By Daphne Bramham,
Vancouver Sun
July 23, 2010
Kenneth Klassen is an ordinary-looking guy. He is neither model material, nor does he appear to be the predatory monster that he is.
If he looked the part, it would be easier to countenance the evil that he's done. But few pedophiles do.
Earlier this year, the 59-year-old international art dealer from Burnaby pleaded guilty to having had sex overseas with 14 girls as young as eight and possession of pornography that included both children and bestiality.
Thursday, he was in B.C. Supreme Court for his sentencing hearing, where Crown counsel told the judge that Klassen's psychiatric report indicated he had been preying on children since he was 27 or 28. More than a quarter of a century.
Stocky with a receding hairline and well-trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, Klassen's brown-checked linen sports jacket was fashionably wrinkled. Outside the court, he shoved a brown, brimmed fisherman's hat on his head and donned sunglasses.
In the prisoner's docket, Klassen sat impassively as the judge was told that a Colombian girl -- whom Klassen called Laurie -- first had sex with him so that she could buy new clothes for her 12th birthday.
"I had nobody to give me anything," she told Colombian authorities.
For a year, she lived with Klassen in his Colombian home. And over a period of four years, Klassen threatened her if she didn't obediently sexually service him (and two of his friends on one occasion) and videotape him with other girls.
Another Colombian victim, Patty, told authorities that Klassen once gave her a teddy bear -- a gift that reminds us just how young his victims were both in Colombia and Cambodia.
Klassen also impassively watched Justice Austin Cullen viewing nearly two hours worth of clips from the pornographic videos that Klassen had made or purchased, as well as other homemade videos of him with different Colombian and Cambodian girls.
What's on the videos is so disgusting that Crown counsel Brandon McCabe told the court no one should have to watch them.
Only Cullen and the lawyers could see the videos. Klassen demurred, even though it was his right to see them.
I don't know what they saw. The Vancouver Sun has applied to get access to descriptions of them, not because any of us wants to have to really know how Klassen violated these girls, as young as eight, whom McCabe described as "disenfranchised, desperate and poverty-stricken."
Unfortunately, we need to know, because even though the law has been on the books for 13 years, this is only Canada's third case in which a Canadian is charged with sexually assaulting, abusing and exploiting children in another country.
The Crown is asking for a prison sentence of 12 years. It's also asking for a whole raft of restrictions placed on him, including a prohibition on ever going near playgrounds and schools for the rest of his life.
But the maximum is 14 years.
Contrast both with the similar case of former U.S. marine Michael Pepe. He was convicted in a Los Angeles court of having sexually abused seven minors while he was working part-time as a professor at a Cambodian university. The state is asking for a sentence of more than 200 years in prison.
Former RCMP officer Brian McConaghy was one of the people sitting in the Vancouver courtroom Thursday. He had worked on the Donald Bakker case, Canada's first conviction on sex tourism charges.
McConaghy had to view all the videos in that case. It changed his life. He quit the force and now works with the Ratanak Foundation, which rescues and helps rehabilitate Cambodian children who have been victims of sexual predators. Among its success stories are Bakker's victims.
Among the 150-plus children helped by Ratanak, McConaghy knows a girl who had been raped more than 9,000 times; one who lay in her own blood for weeks as someone filmed a pornographic torture video; others who have been electrocuted and beaten; still others who were in brothels by age five.
McConaghy praised Cullen for watching the video clip. He didn't have to. The judge in Bakker's case handed down a sentence of 10 years on the basis of a joint submission by the defence and Crown counsels.
McConaghy says bitterly that for judges not to see what child pornography and exploitation really is, is akin to them not wanting to see murder evidence because they don't like the sight of blood.
But it's not only judges who need to see it. McConaghy passionately believes that until Canadian lawmakers understand the horror of child pornography and horrific abuse by foreigners of desperate, poor children around the world, Canada will never have laws, sentences, ways and means to prosecute the perpetrators.
So he's campaigning for a chance to show willing members of Parliament even 30 seconds of the kind of abuse that vulnerable children overseas are suffering.
Nobody should have to see this stuff. But as long as there are predatory monsters like Kenneth Klassen -- a father with three children of his own -- somebody has to know what they do. We need to know to ensure that they are hunted down, prosecuted and given sentences appropriate for the vileness of their actions.
dbramham@vancouversun.com
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