Manitoba woman added to abuse registry for failing to protect child

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2020 (2315 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A judge has ordered a Manitoba woman’s name be placed on the national child abuse registry, after she ignored several “red flags” that a neighbour had been sexually abusing her daughter.

“The disturbing facts of this case demonstrate how easily and how quickly a mother and her children can become entangled with a child sexual abuser and the devastating results that follow,” Queen’s Bench Justice Kaye Dunlop said in a judgment delivered earlier this month.

“This case is about the duty of society to protect children, not only from those who commit child sexual violence but from those who objectively fail to protect their children from sexual violence.”

The young girl’s abuser was convicted after trial of sexual interference, invitation to sexual touching, and making sexually explicit material available to a child.

He was sentenced last year to eight years in prison. He cannot be named as doing so might identify his victim.

After the man’s conviction, Child and Family Services sought a court order that the girl’s mother name be added to the national child abuse registry.

Court heard the man befriended the girl’s mother upon her moving into the same apartment building in a small southern Manitoba town where he was a school teacher.

The woman told court she was romantically interested in the man and trusted him. Within days, the woman was allowing him to pick up her daughter at school and have her stay with him while she was at work.

The man began abusing the girl three days after meeting her — up to 30 times over the course of a month — until the girl disclosed the abuse to her mother in July 2016. The mother immediately notified police.

During that month, the man showed the girl pornography and had her to his apartment for sleepovers, when he would force her into sex acts.

“The mother was of the opinion that the child acted like she was happy during the period of time that she was in contact with (the man),” Dunlop said. “Her implication was that she had no reason to suspect anything was happening to the child as a result.”

Dunlop said the woman ignored “flagrant” signs the man was not the friend he claimed to be, including an incident when the girl acted out in a sexually suggestive manner and he dismissed it as “no big deal.”

On another occasion, after the man and woman had been drinking and the woman tried to initiate sex, the man could not perform and said: “This would be nice with (the child).”

The woman became alarmed, but accepted the man’s explanation when he backtracked, and even allowed the man to continue having time alone with her daughter, court was told.

“Subjectively, the decisions made by the mother were not the decisions that an ordinary, prudent or reasonable parent would have made for their child,” Dunlop said. “Most parents would not have trusted their child to an individual they met only three days earlier and then, within days after that, allow their child to sleep unsupervised repeatedly at his home.

“By the time (the man) said to the mother while they were both in bed naked and engaged in several sexual acts that he wanted the child in bed with them, the issue of the child potentially being or having been sexually abused… was literally staring the mother in the face,” Dunlop said. “Her decision thereafter to allow (the man) unfettered and unsupervised access to her child for multiple days cannot be explained as a mistake.”

The woman’s two children are now in the care of her ex-husband.

Names included on the child abuse registry are available to police, social service and adoption agencies, and employers to assess whether the named person is suitable to work with children.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca