in bed with his three-year-old niece.
”He told [his father] that two of his friends, a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old, had sodomised him,” the parent said.
The father took the boy to a doctor, who confirmed this. He then confronted the two alleged perpetrators, who said they had been sodomised by another boy.
”The boys told us they had watched blue movies at the house of one of the older boys while his parents were at work,” another parent told the Sunday Times.
The older boy allegedly then told ”a group of about eight boys” to ”do what those people in the movie did,” the paper reported.
Police have also confiscated pornographic material from one of the boys’ homes. – Sapa