Babysitter accused of physical and sex assaults | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

A Masterton man facing multiple counts of abusing children in his wider family while entrusted to babysit went on trial yesterday in the High Court at Wellington.

The 16 indictments, a number of which are representative, cover both sexual and physical maltreatment. Ten of the charges involve sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection.

Justice Alan MacKenzie has granted the 49-year-old interim name suppression for the duration of the trial.

In all, there are five complainants, three girls and two boys. They were aged under 12 when the alleged offences occurred in Masterton during the later part of the 1980s and at the end of the 1990s.

One boy was four when the accused would pick him up from kindergarten and take him home, Crown prosecutor Ian Murray told the jury of eight men and four women.

As well as regularly violating the child sexually, he once threw the boy against a wall, knocking him out, Mr Murray said in his opening address.

He said that another boy about the same age was slapped hard while in the care of the accused.

The prosecutor said the man had made a "blanket denial that any of these events ever happened".

In a brief opening statement, the defendant's lawyer, Jock Blathwayt, said his client was a person of "very low intellectual capacity".

He added: "I submit that what he [the accused] says is true."

The mother of a girl, who was "seven or eight" when she was allegedly sexually abused by the man while he was babysitting, said in evidence that her young daughter told her when she arrived home what had happened while the parents were out drinking at a family get-together.

Until that point she "didn't have any problem" with the accused - the cousin of her then husband - looking after the girl. He had offered to take the child home and stay with her because she was bored at the gathering.

The witness said she confronted the man next morning - he had stayed overnight - informing him of what her daughter told her.

She said that after a silence he replied "sorry" and she ordered him to leave the house.

"I wasn't sure how to handle it. I didn't do anything straight away."

She told her husband and later talked to a close relative of the accused about the matter but did not report it to any authorities.

Under cross-examination, the witness told Mr Blathwayt: "It wouldn't be fair to say I didn't believe it actually happened." - NZPA