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Editor’s note: This article contains disturbing subject matter.
A Saskatchewan man is heading to federal prison for repeatedly sexually assaulting and impregnating his 13-year-old granddaughter.
According to court documents, the assaults started when the girl was 10 years old. She was with her grandfather at a powwow and she went to lie down in a truck because her back hurt. He came with her and molested her. Shortly after that, the rape began – the girl estimated she was raped between 75 and 100 times.
The girl’s identity is protected by a publication ban, and because of the man’s relationship to her, he, therefore, cannot be identified either.
Court heard the sexual assaults continued for three years until the girl gave birth to a baby boy in spring 2014 at the Wynyard hospital.
She told court the man told her to lie and say another man had forced her to have sex, but about a month later she filed a report with the Wadena RCMP, explaining who the baby’s father really was. A later DNA test confirmed the girl’s grandfather was the baby’s father – he was 50 at the time.
Police then put out a warrant for the man’s arrest, but he managed to evade police for almost a year. In 2015 he was arrested and was kept in custody as the case made its way through the court.
He eventually pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault.
In her victim impact statement, the girl said her childhood had been taken away from her, that she suffered from anxiety and depression and had developed an eating disorder.
The maximum sentence for this offence at the time was 10 years, according to the judge. The Crown was asking for a nine-year sentence, while the defense argued for six-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half years – citing his guilty plea and history of being the victim of sexual assault himself — as mitigating factors.
The judge recognized the offender’s history but also wrote that he saw no record of apology. The judge said in his decision that the most egregious factor in the crime was the ongoing nature of the assaults:
“The nature of child sexual abuse is so offensive because it often involves a captive victim who is subject to repeated assaults, unlike adult victims who, in most instances, find a way to distance themselves from their assailant. V.D. lived with his child victim. She had no means to leave; she was a dependent child.”
The man was sentenced to eight years in prison, less time served, which worked out to just over six years left to serve. He was also given a list of conditions to follow upon his release, like providing DNA, being added to the sex offender registry, a 10-year firearms ban, no communication with the victim, and not being able to be around kids or in places where kids are likely to be.
