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Warning: This story details rape and may be distressing for some readers.
During a time when life should have centred on having fun with friends, making plans for the future and managing the doom of impending school assessments, one teen girl instead shouldered the weight of sexual trauma and the justice system.
She sat in a courtroom, feeling broken beyond repair, and gave evidence against men who, in unrelated attacks, forced themselves upon her sexually and stripped her of her adolescence.
The Auckland teen has had her body medically probed, been interrogated by police and lawyers, been the subject of social opinion, and had to bare herself again to her attackers when penning impact statements for their sentencing.
She was first the victim of Charlie Ngapera, an older man who took the then 15-year-old to a lookout and sexually violated her by having sex with her, as she unsuccessfully tried to flee his car.
Later, that same year in 2022, she was raped multiple times one evening by a group of young men, including Teina Takimoana and Arthur Te Wera, who kept her in a room and took turns with her body.
While Te Wera pleaded guilty to
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