Becoming the first person to be sentenced under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act in Mizoram, a shopkeeper has been sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment after a special court found him guilty of sexually assaulting a seven-year-old girl twice.

The accused was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault, which POCSO defines as sexual assault on children less than 12 years.

Ronghaka, an Aizawl resident, was found guilty of touching the girl, an immediate neighbor and his daughter’s friend, on her private parts and rubbing his against hers in his shop on the night of August 7 last year.

The court also found him guilty of having done the same to the girl on an earlier occasion.

According to the victim’s statement, he had then called her and his daughter (the two were playing together in his house) into the bathroom to scrub his back as he took a bath. The victim said he ordered his daughter to leave the bathroom before commencing to molest her.

Ronghaka confessed to the sexual assault in his shop and that he had been drunk at the time but denied the incident in the bathroom.

The judge however dismissed his denial saying, “Usually a girl of seven years never tells lies or have imaginations about sex matters as their sexual instinct did not yet arouse, and what they told is always the fact they encounter. It is not their imagination or make up stories.”

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