Mother of raped 11-year-old: ‘the police betrayed me’

The mother of an 11-year-old girl reportedly raped by four teenage boys on April 30 said Wednesday she had lost faith in the police after their handling of her daughter’s case.

“The day after our daughter was hospitalized for treatment, we heard that the boys who raped her were not under arrest, not even house arrest, that they were free. We tried to get information from the police, but there was no response. I felt that the police betrayed me. I believed that I didn’t need to be concerned with justice and that they would know how to find it for the victim, but I was wrong,” the mother told Yedioth Ahronoth.

The girl and her parents filed a complaint with the police in Beersheba after the parents discovered the alleged assault. The suspects claim that the girl consented to the sexual relations.

Three of the boys under investigation are suspected of rape; the fourth youth allegedly did not participate in the sexual act, but watched from the side and acted as a lookout.

The mother added: “I will never forget how she looked… She called me to come to her room, because she had something to tell me. In her room she started to stutter that ‘it is not my fault. You can’t get mad at me.’ After the tenth time, I lost patience and demanded that she tell me. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words, so her friend told me, ‘Four boys trapped her in the stairwell and raped her.’ I looked at my daughter, I saw the tears in her eyes, and I knew it was the truth. In one second, the world turned upside down, and I couldn’t breathe.”

In sections of her personal diary published in Tuesday’s Maariv, it was revealed that the girl wrote in her journal after the incident: “I discovered today… that boys are evil. Today I was raped by four.”

“Everyone says that it is not my fault, but I feel that it is my fault,” the girl wrote in her diary, which was decorated with pictures of Disney princesses.