A 58-year-old man faces 12 years to life after he was convicted of the unlawful carnal knowledge of an 11-year-old girl. This afternoon a jury found Gerald Bahadur guilty of three counts of carnal knowledge. It happened in June of 2005 and what makes the conviction notable is that evidence offered in court showed that after some time, the child willfully engaged with Bahadur. Today after the win, prosecutor Audrey Matura told us that it is a rare conviction, and she discussed what makes it so.
Jules Vasquez,
How consequential and how rare is a conviction like this?
Audrey Matura, Crown Counsel
"I would say in a way it is very rare but there are for different reasons and I can address them one by one. One of the first reasons will be that the child is usually embarrassed and cannot understand what can happen and unfortunately here in Belize they seldom give them counseling so that they realize that what they did is not wrong because many times it seems as though they did willingly but we cannot forget that at the end of the day what we have is a mature adult, with years of experience and knowledge, using that over a child who doesn't know better, who is very vulnerable.
The second one is because they feel that it would be in open court and everybody would hear. But the third one too is that sometimes the parents are not very encouraging. The reality in our society is that a lot of parents seem to either encourage some of these relationships or feel that they should have done more and didn't and so they fear that the law will do something to them. So instead of assisting their children and helping them with the prosecution of the case, they get afraid and don't want to talk.
And another reason is that sometimes outright that some of these young people, the cases take so long to come to court. They don't want to relive the moment. Some of them have moved on, some of them have gotten married and stuff like that depending on the age. In this case this happened when this little girl was eleven years old and so by the time she gave evidence, she was already thirteen going on to fourteen.
But I think maybe the biggest social reason is that jurors in our society would, some of them, not all of them, but people on a whole because jurors come from the society, tend to judge these little girls and think she is hot but she gone along and stuff like that but they don't realize that these are children, you don't judge children the way you judge an adult. They should have looked at the other side of the coin where they say yes it was a little girl and she did go along a bit but look at the man, look how old he is, he must could have said no. he must could have said he was like a father, an uncle, a brother to this person and stopped it."
Because the child was under 12 years old, Bahadur faces 12 years to life. He will be sentenced next week. Adolph Lucas presided, and Bahadur was un-defended.
