Warning: the following story contains graphic details involving a sexual assault
An Inuvik man who struck his girlfriend in the face only to go on and sexually assault her sleeping mother on the same night received a two-year sentence on Wednesday.
With credit for time spent in remand custody - amounting to 365 days - the 30-year-old will serve one year behind bars, followed by two years of probation.
The offender is not being named by News/North in order to protect the identity of both victims - the man’s former common-law partner and her mother.
During a night of drinking in March of last year, the man punched his partner in the face - leaving her with a black eye - after accusing her of cheating.
The man then went to his girlfriend’s mother’s house, where the victim was sleeping. He pulled down her pants and sexually assaulted her as she slept.
When she awoke, he told her he was “making love to her.”
The victim chased him out of her home with a baseball bat.
The woman, Crown prosecutor Alex Godfrey told the court, has lost all trust in her children’s male friends following the attack.
She now suffers from recurring nightmares, and always makes sure her doors are locked.
The man, who was using crack cocaine and abusing alcohol in the weeks leading up to the assaults, has no recollection of the events, according to the Crown, but accepts the victims’ account of what happened.
He pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm and sexual assault, sparing the “intensely relieved” mother from having to testify, said Godfrey.
Justice Louise Charbonneau, who reserved her decision after hearing submissions from the Crown and defence on Monday, called the woman’s loss of personal safety “heartbreaking.”
Not only did the offender attack the woman in a vulnerable state - while she slept - he committed a breach of trust when he sexually assaulted the mother of his then-girlfriend, said Charbonneau.
She called the sex assault a “serious violation of her personal and sexual integrity.”
But Charbonneau said the two-year sentence she ultimately handed down was “much shorter,” than the term she had initially mulled.
Upbringing marked by ‘abuse and dysfunction’
Instead, Charbonneau settled on the “lowest end” of the range - the Crown recommended 2.5 to 3.5 years in custody less remand time - after weighing the upbringing and circumstances of the Indigenous offender.
The offender, the court heard, grew up in a home marked by “abuse and dysfunction.” He was apprehended from his mother, a residential school survivor who abused drugs and alcohol herself, when he was only three. While never diagnosed, he believes he has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)
He started drinking at 12.
On birthdays as a child, the man recounted in a pre-sentence report, his mother would gift him with marijuana before telling him to “get lost.”
‘I can’t survive without treatment’
In asking Charbonneau to consider a sentence of two years, the offender’s lawyer Peter Harte drew attention to a lack of adequate rehabilitation resources and programs at North Slave Correctional Complex (NSCC), where the man has been in custody on remand.
NSCC houses inmates on remand - awaiting trial or sentencing - as well as prisoners serving sentences under two years. A sentence of two or more years is a prison term.
Harte said his client, a victim of abuse himself, is one of many failed by a corrections system - at no fault of its dedicated employees - that doesn’t have the resources to effectively address the criminal behaviour and underlying issues of inmates, including inter-generational trauma and FASD, before releasing them back into the community.
Harte cited a 2015 report on the territory’s Corrections Service from Canada’s Auditor General, which found “serious deficiencies” in case management for inmates at NSCC and the Fort Smith Correctional Complex.
According to the report, “these deficiencies limit the Department’s efforts to rehabilitate inmates and prepare them for release back to the community."
Harte said his client told him he’s desperately seeking substance abuse and trauma treatment that isn’t accessible at NSCC.
Harte told the court the offender confided he “needs to see somebody about what happened to me as a kid,” and that he “can’t survive without treatment.”
He asked the court to consider a sentence that would allow his client to pursue rehabilitation, adding the offender wants to seek long-term treatment at a residential facility.
Courts must consider public safety
Charbonneau said it goes without saying that simply “warehousing” inmates before releasing them without addressing the root causes of their criminality is a concern, but stressed a lack of resources is out of the court’s control.
She said public safety is a sentencing principle that must be upheld.
People who are abused can grow up to be predators, but that doesn’t change the need to safeguard the public from abuse, said Charbonneau.
The Inuvik man must register as a sex offender for 20 years, is barred from possessing firearms for 10, and must submit a sample of his DNA. Charbonneau recommended residential treatment for trauma and substance abuse as part of a probation plan “designed to help his rehabilitation efforts.”
“This is your chance,” Charbonneau told the man.