Dauphin-area couple sentenced in child-abuse case

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This article was published 28/10/2019 (2333 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Dauphin-area couple has been handed double-digit prison sentences in a child abuse case a judge described as “equally disturbing and heartbreaking.”

The 41-year-old male and 29-year-old female co-accused admitted to sexually abusing the man’s two young daughters, depriving them of food and keeping them in a locked room where they were forced to defecate on the floor.

Neither accused can be named as it would identify their victims.

On Monday, Queen’s Bench Justice Sandra Zinchuk sentenced the man to 17 years in prison and the woman to 14 years.

The abuse has left both young victims “irrevocably changed and damaged,” Zinchuk said.

“These children should have been able to look to their father… to provide the love, guidance and support needed to develop (into) happy, healthy young women,” the judge said.

“Instead, the lives of these two girls was bereft of the basic love and care to which children are entitled. They were subjected to confinement, physical maltreatment, food deprivation and corporal punishment. They lived in fear and squalor and were directed to keep their home lives a secret.”

Police arrested the couple in August 2014, after one of the girls reported the abuse to a relative, who contacted Child and Family Services (CFS).

When questioned by police, the older of the two girls, then seven years old, said she and her sister would take turns “mak(ing) love” with their father, while the woman recorded it on a video camera.

The girl said she and her sister were fed just twice a day and were often left hungry. She said they had to sit on the floor on their knees, their hands behind their back, as their father ate.

“We (weren’t) allowed to eat,” she said in an interview with police. “We just get on our knees, face him and watch him eat. And Dad and (the female accused) decide if we get to eat.”

After the girls were caught sneaking food at night, they were placed in a locked bedroom for several days and let out just twice a day to eat.

Denied access to a washroom for much of the day, the girls were forced to defecate and urinate in the bedroom. That, in turn, saw the girls punished by being sprayed with cold water from a garden hose.

Text messages recovered from the couple’s cellphones include one in which the woman discusses sexually abusing one of the girls. In other texts, exchanged after CFS became involved, the couple discusses deleting images from their phones.

Both accused pleaded guilty to two counts each of sexual assault and making child pornography. According to pre-sentence reports provided to court, both accused continued to minimize responsibility for their actions and remained a high risk to reoffend.

“A guilty plea is often accompanied by genuine remorse,” Zinchuk said. “However, both (accused) appear to be conflicted between some minimal understanding of what they have done versus a desire to minimize or deflect their own level of responsibility.”

According to a pre-sentence report, the male accused claimed he had been sexually abused by his stepmother, beginning at age 10, but “does not appear to believe this had anything to do with his own behaviour with his daughters.”

In her pre-sentence report, the female accused detailed a long history of unhealthy romantic partners, many of them sex offenders.

“She appears to recognize the need to end these relationships, but is unable to appreciate why the pattern developed in the first place,” Zinchuk said.

The male accused received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to just over nine years.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca