NYT: Woman Rapes a 4yo boy

Now I am perplexed, to say the least. Not that I ever understood the attraction of children, but to abuse a 4 year old boy? What's there to have? Somebody please open my eyes (but not too wide). I would like to know the mechanics, not the emotional underpinnings. If this were in a movie, what would it look like :)
Click on read more to read the article in the New York Times about that incident. I also noticed that this is the first time I see that someone's middle initial is actually a NUMBER, not a letter (see the very bottom of the article). Ain't that fantastic?

By COREY KILGANNON
Published: March 2, 2006

A day care worker in Queens was arrested yesterday and charged with raping a 4-year-old boy in her care, the authorities said. The woman, Khemwatie Bedessie, 36, a teacher's aide at Veda's Learning World, in Richmond Hill, is accused of taking the boy into a bathroom during nap time and sexually abusing him, the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, said in an interview last night.

"The charges are very disturbing," Mr. Brown said. "I don't know if I've seen a case like this in my 15 years as district attorney. I feel this child may never fully recover from the emotional and physical trauma allegedly inflicted upon him."

The day care center is in a two-family house on 128th Street, with a playground set up in the backyard and part of the driveway. Mr. Brown said that the parents called the police after the boy complained about repeated encounters in January and February with the woman, who Mr. Brown said has worked at the center for four years.

The boy was interviewed at the Queens Child Advocacy Center, with medical experts and officials from the district attorney's office, Police Department and Administration for Children's Services observing. Ms. Bedessie was arrested at her home yesterday afternoon. She was charged with rape, endangering the welfare of a child, and six counts of first-degree sexual abuse. She faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

Asked about the rape charge, Mr. Brown said, "The slightest penetration constitutes rape, and when you have a child under the age of 11, there is no question of the child giving consent." At Ms. Bedessie's home in South Ozone Park last night, family members refused to speak to reporters. "Our family's having a crisis," said a woman who answered the door. "We have no comment. Please respect us." A neighbor, Edwin Jaudon, 50, said Ms. Bedessie is a Guyanese immigrant who lives with her sister, the sister's husband and their children. He said he has known her for 15 years, and called her "a decent, upstanding person," who is single and without children but known for being very caring of her young nieces and nephews and for children she babysat for privately after work. "She's a good person," he said. "The only time I've seen her get mad is at me when I smoke too many cigarettes." Still, he added, "Anybody's capable of anything."

In front of the day care center yesterday, Bebkha Rampersaad, 42, of Woodhaven, said that his 3-year-old son, Arvin, attended the day care center. His wife picked him up yesterday and after seeing television news reports of the arrest, sent him to find out more.

He said that he paid $100 a week to send Arvin there, and that he did not know the staff members by name. "My heart is still fluttering right now," he said. "I hope it wasn't going on with my kid all the while." He said he would ask his son about any inappropriate encounters with staff members. "He'll tell me," Mr. Rampersaad said. "He tells me everything that goes on."

Even among the small number of cases involving female sex offenders, accusations like those against Ms. Bedessie are fairly rare, said David S. Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, women committed only 3 percent to 5 percent of all single-perpetrator sexual assaults or rapes in the country in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available.

Most of these females fall into three categories, Dr. Finkelhor said: "Mrs. Robinson"-type older women who seduce teenage boys; mothers who are socially isolated and depressed who take their children into bed with them and molest them; and teenage girls who abuse young children they take care of. A situation of an adult woman with a very young child "is really unusual," Dr. Finkelhor said.

Jennifer 8. Lee contributed reporting for this article.