A top medical doctor has said victims of sexual and gender-based violence who are minors do not usually over-exaggerate or lie about their clinical condition except if there is adult interference.
Dr Babanding Daffeh made the comment while winding up his main testimony in the rape trial of Bubacarr Keita on Wednesday.
“Generally and not only SGBV cases… In our clinical practice and in my experience, kids underage usually do not over-exaggerate their condition or lie to you concerning their clinical condition except when there is adult interference,” the doctor said when Alasan Jobe, prosecuting, asked him to speak out of his experience if victims of SGBV cases have any vested interest or motive to just point at somebody and falsely accuse that person as the one who sexually abused them.
The doctor had also on Wednesday testified the best way to test paternity when there is a dispute is to do DNA analysis.
The doctor has now begun taking questions from Mr Keita’s lawyers, where he accepted to not being an investigator.
“It is correct that you’re not an investigator?” Lamin Camara, cross-examining, asked him.
The doctor replied: “No, I am not an investigator.”
“And because you’re not an investigator, you have no way of establishing the veracity of the allegation against the accused person?” the top lawyer followed-up. The doctor said, “yes that’s correct.”
The lawyer then asked him if part of his findings in his investigation was based on what he was told by the victim.
Dr Daffeh responded: “Not actually. There are two fundamental issues that came up in the history which I already informed the court. That the two issues are that the victim did admit she had a boyfriend whom she met in September during the school holiday but they never had sex at all.
“The second issue was it was the husband… That was the word of the victim. That after Ramadan in June 2019, that it was the husband of the sister who forcefully slept with her in her room and this was not once. These two fundamental issues led us to investigate this victim. That’s why we did the test just to correlate to the issues in the history.”
