Why this double agony for rape victims?
I can’t believe that 60 years after Independence, and despite decades of having had successive state offices dedicated to the welfare of women, rape victims still have to pay for the medical examination that is necessary for the case to go to court.
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Yes, it is a fact!
The recent ordeal of a 13-year old teenager I shall call ‘Teen X’, confirms the continuance of this salt-in-the-wound absurdity. Her sickening story was reported by the Ghanaian Chronicle last Friday.
Teen X was reportedly defiled in November last year by a boy, whom I shall name ‘Y’. He was allegedly instigated by his older brother who also filmed the defilement.
Although the two suspects are known and the film has been circulated, the case has stalled because the parents of Teen X could not afford the GH¢300 demanded by a doctor before he would conduct the medical examination, the Chronicle reported.
Why is this double agony being inflicted on already traumatized victims?
As reported by the Chronicle, Assistant Superintendent of Police Veronica Obese, told journalists in Bolgatanga that the mother of the victim only reported the case on February 2, although the defilement took place at Namolgo, a farming community in the Talensi District, in November.
When the matter was reported to the police, Y was arrested. According to ASP Obese, Teen X’s mother told the police that after seeing a video recording of the act, she questioned her daughter and she named the suspects who are brothers.
ASP Obese, of the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit of the Upper East Regional Police Command, said when Y was interrogated he confessed to the crime and revealed that it was his older brother, Zamnok, who forced him to defile the girl. Zamnok is now reportedly on the run.
As narrated by Y, that evening he and his brother were riding on a motorbike when they met Teen X, who was a friend of Zamnok’s girlfriend. When Teen X asked Zamnok about his girlfriend, Zamnok offered to give her a ride to his girlfriend’s house and she accepted the offer.
However, on their way, Zamnok stopped and allegedly ordered Y and Teen X to get down from the motorbike. He then allegedly ordered them to undress, lie on the ground and have sex. Both resisted, but Zamnok allegedly slapped them until they complied; and Zamnok filmed the assault.
In the video recording, Zamnok, whose face is not shown, is heard coaching Y on what to do while the girl wails, evidently in excruciating pain, and pleads for mercy.
ASP Obese said a police medical form was issued to Teen X for a medical examination at the Upper East Regional Hospital, in Bolgatanga. However, the doctor who was to examine the girl demanded an amount of GH¢300 before he would do so.
The ASP added that not even the intervention by the Social Welfare office of the hospital and the Administrator could convince the doctor to examine the poor victim for free, or for future settlement of the bill.
As a result, when the police presented the case in court, the court could not proceed with the case because it needed a doctor’s report that indeed the victim had been defiled.
According to ASP Obese, the docket on the case has since been forwarded to the office of the Attorney-General for advice, while Zamnok is being sought, the Chronicle stated.
My reaction to this incredibly sad and sordid story was, what kind of doctor could have been so heartless as to insist on a fee in such a matter?
However, this is not the first time this column is writing about this scandalous fee.
In the March 6, 2015 column, I quoted what Dr Ebenezer Badoe, the Director of the Child Protection Service at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, had said in an interview with the Daily Graphic. He had called for a stakeholders meeting to discuss the charging of the fee by doctors who fill the police medical forms for rape and defilement victims.
“He said such a meeting between the ministries of Health and Gender, Children and Social Protection and the Ghana Medical Association was necessary to iron out the issues.
Dr Badoe said: “I cannot take the fee because the victim is already traumatised and so I would not want to add more pain to her.” However, he justified the charging of the fee by other doctors. His explanation was that for instance, if a doctor had to appear in court in relation to a report, the fee could cover transport costs.
Evidently the standard fee, quoted as GH¢300, is not affordable for countless victims. No wonder so many rape victims even when they have the courage to report the rape give up the idea of prosecution.
Why should victims of sexual assault have to pay for a medical report to confirm whether they have indeed been raped? Why can’t the state bear that charge? Why can’t it be borne by the National Health Insurance Scheme, for example?
Surely this kind of medical report cannot be equated with other medical reports, such as for new employment or to make an accident claim, so as to justify charging the victim for it.
Again I wonder why in this heart-rending case the doctor was so unfeeling as to demand the GH¢300. But he may have his reasons.
But what about the state? What reasons do our state actors have for not abolishing this shocking burden on rape victims?
Or is there the ridiculous thinking in some quarters that if the state were to absorb the fee, all of a sudden there would be a flood of women claiming to have been raped and thus needing to be medically examined?
And is it that the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, Ministry of Health, our Members of Parliament, human rights activists, women’s rights campaigners and the Attorney-General are all incapable of finding a solution to this problem?
Would they prefer that rapists should go unpunished?
This is a golden opportunity for the new people at the helm of affairs in all the stakeholder institutions to prove to Ghanaian women in general, and to rape victims in particular, that it is not business as usual under President Akufo-Addo.