An elderly man who told his daughter-in-law to sleep with him so he could impregnate her when she and her husband were trying for a baby in 2014 in Tavua, before raping her a year later, has been sentenced to ten years in prison.
The woman who is now a mother of two and is married to the man’s eldest son was raped two months after giving birth to her first child in 2015. She was 19 then.
The high court in Lautoka heard that woman had told on her father-in-law to her husband, but he did not do anything about it.
She decided to take matters further and pursue police assistance in 2018 after she gave birth to her second child, a girl, fearing that “her daughter would face the same fate.”
In court, the man denied the allegations saying that the woman cooked up the story in 2018 because “she wanted to take her husband away from the family home and live separately.”
But, it did little to sway the court, convicting him of two counts of indecently Annoying Any Person, one count of Indecent Assault and one count of rape. In handing down his decision, Justice Rajasinghe said the level of harm in the offences was significantly high.
He told the man that he not only abused the trust and confidence of the young woman, that he also destroyed his son’s family.
Because the man was not a first offender, he was not entitled to any discount. The man is not eligible for parole after he has served eight years of his jail term.
