An 11-year-old New Zealand boy was reported yesterday to have fathered a child with the 36-year-old mother of a school friend, raising questions on why women cannot be charged with rape in the country.
Counselors working in the area of child sexual abuse said the case highlighted a lack of attention to women as potential offenders, according to the New Zealand Herald, which reported the story.
The case has also prompted an examination of the law, under which the crime of rape applies only to men. New Zealand Minister of Justice Judith Collins said she would investigate, the paper reported.
“This case raises an important point. I will seek advice from officials on whether or not a law change is required,” Collins said.
The woman and boy, whose names were not released, live in Auckland’s North Island District.
The boy’s school principal told the Herald that he was shocked when the child told him what was happening.
“You won’t be very happy with me,” he recalled the boy saying late last year.
He said he had been having sex with his friend’s mother “and it needs to stop.”
The organization Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse said if the case is proved then the woman should be held accountable.
Under New Zealand law, the crime of rape applies only to men and carries a maximum jail sentence of 20 years.
Women who force a male to have sex face a charge of sexual violation which carries a maximum 14-year sentence.
According to the newspaper, government welfare officials — who took the baby into care about two months ago — confirmed they were dealing with a case at the boy’s school and that it was before the courts, but refused to comment further. The police also refused to comment.
The Herald reported that the young father, who has now turned 12, was also understood to have been taken into care.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema