The wife of a soccer coach brought an eight-year-old girl to her husband and stayed while he raped the child and allegedly infected her with HIV, a national inquiry has been told.
The girl, known as BXA, has since been diagnosed with HIV, which she believes she contracted through the sexual assaults.
In evidence presented to the child sex abuse royal commission on Monday, BXA said her mother signed her into a soccer club in southern Sydney in 1996.
Now 27, she said she had an unhappy childhood because her father had left and her mother drank.
In a statement read on her behalf, BXA said that when she stayed with the coach and his wife he would come to her bedroom and rape her.
BXA said the coach’s wife, who was her mother’s friend, would come into the spare room where she was sleeping and take her to her husband “in their bedroom and stay in the room while he raped me.
‘I would see her watching and when I would look at her, she would look away.’
She stayed at the couple’s house regularly on Friday nights and worried that her mum did not want her.
When she was 11, she revealed the abuse to a friend at school.
The school found out and contacted the NSW Department of Community Services (DoCS).
BXA gave evidence in court at the age of 13 but the coach was acquitted.
In 2003 he pleaded guilty to multiple counts of abusing other children and was jailed for five years.
BXA said when she was 13 she began to feel very ill and at 15 she was diagnosed HIV positive.
She believes she contracted the virus from the coach because she had not had sex with anyone else or been given a blood transfusion or used drugs.
Her application for victim’s compensation has twice been rejected.
The commission also heard on Monday the coach, known as BXK, continued coaching for two years before the BXA rape charge came to the attention of Soccer NSW, now known as Football NSW.
Michelle Hanley, child protection officer for NSW Football, told the commission that communication between the different soccer organisations was “ad hoc” in the early 2000s.
She did not find out until 2002 that the coach of a local under-10 team had been acquitted of raping a child and that there were complaints about him going back almost two years.
The matter was brought to her attention by Larry Grant, then president of the Southern Districts Football Association but Ms Hanley said she was never given BXK’s name.
The commission also heard that BXK continued to referee without authorisation even though Football NSW had rejected his application for the 2003-2004 season.
The commission is holding a two-week hearing into sports clubs and institutions and will examine unproven allegations against well-known tennis coach Noel Callaghan and Queensland cricket coach Robert Ross, who committed suicide before his trial for 50 child sex abuse offences went to court in 2014.
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