On Wednesday in Prince George, a man was sentenced to 90 days in jail, to be served on Saturdays and Sundays, for possessing child pornography. The sentence is gentle to a fault. Furthermore, he gets to keep his anonymity from the general public as part of a court-ordered publication ban.
A former school teacher, his long career in the classroom is over, as it should be.
The innocent individuals in this man's life - his wife, his children, his family, friends and former colleagues - have been made victims of his crime. The harm he has caused them will rightfully haunt him until his dying day.
The man did not have a prior criminal record and he did not have a massive collection of child pornography that he started collecting decades ago. Instead, he had downloaded a handful of short videos featuring children between the ages of 7 to 12, depicting what the court described as the "middle range" of violence, meaning there was no penetration.
This man gave little thought to the victimization of children he didn't know or the implications of his sexual gratification in seeing those unknown children victimized.
Many find it easy to point fingers at this man for his depravity but there is little separating him from the millions of Canadians who view online pornography. The man told police that he used "teen and preteen" as search terms. That is the online equivalent of flooring it with a sports car through an elementary school zone at 8:30 on a Wednesday morning in September and not expecting anyone to notice. Those searches put the man on the radar of the RCMP's child protection unit.
In other words, he's only two degrees of separation from thoughtless speeding drivers flying through a school zone, ignoring the devastating harm they may cause to children. And he's only one degree of separation from the numerous individuals who seek out legal and readily available pornography depicting violent and degrading sex acts, particularly towards young adult women.
The long-term effects of online pornography are still being absorbed but access to both legal and illegal content has had a major effect. The phrase "child pornography" first appeared in The Citizen in 1977 but it remained a distant issue, dismissed as "kiddie porn," for 20 more years.
In 1996, as Internet access moved into homes, a Burnaby principal was charged with possession of child pornography, garnering front-page news in Prince George. Then, in September 1997, a man and a woman in Willow River were not only charged with possessing child pornography but also for the far more egregious offence of producing it. Their victims were a three-year-old boy, a pair of 10-year-old girls and a 15-year-old girl.
The man, James Darren Bennett, remains behind bars indefinitely, after being declared a dangerous offender in 2000. His most recent applications for full and day parole were both denied last December. The woman, Crystal Diane Henricks, was convicted on eight counts and sentenced to 13 years in prison, a term that was later reduced to seven years on appeal. In 2004, she was living under supervision in an undisclosed community, after her statutory release.
Since then, leading up to this week, there has been an increased frequency of local convictions for possessing child pornography. A Mackenzie man, also a first-time offender, received a two-week sentence and three years probation in 2007. The last local teacher to come before a local judge for possessing child pornography was Michael Raymond Gardiner. He also received a nine-month sentence in 2009. He was a teacher at PGSS at the time of his arrest in March 2008.
All of these individuals think they won't get caught and then offer up the sob story about how they didn't mean to cause any harm when they are.
For anyone looking at pornography involving children and thinking it's harmless, just imagine what will happen when the police show up, what will happen when everyone in your life knows, what will happen when you lose your job and what will happen when your name appears in a news story distributed online, where everyone can see it by typing in your name into Google.
Pondering that is a better use of your spare time and your twisted imagination.
