Teen arrested

A 16-year-old boy was arrested last week on suspicion of raping a 10-year-old girl in Kampong Cham province’s Dambe district, police officials said yesterday.

Dambe district deputy police chief Sieng Kinsan said the boy was arrested on Wednesday in Cheach Chhung village, in Chong Cheach commune, after the victim and two witnesses told police that the suspect had raped her at his grandmother’s house.

“We arrested and sent him to the provincial police station on Wednesday last week after we got [a] complaint from the victim’s family,” he said. A total of three rape cases have been recorded in the district this year, he added.

But Thy Somalai, head of the provincial women’s programme for the rights group Adhoc, said one to two rapes have taken place in Dambe each month this year, usually in rural areas “where there is no brothel service [or] a lack of knowledge”, and that some of the rapes occurred because perpetrators wished to imitate the sex they saw on video.