A 35-year-old accountant who used text messaging and video chatting to try to lure teen and pre-teen girls into sex has been jailed for 18 months after pleading guilty to child luring.
The Vancouver man exchanged about 50,000 text messages with two girls between April 2014 and December 2016 in an attempt to lure them into sex.
“This is an extreme case, in my view, of child exploitation,” said North Vancouver provincial court judge Doug Moss in sentencing the married father to jail time.
Moss described the messages the man sent to the girls as “vile and disgusting.”
At a sentencing hearing Wednesday, Crown counsel Ron Edwards described how the man got to know one 12-year-old West Vancouver girl through volunteer work with her mother on a local community service group.
At a Christmas event in North Vancouver, the man – who is not being named to protect the identity of the girl – asked the girl for her cellphone number.
He then began to text her personal messages.
Soon afterwards, the girl’s mother became suspicious when she heard her daughter’s text message notification go off at 10 p.m. After reading the messages, the mother became concerned and contacted West Vancouver police who set up a sting in conjunction with the Vancouver Police Department’s counter-exploitation unit.
Officers kept the girl’s cellphone and pretended to be the 12-year-old responding to his messages, said Edwards.
After telling the “girl” they should keep their relationship secret, the man soon began sending explicit sexual messages and photos of his anatomy, and asking her to do the same.
Eventually the man suggested that they meet to “make out and play” on a day when there was no school and the girl’s parents would not be home. Police were watching as the man arrived for a pre-arranged meeting at a local McDonald’s and arrested him.
When they seized the man’s phone, police discovered a number of messages to another teen girl, who lives in Oshawa, between March 2014 and May 2015. They subsequently contacted police in that area.
Edwards said that girl, who he described as a “vulnerable youth” was 14 when the man first contacted her. Edwards said in that case, the man used a different name and pretended he was a teenage boy.
About a month after they began exchanging messages, the man demanded that the girl send him nude photos of herself. She did so, feeling pressured, said Edwards.
The man also pressured the girl into sexual video chats over Skype.
Psychological reports pointed to the man as a “moderate risk” to re-offend, noting his history of “chronic and repeated” use of technology to contact underage girls and his persistent sexual interest in them.
The man’s defence lawyer, Brian Mickelson, pointed to the man’s stable family life, his history of volunteer work and his acknowledgement that his actions were wrong.
Mickelson said the man knew some of the girls were underage but found them “easier to talk to than adult females. He experienced them as less threatening and more accepting.”
In handing down his sentence, Moss described the man’s actions as “reprehensible.”
“When someone such as yourself does what you have done…the only option is a jail sentence,” said Moss.
A conviction of child luring carries a minimum one-year jail sentence and a maximum of 10 years in jail.
In addition to the jail sentence, Moss placed the man on three years’ probation, with conditions not to be found near schools, daycares, swimming pools or parks where children under 16 might be, and not to contact anyone under 16 (with the exception of his own child), or work or volunteer in a position of trust with them, unless with an adult approved of in advance. The man is also banned from using a computer, or having access to the Internet except for work purposes. The judge ordered those conditions will continue for four years after probation, under special prohibitions for child sexual offenders.
The man will also be placed on the sex offender registry for 20 years.
