A girl at the centre of a child cruelty case involving eight siblings has repeated her allegation that worms and spiders were put in her mouth but said she was never put in a hot oven as her brother claimed.

"Well, obviously I would get burnt in there and I'm not burnt," she said in the High Court at Wellington today.

Her brother also said that the children were tied to a clothes line and swung around but the girl, now 13, said that she could not remember the Porirua house they lived in ever having that type of clothes line.

The girl says her parents sexually abused her but also that her father once rescued her from another man's sexual attack.

The girl said that she remembered that when she was about nine a man came into her bedroom and molested her but her father came in and stopped him.

Her father fought with the man and was angry and upset, she agreed.

The jury had earlier heard her describe the man as a friend of her mother's who would drink with her parents.

The man never came back, she said.

The next morning there was blood on her sheets and her parents took her to hospital.

She mentioned it to her older half-sister who told social workers. The social workers spoke to her and her mother. She also spoke to police about it.

A social worker told the jurors on Monday that the man had been deported because of other charges.

The parents of the eight children face child cruelty charges relating to the four months before welfare workers removed the children from the Porirua house in March 2010.

They and two men known to the children as "uncles" are also charged with sexual offences against some of the children alleged to have occurred between February 2006 and March 2010. The father and one of the uncles also face assault charges.

All the accused have pleaded not guilty.

- © Fairfax NZ News