Court heard the man was heavily intoxicated when he posted a video of the abuse on Snapchat, leading to his arrest in Saskatoon on Nov. 30, 2023.
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Warning: Story discusses child sexual assault
A Saskatoon man says he immediately called police after he “came to” and realized he had posted a Snapchat video of himself sexually assaulting his five-year old niece.
He said he was drunk, made a mistake and had abused a child, a Saskatoon provincial courtroom heard last month.
The man, who can’t be identified to protect the victim’s identity, gave police an address and said he’d be waiting for them. When they arrived, he was gone, and family members told officers they had discovered the video.
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The 31-year-old man was later arrested when he returned home. According to the facts read out at his sentencing hearing, he repeatedly apologized, said he was going to hell for what he did and asked how much time he would spend in prison.
The answer, it ended up, would be six years after Judge Inez Cardinal accepted a joint submission from the Crown and defence.
The man pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting his niece and making child pornography of the abuse on Nov. 18, 2023, as well as sexually assaulting the girl, making child pornography of the abuse and making the abuse available online on Nov. 30, 2023.
He was arrested after the second offence and told police he got rid of his cellphone, but didn’t know where it was because he was intoxicated. Police found it a few houses away and confirmed it was his.
There were 13 videos depicting child abuse. Eleven of them involved three separate assaults against his niece, Crown prosecutor Andrew Clements said. Four of the 39 child abuse images were of his niece, court heard.
Clements said the Crown reached out to the girl’s family, but no victim impact statements were provided to the court, which heard the offender was dealing with major addictions issues leading up to the offences.
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Legal Aid lawyer Cory Rediron said his client was a welder who lost his job because of his substance use, which had escalated to meth and a 26-ounce bottle of vodka every day.
He was in his grandmother’s care as a child, but now has a good relationship with his mother, who is caring for his child, court heard.
Cardinal said while she appreciates his struggles with trauma and addictions, it’s time for him to move forward and break the cycle. Hopefully his niece will not let the trauma he’s inflicted on her “drag her life story down,” she noted.
“You need to address those underlying issues, that trauma from your childhood and from what your parents and grandparents went through,” she said, adding the fact that he was viewing and making child porn means “There’s a deeper issue that you need to address, and that’s your own attraction to child pornography.”
The man pledged to take all sex offender programming available in prison. He’s also been participating in AA and reconnecting with religion so that he never hurts another child, Rediron said.
“I will be a better man from here on out. Now that I’m sober for this long, (there’s) a lot of things I’ve noticed about myself and I think I like being sober from here on out. It’s better this way,” the man told court.
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“I’m a sick man and I need to change; that’s why I did what I did, to put myself in here and face the music.”
For five years after his release, the man is banned from being in places where children congregate (unless with a sober adult aware of his convictions), cannot contact his niece, and cannot use the internet to access any social media.
He will also be on the national sex offender registry for 20 years.
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