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She endured 7 years of rape, by her own fatherBy WENDY RUDERMAN
rudermw@phillynews.com 215-854-2860

JESSICA GRIFFIN/Daily News
Jasmine Harris, who is ready to attend college, says her father started raping her when she was 8.
» More images JASMINE HARRIS was so nauseated with morning sickness that her father had to carry her into the women's clinic.
Jasmine was there for an abortion. She was 11 years old.

Her father, Dwayne Harris, told the doctor his daughter had sex with a 13-year-old boy. He used their rent money for the abortion and didn't have enough for the anesthesia.

The doctor kicked in the extra $100 to sedate Jasmine, then gave her a stern lecture.

'You don't need to be having sex this early,'Jasmine said he told her. "I was afraid to tell him the truth."

Truth was, since she was 8 years old, her father forced her to sleep in his bed where he raped her almost every night.
For years, she kept the secret. She doesn't want other young rape victims to suffer in silence.

Now 17, Jasmine said she feels compelled to speak out to show other women they can find justice. She did.
In 2005, police arrested Jasmine's father and charged him with 17 crimes, including rape, false imprisonment and nine other felonies. He pleaded guilty last month and was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison, court records show.

Voices like Jasmine's weren't always heard. From 1981 to 1999, the then-Sex Crimes Unit systematically downgraded or ignored thousands of rape cases. The unit took a hard look at itself in 1999, after the Inquirer uncovered the practice.

Today, the squad, reborn as the Special Victims Unit, aggressively pursues suspected rapists and is expert in coaxing painful tales from ravaged victims. The unit's moniker - Special Victims - is more than just a title. It's a mindset, according to unit head Capt. John Darby.

"We understand the trauma, the emotional effect that it has on the victim and their family," Darby said. "It's not like somebody just snatched your purse. Let's face it. It's in a totally different category by itself."

When police hauled Harris away in handcuffs, Jasmine said she felt liberated.

"I felt safe for the first time," Jasmine said. "It was such a great relief to talk about it, because I was holding it to myself all that time."

It was a warm night in April 2005. Two officers arrived at the North Philly apartment Jasmine shared with her father. They had one question for her.

"Is it true?" Officer Lisa Wagner asked Jasmine, then 15.

Jasmine wanted to answer but first had a question.

"Am I going to be safe?" she asked the cops, according to the police report.

" 'Yes, everything is going to be fine,' " Jasmine recalled Wagner saying. " 'He is going to go away for a long, long time, and you won't have anything to worry about.' "

The officers slammed Harris against the door, cuffed him, and stuffed him in a police cruiser, Jasmine said.

"Right from there, he was gone," Jasmine said. "I was so happy, like, 'My God, this is going to be over!' "

She first thought he was 'cool'

Jasmine's father hadn't always dominated her life. Until age 8, Jasmine and her older brother, Dwayne, lived with their mom in a North Philly apartment.

Harris was an occasional father. He popped in and out, appearing with candy or Dollar Store toys, but quickly vanished when talk turned to child support.

That changed around Christmas 1997, when Jasmine was 8. Harris showed up with a doll for her and a bike for her 10-year-old brother.

Jasmine's mother was only 26 at the time. She struggled to support Jasmine, Dwayne and a third child she had with another man.

Jasmine and Dwayne thought their dad was "cool" and they wanted to live with him. Their mother let them go.

At first, Jasmine and her brother lived with their dad in a third-floor apartment on Girard Avenue near Ridge. All three shared a queen-size bed. Their father slept in the middle.

Harris, who is illiterate, made a living washing dishes, cleaning houses and doing construction work. He could never keep a job, Jasmine said.

Despite cramped quarters and scant resources, Jasmine said their father bought them candy and toys. He let them stay up late, watch unlimited TV and skip school.

Harris first raped Jasmine a few months after she moved in with him. She was asleep next to her father when she felt pressure against her. He was on top of her. She pretended to stir in her sleep, hoping he'd stop. He pushed harder.

"He broke me in when I was eight," Jasmine said.

He rolled off her and went to sleep. Her brother slept soundly. She lay awake, stared into blackness and cried.

The next morning, he told her not to tell. He said, "You don't want Daddy to go to jail, do you?"

In the beginning, he raped her twice a week, then nightly. Each morning afterward, she told him she was depressed and dreaded bedtime.

Sometimes he acted like he didn't know what she was talking about. Other times he got mad and compared her to a bitchy girlfriend. Or he tried sweet-talk. She was beautiful, he said, just like her mother.

" 'You're a very attractive young woman and I'm just teaching you things that you are going to use when you get older,' " Jasmine recalled him telling her.

Sometimes he promised to stop.

"He would say something like, 'I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna try to stop,' but he would do it that same night," Jasmine said. "It was driving me crazy. I was hating him, wanting to kill him, wanting to kill myself, and it was like not fazing him at all."

Later on, he used terror tactics: Talk and you'll end up in a "body bag," the police report quotes him telling her. He said he knew "a lot of people who would do anything for him," even kill his daughter, the report said.

"He had me brainwashed that he was a monster and he could do whatever he wanted to do," Jasmine said.

He rarely let Jasmine or her brother talk with their mother. He talked for them.

The kids are doing good. They're on honor roll, Jasmine said he told their mom.

Felt like a prisoner

Harris was fiercely jealous of any boy who looked at Jasmine. He accused her of having sex with others. She was his prisoner.

When Jasmine wanted to visit a friend or cousin, he refused unless she had sex with him.

Every time she tried to fight him off, he slapped her and hit her with a belt. Eventually she learned to give in. Whenever he walked into the bedroom, she robotically removed her clothes.

"I guess you could say I would get ready for it," she said. "I can't put it another way."

She turned her head when he tried to kiss her and closed her eyes. She pictured herself as a Hollywood actress walking the red carpet.

She thought he would stop when he started seriously dating a woman. They eventually moved in with the woman and her four kids in a South Philly housing project.

Jasmine shared a bedroom with the woman's three daughters. All four girls slept in a single twin bed, lined up lengthwise like pencils. When everyone was asleep, her father roused her out of bed and took her to another room.

Then one day, after her father beat her severely, she told his girlfriend's three girls.

They told their mother. She confronted Jasmine's father, who denied it, Jasmine said.

The woman continued to date Harris off and on for another six years while Harris continued to rape Jasmine.

School became an afterthought. She missed 30 to 40 school days each year. Nobody questioned the absences, possibly because she was an honor-roll student.

Jasmine was 11 when her father moved them out of his girlfriend's apartment and into a $350-a-month efficiency in Logan.

Jasmine slept on the pull-out couch with her father. He made her brother sleep on the floor and listen to music through headphones.

Pregnant - again

One summer day she started throwing up. She felt weak and couldn't move off the couch. Her father knew what was wrong. At first she didn't believe him, but as weeks went by, she grew sicker.

"He was like, 'I think you're pregnant because your mom used to be the same way with you and your brother,' " Jasmine said.

He bought a pregnancy test. "I peed on the stick," she said. "I had to read the instructions because he couldn't read."

He started calling around for a women's clinic. The doctor showed her the six-week-old fetus on an ultrasound.

After the first abortion, her father used condoms. Sometimes, but not always.

When Jasmine was in ninth grade, she knew she was pregnant again after she threw up in the school cafeteria. She called her father to pick her up.

Like before, he carried her into the same women's clinic in North Philly. Harris didn't make up a story, and no one asked. At 14, Jasmine could pass for 17. A different doctor performed the abortion. This time without anesthesia.

"It felt like they were sucking my insides out," Jasmine said. "I was screaming because it was very painful. The doctors had to hold me down."

"I was hurt that I was killing the child but it was - his," she said, her mouth curled in a frown.

When it was all over, her father asked the doctor to put her on birth control. The doctor agreed.

In a way, Jasmine felt relieved. She knew she wouldn't get pregnant again, but also knew her father wasn't planning to stop.

In her sophomore year at Dobbins High School, Jasmine developed a crush on a junior. He asked her to his prom. She liked him so much she mustered up the guts to ask her father if she could go.

He said he wanted to meet this boy. She introduced them. They shook hands and he told the young man his daughter wouldn't be going to any prom. She was too young to date; she needed to focus on school work, he told the boy.

Her father had her transferred to Olney High School. After three weeks, she begged to return to Dobbins.

"I said, 'Please, I will never say nothing else [about the boy],' " Jasmine said.

She went back to Dobbins. And for the first time in years, he let her visit with her mother. It was Easter weekend two years ago. Her mother told Jasmine she had heard stories about an unnatural relationship between the girl and her father. Friends and relatives said the two were always together, like a couple.

"She asked me, 'Did he ever try anything with you? Because you know if he did, I would kill him,' " Jasmine said.

Jasmine was evasive. Her father, Jasmine told her mom over dinner, was protective. Nothing more.

She was too afraid to confide in her mother. She knew her mother would challenge Harris. Once backed into a corner, her father might attack them both, Jasmine thought.

Instead, she found enough courage to tell her cousin while they sat in the same class at Dobbins.

"It was on my mind like really, really heavy, and I just had to tell somebody," Jasmine said.

She slipped her cousin a note that read, "My father has been molesting me since I was eight years old." They cried.

That night, just after Jasmine's father made a spaghetti dinner, the phone rang. Her cousin wanted to know her address. She told Jasmine she wanted to sign her up for a singing contest. Jasmine believed her.

The torment ends

The cousin hung up and called a child-abuse hotline.

"I was crying," said the 17-year-old cousin, who requested anonymity. "I was nervous for her because I didn't want him to hurt her in any kind of way. I was shaking."

A worker with the city Department of Human Services called police. Moments later, two officers stood in the front door of Jasmine's apartment on Fisher Avenue near 5th Street. Jasmine heard the static crackle of a police walkie-talkie. She turned from the television.

"I saw the uniform. I thought, 'Oh my God!' " Jasmine said. "They said, 'Are you Jasmine Harris?' I said, 'Yes.' "

Detective Rhonda Collins of the Special Victims Unit wrote the arrest report. In chilling detail, Collins documented Jasmine's eight-year ordeal, including the abortions.

When asked recently about Jasmine's case, Collins said it's hard to recall because she handles so many like it. She looked up the file.

"That's case number 1487," Collins said. "I kind of remember it, but I had quite a few that year in which the father was sexually abusing his kid."

But no matter how often these cases land on her desk, Collins said she still gets angry.

"That's who you look up to, your father and your mother. To have your biological father sexually abuse you like that . . . ," Collins said, her voice drifting off.

Diana Russell, an expert on sexual violence and a sociology professor at Mills College in California, said incest is far worse than rape by a stranger for several reasons: The child is betrayed by a parent and the sexual abuse occurs frequently and at a young age.

"Betrayal is the worst thing. In a way, [Jasmine] was doubly betrayed," said Russell, author of "The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women."

Jasmine said she once blamed her mother for letting her go with her dad. She doesn't anymore.

"It really wasn't her fault, because he's a father as much as she's a mother," Jasmine said. "She just thought he should have some responsibility in raising us."

After her father's arrest, Jasmine went to live with her mother. And she had her first date with the teenage boy who had asked her to the prom.

They fell in love and he asked her to marry him the summer before her junior year. She got pregnant the following summer, just before her 17th birthday.

Five months ago, Jasmine gave birth to a girl with a crown of dark curls. After taking six weeks off from school, Jasmine returned to finish her senior year. She cried the first time she took her baby to day-care.

Jasmine, who appears regal and self-assured, graduated from Dobbins in June. This fall she plans to study nursing at Community College of Philadelphia. Eventually, she hopes to become a pediatrician.

Marriage plans are on hold until Jasmine graduates.

Jasmine now lives in North Philly with her godmother. Jasmine said that she never felt like she could really talk with her mother and that she felt closer to her godmother, who is a friend of Jasmine's mom. At Jasmine's request, the godmother, who has legal custody of the teenager, gave the Daily News permission to print Jasmine's name and photo.

Jasmine's father was sentenced on June 22. The judge asked him if he had anything to say. He turned to Jasmine and said, "I just want to say, 'I'm sorry.' "

"He had this little smirk on his face, like he wasn't meaning it from the heart," Jasmine said.

" 'You're sorry? You're sorry?' " Jasmine recalled the judge saying incredulously before giving him 20 to 40 years.

"It was beautiful," Jasmine said. "It was one of the best days of my life."

Even if her father was truly sorry, Jasmine said it wouldn't matter.

"You can never really apologize for something like that," Jasmine said. "An apology means nothing." *