 After admitting to repeatedly raping a young girl for years while he was a teenager, a local man was sentenced to a mere 100 days in custody Thursday at the Calgary Courts Centre. (Mike Drew, QMI Agency)
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CALGARY - Repeatedly raping and sodomizing a young girl in his mother's day home has landed a Calgary man 100 days in detention.
Youth court Judge Lillian McLellan, in a written ruling released Thursday, also placed the man on community supervision and probation -- bringing his total term to the maximum juvenile sentence of two years.
Although now an adult, the offender, who can't be identified, was a youth when he repeatedly violated his young victim while babysitting her in his parents' home.
McLellan said the man's crime warranted a sentence of six months custody, but reduced that to five months because he pleaded guilty to sexual assault.
Under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, custodial sentences must be divided into two-thirds detention and one-third community supervision.
That means the offender must spend 100 days in custody followed by 50 days of supervision before he begins a 19-month term of probation, McLellan said. In her ruling, McLellan noted the Youth Criminal Justice Act calls for custodial terms only in the most serious of cases.
The act "restricts custody to primarily violent young persons and serious repeat offenders for whom no alternative to custody is available," McLellan said.
But the judge said despite the lack of any prior criminal history the offender's conduct was violent enough to warrant a custodial term.
"This is a serious offence involving multiple incidents of sexual exploitation over time that caused great harm to a young child," she said.
The man -- diagnosed as a pedophile -- sexually abused the girl over a 2 1/2 -year period when she was between the ages of three and five.
He began the assaults when he was 14 and til he was 17 years old.
Victim-impact statements provided by the girl's mother and grandmother said she was severely traumatized by the attacks, which took place after the offender convinced her to play a game of "horsey."
"The mother reports the child has suffered from severe anxiety with respect to going to sleep and often wakes with nightmares," McLellan said.
"The child was scared when the young person made her do things she does not understand and she feels 'icky.' " the judge noted. "When the child thinks about what happened, she feels sick to her stomach."
kevin.martin@sumedia.ca
