...and now just imagine that it was your child...
THERE’S a very good reason why victims don’t get to choose the sentences or set the punishments for convicted criminals. Ask any parent, this past week, what they think of the two-and-a-half year sentence handed down to convicted paedophile Tom Humphries, and you’ll understand what that reason might be.
Ask them what they think would be a proper punishment for a man who had targeted a vulnerable 14-year-old girl, groomed her over a lengthy period with increasingly pornographic text messages, and finally lured her to his apartment where he persuaded her to perform sex acts on him.
Like me, I suspect, most of them would say that if it had been their child, they’d be the ones doing the jail time, and doing it willingly.
I have a 14-year-old daughter. She is my youngest child, our household’s last link to the charms and trappings of childhood. And, for all her impressive collection of make-up and mini-skirts and Jacob Sartorius posters, she’s never so absorbed as when she is re-arranging the furniture in the giant Barbie house that Santa Claus brought five years ago.
She’s hunted in junk shops for odd miniature items that might make curios for the house. She collected all sorts of tiny kitchen fittings and gadgets. She’s painted the rooms, upholstered the sofa with scraps from an old dress and, unbeknown to her older brother, she’s stuck one of his spare passport photographs over Barbie’s bed and surrounded it with heart-shaped emojis so he looks like a doll’s pin-up.
When we go shopping she’ll browse the clothes and lip glosses and makeup brushes, but we rarely come home without some doo-dah for the Barbies too. When I dithered about getting a new puppy, earlier this year, the others grumbled but she was the only one who cried until I changed my mind.
When I tried to suggest that Santa Claus might just pass us by last Christmas, she was the one who left out the glass of whiskey, the plate of mince pies and the carrot for Rudolph, just in case I was wrong. Turns out, I was. She is 14, the absolute heart and joy of our home, and she is still a child.
The little girl that Tom Humphries defiled was still a child. The precious
GEORGE Clooney had no problem changing his fourmonth-old twins’ nappies, he said this week, until they recently started on solid food. Now, ‘it goes in as a carrot but the way it comes out, it’s shocking’. Gosh, if he finds a carrot shocking, wait until they start eating their crayons...
lingering innocence that parents cling to, for as long as we can, was stolen from that girl and that family.
There won’t have been any mince pies left for Santa in a house where a child has been exposed to an adult’s manipulation and lust, where she’s had to give statements to gardaí and face the possibility of testifying in court, where she has been forced to engage with counsellors and lawyers and to confront language and concepts that should still be years away from her world.
In such a house, any treasured old toys or teddies will now look like mockeries of lost wonder and simplicity and childish joy.
When that girl said, in her victimimpact statement, her childhood had been taken from her, all of us parents knew she wasn’t the only one whose bank of youth had been burgled; having a child in the family keeps you in touch with the child in yourself too. When the time comes to put away childish things, everyone in the house feels their loss; how much worse must it be when those childish things are brutally stolen?
So it’s probably just as well that victims don’t get to set the sentences and fix the punishment for criminals who harm themselves and their families.
But that’s not to say their feelings are irrelevant. The sentence handed down to Humphries this week prompted decent, law-abiding, citizens to imagine taking the law into their own hands. That is a sign of a criminal justice system that is unfit for purpose.
Humphries’s sentence was not out of kilter with others that have been imposed for similar crimes, without any great uproar, so the judge can’t be faulted. Had she imposed a longer term, there was a very real possibility that it would be overturned on appeal. The problem here is not this sentence, it’s a system that has for too long tolerated leniency for crimes against children. And it’s a society that has ignored light sentences for crimes such as domestic violence, sexual assault and paedophilia until the perpetrator was a public figure and everyone finally took notice.