An allegation by two young women from Petralona that they were repeatedly raped by their parents and relatives while they were still minors has caused a nationwide uproar.
On OPEN and the morning news program «Open Communication,» the man who is currently taking in the 17-year-old boy spoke on the morning of Wednesday, November 2. In the video above, he describes how he met the boy and how he came to realize the horror the boy was going through.
«I met the child when he was 9 or 10,» he says at the outset. And he continues: «This happened in the summer of 2015. That’s when our relationship with the siblings really began, and we started talking more. About a year ago, the older sister and her brother were passing by a friend of mine’s café—a place I frequent—and she, before I did, had noticed the strange behavior of these children. On the one hand, one child exhibited antisocial and aggressive behavior, and on the other, the son displayed extreme anxiety and a constant presence of sexual expressions in his body language.».
«Toward the end of the summer of ’15, early fall, we developed a closer relationship with my mother—by that I mean, essentially, a connection beyond the client-owner relationship she had with the café owner. ’She was acting strangely about what was happening at her house; she was talking more and more about her husband, and she made extremely negative comments about her son,» he said, and continued:
«Before that, a year ago, she would wander around the neighborhood spreading rumors that the child was taking medication, that he was consuming various substances when left alone, and of course the mother’s reaction to such a child was to wander around the neighborhood, going from pharmacy to pharmacy, from café to café—just like she did with this friend—and saying that “I'm giving him a stomach pump, rushing him to the hospital, and I can't take him back again because I've already given him two stomach pumps, and after that they'll take custody away from me”».
«Seeing the children’s situation and based on what the mother initially said against the father, both my friend and I offered to help the family and the children. We would take on the first two children—the eldest daughter, who is now an adult, and the second son—with their schoolwork, each of us helping as best we could, and of course supporting the mother as much as possible,» the complainant continued, adding:
«When I moved into this house in January 2016 because I had started my classes, the first thing my conscience told me to do was to start tidying up the room. It was a dump infested with cockroaches, with his clothes dirty and disheveled. His teeth were yellowed, his lips chapped and full of pus. With these actions I mentioned, along with what we were seeing in the child—in the children— we also have a mother who is opening up to us more and more and speaking with complete naturalness about the atrocities that were taking place inside her home».
