Unspeakable Crime, Negligible Punishment

Parental child rapists - these poor excuses for humankind must surely represent the utter depths of degradation to which human dregs are capable of descending. What they represent, the warped essence of their desires, the mangled mind of the rapist, a creature beneath contempt, is as elevated above the child molester-rapist as is the butterfly to the caterpillar.

The criminal sexual assault of a child, incapable in any measure of protecting itself against the attack of the psychopath can still be trumped in the swamp of dismal human nature at its most disgustingly miserable, in the presence of a parent sexually abusing a child.

These creatures elicit such a instant response of rejection from other human beings that even criminals who prey on society in other ways view them with absolute repugnance. Little wonder that when child molesters and rapists and child pornography aficionados are placed in prison they are routinely separated from the rest of the inmates convicted of crimes deemed to be worse offences against civil society, as reflected in the sentences meted out to them through the justice system.

So it is more than a little bitterly amusing to realize that even among the criminal class this demographic of society's worst offenders are recognized as having stooped far below the limits of what the majority of social deviants agree is permissible. Their transgressions against the fitness of the human species is so remorselessly evil and destructive that they are recognized as fair targets in the prison system for extermination as noxious pests.

The irony, of course, is that when meting out justice in reflection of society's values and mores, those who sit in judgement upon child rapists and parents who have committed forced incest with their frightened, unwilling and helpless children, view them as having lapsed in judgement, their crimes viewed as so pedestrian that the discipline exacted of them in time served is somewhat less than someone committing a white-collar crime.

As Bob Tarantino, a Toronto lawyer writes in C2CJournal.ca, "When I attended Osgoode Hall back in the 1990s, the snarkier amongst us observed that we were in "law school", not "justice school". While "justice" makes a fine aspirational yardstick, it is a goal actually realized only occasionally. 
The decisions of various Canadian courts in a recent case, R vs P.M., the sentencing for which took place in 2010 and the appeal of which the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear in November 2012, prove that. The sentence handed down was shocking in its leniency, and sobering in the lessons it teaches.
"The crimes at the centre of this case are horrifying. A father (identified only as "P.M." to protect the identity of his victim) vaginally and anally raped his 13-year-old daughter "approximately 10 times" over the course of a little more than a year. When his home was searched after a school counsellor learned of the assaults and notified the police, nearly 2,000 images of child pornography were discovered on the man's computer. Included among them were photographs and videos of him raping his daughter. In some of the videos, the victim was heard begging, "Daddy, please stop". He didn't."

And Mr. Tarantino concludes his article by stating: "In short, for having terrorized and raped his daughter ten times over the course of slightly more than a year, for having videotaped and photographed those grotesque assaults for his later viewing pleasure, for having possessed hundreds of other images of violent child pornography, P.M. will spend significantly less than five years in prison. The decisions of the various courts in R vs P.M. and the precedents which lead to the sentence handed down, are law. But they should not be mistaken for justice."

A new study, decades in the making, out of a sexual behaviour clinic at the Forensic Treatment Unit of the Royal Ottawa Health Care Group, reached some conclusions relating to causes of sexual behaviour and aggression. The study had included 771 male subjects aged from 18 to 78, assessed at the clinic between 1982 and 1996, all of whom had been convicted of a sexual offence.

Thirty-six percent of the subjects were classified as "intra-familial offenders against children"; twenty-four percent were "extra-familial offenders against children", 22% were exhibitionists, 9% were rapists of adult women, and 8% were offenders against "heterogeneous victim types." Draw your own conclusions from that perspective.