A family from a small NQ town ‘forced to hide in Townsville’ after child allegedly raped

The mother of a little boy allegedly raped by her former partner says her young family is in hiding in Townsville as the case drags through the justice system, years after the alleged crime.

A North Queensland woman and her young family are in hiding in Townsville. The mother says it feels as though her case has slipped between the cracks.

THE mother of a boy who was allegedly orally raped by her former de-facto partner says she has been run out of a North Queensland town as the case drags painfully slowly through the justice system.

The woman, now in hiding in Townsville, said she had been left with a mortgage she could never pay off, was working two jobs seven days a week, raising a family on her own and living in fear in a new town.

She said her former partner was charged in July 2018 with two counts of indecent treatment of a child under 12 and seven counts of rape between 2008 and 2011.

“He got out the same night on bail,” she said.

“I was ropeable, I was absolutely pissed off that he did not get to even see the inside walls of custody or anything. How dare he be able to walk free from that type of crime?”

She said her bitterness had been exacerbated by the length of time the case had been before the magistrates court.

The alleged victim, aged five at the time of the alleged offending and now a teenager, is not the accused’s biological son, although the former couple have two young children together.

She said the alleged offender’s bail conditions had recently been relaxed to allow the alleged rapist supervised access to the children and he was sending her one or two text messages a day.

:I’ve got no clue, nobody’s told me anything, I ring the police and they say ‘nothing’s been updated in our system’,” the mother says of the lack of progress with the case.

The mother said her former partner, from a well-known local family, had embarked on a smear campaign that had effectively forced her to flee the town she was living in.

“There are a few people that he told that I was making these allegations and that he was never charged; they’ve all come to me and said ‘why are you trying to make things hard for him,’ ‘you should just move on,’ … or ‘you’re on a witch hunt’,” she said.

“It felt like the whole town was against me.”

She said the man also laid a false complaint with child protection services that she was an ice addict.

“They came out and did an investigation and said that they could see it was revenge, that he is being spiteful, so we are not going to come and see you again.”

The mother said her son came forward with the allegations to protect his younger siblings.

Another aggravating factor was the lack of communication with the police or prosecution over the status of the case.

“I’ve got no clue, nobody’s told me anything, I ring the police and they say ‘nothing’s been updated on our system’.”

All that she had been told was that it should take a maximum of 18 months for it to go to trial in the district or supreme courts, and was expecting him to plead not guilty.

“Nobody can tell me anything, I’ve put the question ‘why is it taking so long to get through the court?’ and they just said ‘sometimes it does,’ there is just no end in sight.”

She felt like her case had slipped between the cracks.

“It feels like I am fighting a losing battle because I am not getting any help from anywhere, it doesn’t matter where I go, nobody wants to help me too much.”

A police prosecutor said he could not comment as the matter was before the courts.

The mother said her son was not coping well but was improving.

She said her son came forward with the allegations to protect his younger siblings.

“I was disgusted, I was sick, I felt like I’d failed my son, like I felt I hadn’t done my duty as a parent to keep him out of risk, out of harm’s way, there was a lot of beating myself up because I couldn’t protect him, because I didn’t protect him.”

The case is one of five sexual abuse cases currently before the same court.

“Which is a really bad statistic for a small town and there plenty of others that people just don’t know about.”

Originally published as A family from a small NQ town ‘forced to hide in Townsville’ after child allegedly raped