THE mother of the 10-year-old boy raped by a migrant in an Austrian swimming pool cubicle has said she now regrets teaching her children to be welcoming to migrants.

The boy’s mother Dunja, herself an immigrant from Serbia in the 90s, said she had taught her five children to offer the same hospitality to newcomers she had been given.

However when told of the rapist’s claim he had “too much sexual energy”, Dunja said his defence was “monstrous”, adding he should be sent to prison to experience life as a sex offender then deported.

The boy, known only as Goran, was hospitalised after the attack and has been crying himself to sleep every night since.

Dunja described herself as a poor single mother who had always encouraged her children not to judge others.

When she heard the Iraqi migrant’s claims that it was a “sexual emergency” that led to the attack, she said she now wished she’d warned her son about the dangers of strangers.

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. I come from Serbia, and I spent five years living in a Caritas home together with people from many different nations,” she said.

“You certainly can’t call me a racist, but to try and defend himself in that way is just monstrous. It’s like me saying I’m going to go to a bank tomorrow and rob it because I don’t have enough money for my five children.”

The Iraqi migrant told police that he knew such an act was “forbidden in any country of the world”, claiming he was not “always sick”, as he has a wife and daughter in Iraq.

The Iraqi, a taxi driver in Vienna, told police he knew he’d made “a mistake” and did not mean to “scar the boy”, Australian newspaper Kronen Zeitung reported.

Until now, police have kept details of the rape — on December 2 — under wraps to protect the victim.

The boy’s mother revealed how her son was a swimming fanatic and that she gave him three euros so he could go to the pool in the Meidling district of Vienna.

“Three hours after school finished, I got a phone call from him and he was crying into the phone. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but then somebody came on the phone and told me: ‘Please come straight away, your child has been sexually assaulted’,” she revealed.

She said that she had rushed there straight away and saw her crying child sitting in a room with a man in swimming trunks who had handcuffs on. She said her sister was with her, and the police had to stop her from attacking the man straight away.

The man had been in the swimming pool with a 15-year-old boy and her son had been talking to the teenager.

When he later went to the changing cabin the man knocked on the door.

She added: “I know that the physical wounds will heal, but the wounds to his soul may never heal. I don’t want the man to be deported, I want him to be jailed because I have heard what they do to child sex attackers in jail.

“I want him to experience everything in jail that child sex attackers can experience from the other convicts. And then I want him deported.”

This article originally appeared inThe Sunand is republished with permission.