School worker’s sentencing for sexual touching delayed
A community divided by the molestation of five young school girls by a male educational assistant will have to wait another 10 weeks to find out his punishment.
About 25 supporters split between the girls and the 25-yearold offender attended a sentencing hearing at Saskatoon Court of Queen’s Bench Friday, including elders on either side who addressed Justice Neil Gabrielson.
The community is small and close-knit, with large extended families and so many people related to each other that the offender cannot be named without identifying victims, who were all between eight and 10 at the time of the offences, which occurred between 2014 and 2016.
The offender’s parents are elders at the school; his aunt was his supervising teacher and his sister drives the school bus in the central Saskatchewan community, Crown prosecutor Tamara Rock said, referring to agreed facts.
Families of the girls say they suffer hostility from the man’s supporters, as if they were responsible for discord since charges were laid almost two years ago.
The grandfather of one of the girls described his kinship connection to the offender before tearfully describing how the girl once loved school, traditional dancing, regalia and powwows, but since the abuse, she doesn’t like school and doesn’t want to go to powwows.
He said his family is fighting to reclaim its culture after generations of being denied it and worse at residential schools.
He urged the offender, who entered guilty pleas, to take responsibility and learn from sex offender programming in custody, and he said the community will accept him back some day.
Defence lawyer Robert Dick said his client has intellectual deficits, no criminal record, strong family support and that the acts were on the low range of seriousness for sexual offences
Dick applied to have the mandatory minimum one-year sentence declared unconstitutional and asked for a jail term between three to eight months or 12 to 18 months if the minimum sentence is applied.
The offender’s father said he didn’t know about the offences but now knows his son “needs a lot of help.” He sometimes hears his son crying at night.
The Crown asked for a threeyear sentence consisting of three consecutive one-year terms and two concurrent one-year terms.
He shouldn’t be given leniency for having diminished capability when he was able to be employed as an educational assistant, Rock said.
The man touched the girls’ buttocks, genitalia and chests. There were instances of digital penetration, Rock said.
The man told a psychiatrist that he was aroused by the touching, that he deliberately hid the acts from other adults and knew he could get in trouble. The psychiatrist found the man’s sexual attraction to children means he has a pedophiliac disorder.