A sixteen year old student has been forced to marry her own father.
The girl, a senior five student whose name we will not disclose because she is a minor has written a public letter calling for help. We have also skipped the culprits because it will ease to identify the girl.
The girl is a student at Agape S.S Namutumba in Busoga and resides nearby the school.
The girl lost her father recently and moved to the home where her mother re-married. Her mother and the stepfather have produced only girls. The man has put the wife under pressure to have a baby boy.
While in that home, last year, the man defiled the student girl and she got pregnant without the knowledge of her mother.
“When I was in S.4, this man raped me and impregnated me. We aborted and it was a baby boy.” She said in a letter dated May 13, 2021.
Since then, when the mother learnt about the incident, she sided with the man and are telling the girl to get married to her father.
“They tell me I should have sex with this man because my mother doesn’t want to have a co-wife from outside,” the girl cries in her letter.
“(My mother) is telling me to be her co-wife because the man is pressurizing her to have a baby boy,” she says.
The girl says that she is living on thorny life and the couple have now declined to pay for her school fees.
Police spokesperson Fred Enanga could not be reached for a comment on this matter.
Statistics of defilement in Uganda
A total of 13,682 girls were defiled in 2019, according to records.
“Defilement still poses a big problem in the police. In 2019, whereas there was some decrease in defilement cases by about 11.4 percent from 2018, a total of 13682 children were defiled. This is unacceptable,” Inspector general of Police Okoth Ochola told journalists in 2019.
Defilement cases in past years
| 2013 | 18, 507 |
| 2014 | 17, 812 |
| 2015 | 13,132 |
| 2016 | 14, 985 |
| 2017 | 15, 366 |
| 2018 | 17,521 |
| 2019 | 13,682 |
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