Man held in Brazil for kissing daughter

It seemed pretty weird when I read the story for the first time. In Brazil, strangers on a beach found a person kissing a young girl, and with all the stories about child molestation, particularly when the skin color of the man and the girl were different, and it was not immediately apparent that the 2 were related. However, as a result of a complaint, the man was put in prison and faces a long jail term if convicted. The mother of the child, the man's wife, denies that anything improper happened, but the man has already spent a week in jail for this charge (link to article):

There is growing controversy in Brazil over the arrest of an Italian tourist held after kissing his eight-year-old daughter in public. Witnesses told police the man allegedly touched the girl in an intimate way. Under a strict new law partly designed to combat child sex abuse in South America's largest country, he faces eight to 15 years in jail if convicted.
However the wife of the arrested tourist says it was all a misunderstanding by witnesses who had misinterpreted seeing a foreign white man with a young darker-skinned girl. She told the Brazilian state news agency if there was any suggestion the claim was true she would not hesitate to take her daughter's side, and recalled that she had been present the whole time.