A father’s atrocities and excuses for letting his own daughter give birth to two children…
A father who forced his middle-school daughter to give birth to two children eight years ago pleads not guilty...
The trial of a man (name and age undisclosed) who is accused of violating the Child Welfare Law by having sexual intercourse with his own daughter is currently ongoing at the Tokyo District Court.
The investigation was triggered by a tip from a child guidance center.
According to the indictment, between late June and mid-August 2013, the defendant allegedly had sexual intercourse with his daughter A (then 15) at his home, knowing that she was under the age of 18, before the Criminal Code was revised in 2017 to establish the crime of sexual intercourse with a custodian.
Why was a case from 2013 brought up for prosecution now, in 2017? The testimony of the detectives who appeared as witnesses at the trial shed some light on the matter. The defendant had allowed her own daughter to have two children with her. The investigation was launched after receiving information from the child guidance center where the children were being taken care of.
At his first arraignment in September 2009, he held a written statement in his hand and spent a long time complaining mainly to the police and prosecutors.
In September 2009, he was arraigned for the first time, holding a document in his hand and complaining about the police and prosecutors. In addition, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department has been working with the Tokyo Police Department to identify the location and date of the crime to the extent possible based on the evidence. …Also, the Tokyo metropolitan government has neglected the fact that the prosecution crimes …… seriously violate the human rights of children …….”
The defense attorney summarized this long and difficult denial as “an abuse of the right to prosecute based on an illegal investigation,” and argued that he was not guilty because of illegal procedures by the investigating agency.
Nevertheless, according to the evidence, there seems to be no doubt that the defendant made his own daughter, Ms. A, give birth to two children of her own. During the investigation, DNA typing was conducted on the defendant, Ms. A, and the two children in the custody of the Child Guidance Center, and according to the results, the probability that the two children and the defendant are parent and child is about 99.999%. The defendant, on the other hand, claims that the police procedures were flawed and that the DNA typing results are not competent evidence.
At the trial, where the issue was whether or not there were any illegalities in the investigation procedures, detectives and forensic laboratory staff appeared as witnesses and testified about what happened at the time. At each trial, the defendant brought in a large bag of documents such as reports and investigation reports, spread them out on a long table, and listened to the witnesses.
In addition, at each hearing, the defendant gave his “opinion” to the presiding judge for about 30 minutes about the court proceedings. For example, when it was announced that the victim, the defendant’s daughter A, would be accompanied by a lawyer during the examination of witnesses, the defendant objected as follows.
For example, when it was announced that the victim’s daughter, A, would be accompanied by a lawyer during the examination, she opposed it as follows: “It is grossly inappropriate to have a lawyer accompany the examination of the eldest daughter.
In the end, he even distrusted and complained about his defense attorney, who was supposed to be on his side.
I can’t trust them to falsify or fabricate documents or not show evidence!”
The two defense attorneys sitting behind the defendant’s seat were depressed. Due to the defendant’s attitude of not being able to trust anyone in the courtroom, the interrogation was sometimes conducted by the defendant himself.
During the trial, his previous atrocities against Ms. A came to light one after another. First of all, the obstetrician who was in charge of Ms. A when she gave birth to the defendant’s child in 2014 testified about the situation at that time as follows.
There are about 1,000 births a year at the hospital. I personally take care of about 200 to 300 births a year, but Ms. A was very special because she had not had a prenatal checkup yet and she was very young. Among other things, the fact that the mother of the pregnant woman usually accompanies the birth, but the father was with her, and the way Ms. A behaved afterwards was different from the norm, left a particularly strong impression on me.
At the trial, her own daughter spoke about her feelings toward her father.
Ms. A was in the third year of junior high school when she became pregnant and gave birth. She was in the third grade of junior high school at the time of her pregnancy and delivery. She had not had a prenatal checkup and did not have her mother and child health handbook with her, so she did not know the exact number of weeks she had been pregnant at the time of delivery. Therefore, after determining the number of weeks at the time of delivery based on the ultrasound before the birth and the physical measurement of the fetus after the birth, it was found that the baby was not born at full term but was born prematurely at 31 weeks.
The obstetrician said, “It is difficult to determine the cause of the premature birth because there are many medical possibilities,” but one possibility was as follows.
The reason I say this is possible in Ms. A’s case is that she had chorioamnionitis, which is a condition that occurs in the vagina during pregnancy and causes contractions at 31 weeks. This could have been caused by repeated ejaculation into the vagina during pregnancy.”
The indictment in dispute is for intercourse with Ms. A in 2013, but the doctor pointed out that she may have had repeated intercourse with the pregnant Ms. A even after that.
In addition, Ms. A herself appeared as a witness at the trial, but due to her “dissociative disorder,” she could not remember any sexual intercourse with the defendant. The symptom is that after a stressful experience, a kind of defense instinct kicks in and the memory is lost.
However, although Ms. A had no memory of sexual intercourse, she did remember some of the events during pregnancy and childbirth. At the time, the defendant testified, “Looking back, I think it was a pregnancy test, but they told me to ‘pee on a long thin stick,’ made me wear dowdy clothes, and told me not to sleep with my stomach down. If this is true, it means that the defendant was aware at the time that he had sexual intercourse with Ms. A and that she became pregnant as a result.
Ms. A also remembered that the defendant was “excessively restrictive” and “violent to other family members.
My father was strict with the boys and lenient with the girls. My father was strict with my brothers and sisters and lenient with women, and would beat my brothers and sisters with bamboo swords if they didn’t study. I saw my father hitting my mother on the head and throwing things at her when I was in elementary school. My mother had a broken finger on her hand.
I had a strict curfew, and he was very demanding and restrictive about who I could play with and where I could go. At first I rebelled against her, but she would do things like …… sanction me, so I realized there was no benefit for me and stopped.”
Mr. A’s mother and the defendant’s former wife also appeared as witnesses at the trial and recalled the defendant’s “sexual view” of Mr. A.
The defendant’s mother and the defendant’s former wife also appeared as witnesses at the trial and recalled the defendant’s “sexual view” of A. “At the house where A lived when she was in junior high school, only the defendant and A slept in separate rooms. It was a room that could be locked, but I didn’t care.
What I particularly remember about the two of them sleeping together is that one evening …… when it was not the kind of time to go to bed, my daughter and the defendant were sleeping on the same futon, and when I peeled off the futon, the defendant, who was wearing only a pair of pants and had a large crotch, was pressing her body against my daughter.”
In December of last year, after the examination of these witnesses, the defendant was questioned. As this was a case of denial, I thought that the defendant would firmly state his side of the story, but he refused all questions from the defense, the prosecutor, and the court, saying, “The indictment doesn’t specify where the crime took place, so I don’t know what I should answer, so I can’t answer anything.
At the end of her testimony, Ms. A described her feelings of punishment toward the defendant.
At the end of her testimony, Ms. A said of her feelings toward the defendant: “I want her to have nothing to do with my children, including my siblings. As for the criminal punishment, I would like to see him get the maximum penalty, but I would like it to be the most serious crime.
I wonder how Ms. A saw the defendant, who continued to express her dissatisfaction with the court and insist on the inadequacy of the investigation. The defendant is scheduled to be arraigned next in the trial of his daughter, who has caused great damage to his own daughter’s mind and body, disintegrated his family, and caused his children, whom his own daughter gave birth to, to suffer as well.
Reporting and writing: Yuki Takahashi
Observer. Freelance writer. She is a freelance writer, and has published several books, including "Tsukebi no mura: gossip killed five people? (Shobunsha), "Runaway Old Man, Crime Theater" (Yosenya Shinsho), "Kanae Kijima: The Secret of Dangerous Love" (Tokuma Shoten), "Kanae Kijima Gekijo" (Takarajimasya), and in the past, "Kasumikko Club: Daughters' Court Hearings" (Shinchosha).