Man to serve 10 years in 'sickening' Craigslist sex abuse case involving 6-year-old girl
Warning: This story contains graphic details
By Samantha Craggs, CBC News
Members of the biker organization Guardians of the Children wiped away tears after the sentencing Friday of a Hamilton man in a child sex abuse case. (Samantha Craggs/CBC)
A Hamilton man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly sexually assaulting his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter will serve 10 years and 205 days for his crimes.
The man, 37, was sentenced Friday for vaginally, orally and anally assaulting his ex-girlfriend's daughter, and offering her to pedophiles on Craigslist.
He was also sentenced for secretly filming his then 16-year-old stepdaughter showering, and possessing thousands of pornographic images and videos — most of them of the six-year-old.
Those files were "unspeakably repulsive and profoundly sickening," Justice George Gage said in his ruling.
For an 18-month period starting in April 2016, (this must be April 2015, as I posted a story on this in Nov. 2016) the man "systematically, methodically and repeatedly" assaulted the girl, who was nearly eight when the abuse stopped, Gage said.
No sentence, Gage said, will "restore (the girl's) innocence, nor can any sentence soothe the pain of the indelible scars."
Gage sentenced the man to 13 years and three months, somewhere between the 15 years the Crown requested and the 10 years the defence wanted.
The biker activist group Guardians of the Children react to the sentencing outside the John Sopinka courthouse. They say Ontario needs mandatory minimum sentences for child sex abuse cases. (Samantha Craggs/CBC)
Factoring in time served, the man will serve 10 years and 205 days.
The sentence was for sexual interference, voyeurism and making and possessing child pornography, as well as assaulting a police officer and failing to appear in court.
Intergenerational abuse not uncommon in indigenous peoples
Gage factored in mitigating circumstances, such as the man's history of sexual abuse at the hands of his own stepfather.
When he reported the abuse in his early teens, Gage said, no one believed him. When he got older, the man burned himself with cigarettes and attempted suicide by crashing his snowmobile through the ice.
Coincidentally, the man's stepfather was finally sentenced for his crimes in 2016 – the same time that the man was abusing the six-year-old.
The man's Indigenous background, with a family history marred by addiction and the residential school system, was also a mitigating factor.
Generations of systemic abuse created "a horrible and depressing scenario," Gage said.
The case began in 2016, Gage said, when the man was living with his then-girlfriend and two stepdaughters.
One more case to be heard
The man repeatedly assaulted the younger daughter, Gage said. He also recorded thousands of videos and images of the girl, but apparently didn't post them online.
He waited until others in the house were asleep, then invited adults over to abuse the girl too, said assistant Crown attorney Janet Booy in the pre-sentencing hearing last month.
"It was, at one point, three adults on one seven-year-old child for their own depraved sexual gratification," she said.
Four other people were charged in relation to the abuse of the girl. In December, Sonya Lucas was sentenced to six years (2nd story on link) five months. There is still one more case to come before the courts.
The girl's aunt said afterward that the man received the sentence she expected, but it's still not enough.
"Until the mandatory minimums are changed in this country, where people are held accountabl for their actions … until that changes, nothing is going to change," she said.
She still questions why the man originally faced 49 charges, and that was reduced to four.
"We have tried and failed to understand how this is fair or just," she wrote in a letter to Attorney General Yasir Naqvi.
"Please, take a moment to think back to how long just one week felt when you were a seven-year-old child," she wrote to Naqvi.
"How long must those 16 months have felt for my precious little niece?"
Russia's child-protection laws approaching the 21st century
Russian children’s ombudsman calls for nationwide register
of convicted pedophiles
Children's playground on a Moscow street during a snowfall © Natalia Seliverstova / Sputnik
The Russian ombudsman for children has supported a recently drafted bill imposing life sentences for pedophilia, but added that the creation of a nationwide register of offenders was also necessary.
“We consider it important to continue work on a register of persons who have committed sex crimes against minors and other illegal acts, which would allow them to be monitored for the rest of their lives,” Anna Kuznetsova wrote on her Facebook page.
“We also support such measures as restricting internet access and tougher sanctions for violations of various bans during the administrative period for which they are imposed.”
The ombudsman added that, in her opinion, any bills that protect the safety of children should be passed as quickly as possible.
The new bill targeting those who commit sex crimes against minors was drafted in parliament on Thursday by a working group of lawmakers headed by Deputy Duma Speaker Irina Yarovaya (United Russia). The new motion introduces life sentences as punishment for sex crimes against children younger than 12, and also makes an attempt to conceal sex crimes a separate offense. It also makes circumstances in which a suspect lives in the same home as their victim an aggravating factor in crimes.
When first announcing the start of work on the bill last October, Yarovaya noted that criminal use of the internet was allowing offenders to commit crimes against a large number of potential victims at the same time. To address this problem, the new bill makes distribution of pornographic materials among children via the internet an aggravating factor in a crime, along with coercion of underage citizens to engage in sex acts by means of the internet.
During the same month, Ombudsman Kuznetsova told reporters that the number of sex crimes committed against children in Russia had increased from 8,000 to almost 12,000 in the past five years. She said that the current situation demanded immediate measures by lawmakers.
These numbers are 'reported' crimes where an investigation ensued. They do not include those crimes that were reported but discouraged by the police because of incompetence or insensitivity. Nor do they include the majority of child sex abuse cases which are never reported.
12,000 is a small fraction of the real number of children being sexually abused in Russia.
UK disabled man who distributed “appalling”
child sex abuse images sentenced
No jail time
A MAN who distributed indecent images of children to others has been spared prison after a judge concluded his treatment in the community would better protect youngsters in the future.
Carlisle Crown Court heard how illegal images of children aged from 12 years down to just two were found on devices belonging to 33-year-old city man Neil Monkhouse.
Police discovered that, between July 4 and 11 last year, Monkhouse had made 28 child porn pictures and passed on 39. Officers also found five cannabis plants growing at his house.
Monkhouse, of Hallin Crescent, Carlisle, was sentenced today (FRI) having admitted nine charges, including the making and distribution of indecent photographs of children, and cannabis production.
Wheelchair-using Monkhouse was said by his lawyer to have “sought comfort and solace online” amid the loss of his job, independence and a previous relationship. His thinking at the time had been “utterly distorted and warped”.
Judge Peter Hughes QC told Monkhouse his crimes were “appalling”, and said he “richly deserved” a prison sentence.
But Judge Hughes concluded that the specialist help needed by the defendant would not be available in custody. Instead the judge imposed a three-year community order comprising rehabilitation and attendance on a sex offender treatment course.
Monkhouse was also made subject to the strict terms of an indefinite sexual harm prevention order, ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register and told he would be automatically barred from working with children and vulnerable adults.
Child rights activist Peter Newell convicted
of child sex abuse
John Simpson, Crime Correspondent
The Times
A “child rights activist” convicted of abusing a 12-year-old boy managed a charity that received hundreds of thousands of pounds from the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Save the Children and Unicef.
Peter Newell, who wrote a manual on children’s rights published by Unicef, was jailed for multiple counts of historical sexual assault on a child aged 12 when the abuse began.
Newell, 77, was listed as co-ordinator for Approach, a children’s charity active across Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia until the allegations arose in 2016.
He was jailed last month at Blackfriars crown court after admitting five charges relating to the rape and indecent assault of a boy under 16.
The Association for the Protection of All Children, or Approach, lobbies for the protection of children from violence, including smacking by parents.
South African TV star speaks about being a
victim of child sexual abuse
And the importance of speaking up
Actor Loyiso MacDonald has briefly spoken out about being a victim of sexual abuse as a child.
He spoke to Screen Access and said a neighbour had been targeting young boys in the area that he grew up in.
He told his parents about the incident and it was only after he broke his silence, did other boys come forward.
"This is why it's so important to speak up. Once I spoke to my parents, and told them what I had experienced, they handled it with care. Out of that, other boys told their stories."
37 Cases of Child Sex Abuse Involving Staff Reported at Austria-Based Charity in 2016
ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images
by CHRIS TOMLINSON
The children’s charity SOS Children’s Villages has admitted that it received 37 reports of the sexual abuse of children involving charity personnel in 2016.
The charity, based in Vienna, Austria, admitted the reports in the wake of the sex scandal involving the international charity Oxfam which was also accused of child sex abuse in South Sudan earlier this week.
The press officer for SOS Children’s Villages Cecilia Bergling Naucler said that while they did receive 37 reports of sex abuse, they did not want to identify those accused for “privacy reasons”, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.
According to Ms. Naucler, the victims were “either children or young adults”. She added: “Due to confidentiality legislation and consideration for children and young people in our activities, we can not comment on individual cases or an exact number.”
The charity, Naucler said, tends to hire locals wherever it operates and the charity told the Swedish broadcaster: “In case of suspicion of serious abuse, notification is made to the police and judicial authorities, in accordance with the country’s current legislation.”
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has also been revealed to have had staff who were found to have engaged in sexual abuse. The charity, which engages in various work from medical assistance to rescuing migrants off the Libyan coast, said they had fired 19 workers last year due to sex abuse allegations.
MSF released a statement this week saying that last year it received a total of 146 complaints, 40 of which were abuse related and 24 of those were sexual in nature.
Breitbart London has reported in the past on charity workers engaging in sexual relationships with migrants in Calais and being accused of sexual exploitation.
Last year, the pro-migrant charity Mercy Corps, which receives funding from left-wing billionaire George Soros, was also accused of acts of sex abuse by Greek authorities.
55 years after horrendous child sex abuse, victim says
'I don't feel safe in this world or experience joy
"It still underpins my life" - those are the words of a woman who was sexually abused in Egham 55 years ago.
At the time she was just a child but now, decades later, her perpetrator has finally been given a sentence for the crimes he committed in his 20s.
Leslie Driver, from Milton Keynes, was sentenced at Kingston Crown Court to 20 months behind bars for "indecently assaulting" two young girls between July 1962 and July 1963.
It comes after the 76-year-old was charged with six offences of indecent assault on a girl under the age of 14 and pleaded guilty to three of the six offences on November 6 2017.
Driver was first arrested on September 1 2015 after the victims disclosed to detectives the abuse inflicted on them when they were children. The horrendous acts took place at a property in Egham, where Driver was staying.
The court heard how Driver, who was a teacher and had previously taken part in charity work abroad, forced each girl to engage in sexual activity on a number of separate occasions.
Talking about how the abuse she received affected her life, one of the victims said in court: “A life blighted by an unreasonable level of fear from the age of nine, no matter what I have done in between to alleviate that fear, it still underpins my life.
"I do not feel safe in this world. I am always bracing myself to the next challenge that inevitably comes along. I don’t experience excitement, joy or well-being. The best I can manage is to say, ‘right now I feel OK’ and act as if I’m joyful. In repressing fear and negative feelings, I have to repress all the positive ones as well. It is emotional survival.”
After the sentencing on January 18, Detective Constable Samantha Coleman, from Surrey Safeguarding Investigation Unit, praised both victims for the "bravery they have shown throughout the court process".
She said: “Thanks to them, Leslie Driver will finally pay the price for the horrific crimes he committed. I hope that this result in court goes some way in giving these two women the closure they so dearly deserve to be able to finally move on with the rest of their lives.”
The force has urged anybody who has been a victim of sexual abuse or assault to report it.
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