Man will serve 10 years in 'sickening' Craigslist sex abuse case involving 6-year-old girl

A Hamilton man who pleaded guilty to repeatedly sexually assaulting his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter will serve 10 years and 205 days forhis crimes.

The man, 37, was sentenced Friday for vaginally, orally and anally assaulting his ex-girlfriend's daughter, and offering her to pedophiles on Craigslist.

He was also sentenced for secretly filming his then 16-year-old stepdaughter showering, and possessing thousands of pornographic images and videos most of them of the six-year-old.

Those files were "unspeakably repulsive and profoundly sickening," Justice George Gage said in his ruling.

For an 18-month period starting in April 2016, the man "systematically, methodically and repeatedly" assaulted the girl, who was nearly eight when the abuse stopped, Gage said.

No sentence, Gage said, will "restore (the girl's) innocence, nor can any sentence soothe the pain of the indelible scars."

Gage sentenced the man to 13 years and three months, somewhere between the 15 years the Crown requested and the 10 years the defence wanted.

Factoring in time served, the man will serve 10 years and 205 days.

The sentence was for sexual interference, voyeurism and making and possessing child pornography, as well as assaulting a police officer and failing to appear in court.

Gage factored in mitigating circumstances, such as the man's history of sexual abuse at the hands of his own stepfather.

When he reported the abuse in his early teens, Gage said, no one believed him. When he got older, the man burned himself with cigarettes and attempted suicide by crashing his snowmobile through the ice.

Coincidentally, the man's stepfather was finally sentenced for his crimes in 2016 the same time that the man was abusing the six-year-old.

The man's Indigenous background, with a family history marred by addiction and the residential school system, was also a mitigating factor.

Generations of systemic abuse created "a horrible and depressing scenario," Gage said.

The case began in 2016, Gage said, when the man was living with his then-girlfriend and two stepdaughters.

One more case to be heard

The man repeatedly assaulted the younger daughter, Gage said. He also recorded thousands of videos and images of the girl, but apparently didn't post them online.

He waited until others in the house were asleep, then invited adults over to abuse the girl too, said assistant Crown attorney Janet Booy in the pre-sentencing hearing last month.

"It was, at one point, three adults on one seven-year-old child for their own depraved sexual gratification," she said.

Four other people were charged in relation to the abuse of the girl. In December, Sonya Lucas was sentenced to six years and five months. There is still one more case to come before the courts.

The girl's aunt said afterward that the man received the sentence she expected, but it's still not enough.

'How long must those 16 months have felt'

"Until the mandatory minimums are changed in this country, where people are held accountable for their actions until that changes, nothing is going to change," she said.

She still questions why the man originally faced 49 charges, and that was reduced to four.

"We have tried and failed to understand how this is fair or just," she wrote in a letter to Attorney General Yasir Naqvi.

"Please, take a moment to think back to how long just one week felt when you were a seven-year-old child," she wrote to Naqvi.

"How long must those 16 months have felt for my precious little niece?"