Tuen Mun girl was subjected to first assault at age eight. She finally broke her silence in an anonymous note to her teacher
A jury deliberated for eight hours before returning guilty verdicts on three charges. A father in Hong Kong has been convicted of repeatedly raping his 10-year-old daughter, who exposed his crimes by writing an anonymous note to her teacher. After eight hours of deliberation on Thursday, seven jurors at the High Court found the man, referred to as H.K.H to protect the girl’s identity, guilty of two counts of rape, and one of indecent assault.
All the attacks took place at the girl’s Tuen Mun home between 2015 and 2017, with the earliest incident occurring when she was just eight years old.
The defendant was remanded into custody by Mr Justice Patrick Li Hon-leung, who will hear mitigation arguments from his lawyer on January 30. The judge also ordered a psychological assessment and impact report on the girl, who was referred to as X during the five-day trial.
The court heard she was molested at least seven times, with all but the first of the attacks involving rape. The father, a 44-year-old builder, was charged over three of those assaults.
X initially hesitated to tell anyone about the rapes, because her father said he could be taken away as a result. But she eventually wrote to her general studies teacher anonymously two days after the last attack, which she said happened on November 19, 2017.
The girl put a note into a box for pupils’ questions, set up in their classroom as part of the sex education programme. “I was forced to have sex with my father. How should I deal with it? Will I get pregnant?” the note read.
That prompted the school to take action to identify X, and later led to her father’s arrest. X told police during an interview that on November 19, she was told to go to her father’s bed just before her usual bedtime.
She said he then raped her as she tried to kick him away. “It’s very painful. Don’t do that,” she recalled telling her father. Another attack was said to have taken place several months earlier during her summer holiday, between July and September.
The girl said her father first assaulted her in 2015 when she was eight. He had rubbed himself against her.
During the trial, the man took the stand to deny the crime. He portrayed himself as a loving father, who said he was puzzled as to why his daughter would frame him – a claim rejected by the jury.