‘Bored’ teen spared jail in child-porn case

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This article was published 22/08/2023 (770 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Manitoba youth who admitted to distributing sexually abusive images and videos of children he found online — because he was bored — has been sentenced to two years of supervised probation.

The 19-year-old man committed the crimes when he was 16 and 17 and cannot be named by law. In September 2022, he pleaded guilty to distributing porn from June 2020 to October 2021.

In a written decision, Dauphin provincial court Judge Geoffrey Bayly noted the crime, which he characterized as the distribution of another child’s misery, abuse and neglect, had caused serious psychological harm to the victims.

The judge said he’s satisfied a sentence with strict conditions and community work would balance the seriousness of the offence with the teen’s degree of responsibility.

He prohibited him from being around children under 14 unless a responsible adult is present. The teen must complete sex-offender therapy and allow police and his probation officer access to his electronic devices.

The Crown had argued the teen sought out the material and should be sentenced to nine months in custody and two years of probation. The defence sought two years of probation, saying that although the offence is serious, the Crown’s assessment of the teen’s culpability was flawed.

The RCMP integrated child exploitation unit got an investigation package from mobile messaging application Kik on Feb. 18, 2021, regarding a user who had uploaded child sex abuse images to its forum and posted links to child sex abuse images to the dark web in June 2020.

The dark web refers to networks that require specific software or authorization to access.

The information indicated the Internet protocol address associated with the user had originated in a town in western Manitoba.

RCMP obtained a warrant for the residence, arrested the 17-year-old youth and seized his electronics on Oct. 15, 2021.

An RCMP analysis of the electronics found 1,105 child sex abuse images and 29 videos.

The judge had viewed a sample of the images.

“The images and videos depicted terrible crimes being committed against vulnerable children. What I observed was both disturbing and heartbreaking,” the judge wrote.

The youth had a PDF document titled “How to Practice Child Love,” which the Crown argued was evidence he is a pedophile who is contemplating “contact offending,” or offending face-to-face, rather than online.

The defence argued those positions were outlandish and contradicted a forensic psychiatric report that assessed the youth at a low risk of such offending.

The youth told the authors of a pre-sentence report, his lawyer and forensic assessors that he became interested in the dark web because he was bored and isolated, following a period of bullying. He intended to explore his interest in horror and computer hacking.

He said he preferred the images and videos of teenage girls who were his age, but regretted looking at them, saying it is not “good to take people’s suffering for granted, especially for nefarious purposes.”

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca