A man who sexually assaulted a young girl while her mother was out of the house has been jailed for three years.
The 42-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect the victim’s anonymity, was found guilty of four counts of sexual assault on dates between 2016 and 2020 following a trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court last month.
The victim was aged between four and seven at the time and is now 11-years-old. The court heard one of these assaults occurred while the girl was celebrating her sixth birthday.
In sentencing on Thursday, Judge Patricia Ryan said: “This was a serious assault on a child.”
She said the aggravating factors include that the man was in “a position of authority” as the child had been left in his care. She also noted the “huge age discrepancy” between the man and the girl as well as the impact of the assaults on her.
The judge said the mitigating factors include the man’s good work history and mental health difficulties.
Judge Ryan sentenced the man to four years imprisonment with the final year suspended on strict conditions. The sentence was backdated to when the man went into custody on July 29th of this year.
A local garda told the court that the man began a relationship with the child's mother in 2015.
He later moved in with the woman and her family. He worked intermittently and when he wasn't working, he looked after the woman's children while she was at work.
The court heard there were four specific instances in which he sexually assaulted the victim while her mother was out of the house.
The man took the victim into her mother's room on multiple occasions and touched her inappropriately on her private parts. The victim could not recall whether the touching was inside or outside of her clothes.
Afterwards, the man told the child not to tell her mother.
In an impact statement read on her behalf by her mother, the girl said: “I was a young kid who didn't understand what was going on at the time.”
“This changed my life as I don't have trust in people,” she said, adding “My family are upset for what has happened to me and there is nothing they can do to help me because they did not know what was going on.”
In the statement, she said: “I was four years old and I was an innocent little girl. This man took my innocence away from me, knowing that this was wrong.”
The man has 27 previous convictions which post-date these incidents. These include public order offences, obstruction, assault, criminal damage and possession of stolen property.
Eilis Brennan SC, defending, said her client “had difficulty with mental illness all of his life” and is a diagnosed schizophrenic.
She said the other convictions happened at a time that the man was homeless and was suffering a relapse of his illness. She asked the court to give him “a level of leniency because of the difficulties he has had.”
Ms Brennan said there was no evidence of penetration in the sexual assaults, nor was there evidence of it being inside the victim's clothes. She said it was therefore “not the most serious level of offending in terms of sexual assault.”
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, you can call the national 24-hour Rape Crisis Helpline at 1800-77 8888, access text service and webchat options at drcc.ie/services/helpline/ or visit Rape Crisis Help.
