Suspended sentence for teen who repeatedly raped nephew was not ‘soft’ says father of victim

When the newspapers reported a two-year suspended sentence for a local teenager who had repeatedly raped his nephew, it seemed, initially, like a very lenient punishment that simply didn’t fit the crime.

But when the father of the victim mulled it over, he realised the true extent of this man’s punishment and the effect it would have on the rest of his life.

“At the start, I was angry. I was fuming,” Eamon (whose name has been changed to protect the privacy of the family) told the Longford Leader last week.

“I was furious, but it was explained to me that the biggest fear, especially because of his age, would be the education he gets in prison. And that he was ten times more likely to reoffend if he went to jail than what is in store for him now.”

The young man’s file is now with gardaí and with INTERPOL, so his movements will be completely restricted for the rest of his life, Eamon added.

“It’s not a soft sentence. There’s an awful lot behind that suspended sentence that the public isn’t told,” he said.

“It is strict. His opportunities in life now have drastically shrunk, because this is on his file. When he applies for a job and he’s asked ‘have you ever been arrested for a felony’, he has. So his life opportunities have shrunk drastically, regardless of the education he gets.

“I don’t think people are aware of that. I think there’s a very short sightedness here. This judgement will have a lifelong effect going forward.”

The teenager was only 15 when he got his eight-year-old nephew to perform oral sex on him while they were playing video games.

“He was a baby doing something horrible to a baby,” said Eamon, who has been separated from his son’s mother for 11 years but has been a very strong father figure for his son.

“He might be 18 today, but I still have a hard time getting my head around it because I, on and off, would’ve seen that boy grow up. So, in my head, because I hadn’t seen him for a few years, he was still a little, small boy.

He pleaded guilty in the Central Criminal Court to sample counts of oral and anal rape on dates between June and September 2017. He also pleaded guilty to inviting or inciting a child to sexual touching.

The court heard that, in September 2017, the victim asked his mother if he could tell her something by writing it down because he didn’t want to say it.

He wrote a note stating that “while (my uncle) is babysitting me, he makes me suck his private parts”. His mother became distraught and rang the defendant’s mother who immediately brought her son to gardaí.

“He wrote it down for his mother, but I felt I had failed as a father because, the week before, he had tried to tell me and I didn’t listen to him properly,” Eamon explained.

“He had begun saying it and, because he was eight, he had a difficult time saying it to me. I was distracted doing something and I said ‘that’s a shocking thing to say - where did you hear language like that?’ and he said ‘my uncle said these things to me’.

“I just said ‘that’s shocking; I don’t want to hear any more of that language from you’. So it played on me then, after I brought him back to his mother.

“The following Friday, I picked him up and that’s when he began to tell me and I said to him ‘okay, I think we need to have a chat about this at home’. He began telling me and I broke down in tears.”

But Eamon never realised, until he was in court, just how much of the truth his son had kept from his parents.

“I didn’t realise how much he protected me about what happened to him, because he stopped telling me the worst parts of it. And he did something similar to his mother,” said Eamon.

“So my eight-year-old son protected both myself and his mother from the worst of what happened to him and it wasn’t until he was chatting to a social worker when the worst of it came out. When it was read out in court, I couldn’t believe it. I broke down.”

When interviewed by specialist gardaí, the victim said his uncle “makes me feel very sad and frightened” and “he was really mean to me”.

He said that the teenager told him that the number of “kills” his uncle got on the Xbox game they were playing would be “how many times he would get me to suck his dick”.

“He made me afraid to tell anyone,” the child said.

In a victim impact statement, he said he sees his uncle everywhere and it makes him very sad.

“If it did not happen, I would be happy. It makes me less confident. I get scared when I meet new and older people,” he wrote.

But Eamon has stressed that his son is no longer a victim, but a survivor. He didn’t attend the court sitting when judgement was being passed, but it wasn’t out of fear, his father explained.

“I told him on the Friday what the story was, and I said, ‘Tuesday I’m going to court’. I said, ‘the DPP have invited you to come up if you want’. I said, ‘If you have any questions, ask me. If you have no questions, fine’. I said, ‘Think about it for the weekend, and we won’t talk about it’,” said Eamon.

“And Monday evening he gave his decision. And it wasn’t through fear or anything, it was more he hadn’t seen his godfather in over a year, and said, ‘I’d rather spend quality time with him than have to go to a court room to look at him’. And I said, ‘fair enough’.

“He would’ve went to the court with me if needs be, just to show, ‘right, look, I’m stronger for what happened’.

“Every so often he does have difficulties. For a long time he couldn’t eat sausages, because they reminded him,” Eamon continued.

“There was one day I was in my boxers, I turned the shower on, I went into the kitchen, that kind of thing. He had a moment there where he just slightly freaked, and then realised he was in a safe environment.

“When he’s felt the need to talk about what happened to him, because he didn’t understand something, we’ve spoken about it. But otherwise he says, ‘that chapter of my life is closed’. And he just looks forward to every day, as a child.”

That strong bond and support from his family has been a huge factor in helping the now 11-year-old victim to move on and look towards a happy future and, the fact that he can talk to his father about what happened has been a big help too.

“The reason he was able to talk to me is because it happened to me and I told him it happened to me,” Eamon explained.

“He knew then he could talk about it because he was talking to somebody else who went through this. And my son had something I didn’t - he had believers.

“When I eventually did meet the DPP, I told them, ‘listen, you guys failed me years ago; are you going to do this to my son?’ I think that kind of spurred them on a bit that this has happened twice in the one family.

“In my situation, you’re talking about a man who would be in his sixties today. And supposedly, I made an off-the-cuff remark to my mother about a year later and the gardaí said ‘that’s a name that’s familiar to us’. And still nothing happened.

“So my son had more confidence in telling the whole story to the prosecutor’s psychiatrist and the gardaí because I told them I was let down.

“The couple of people I had told didn’t believe me but I said ‘just stay on point and make them believe you’ and I think that went a long way with him.”

As soon as the young boy revealed what had happened to him, his entire family supported him, including his grandmother, the mother of his abuser, who was distraught and immediately brought her son to gardaí to face the consquences of his actions.

That was not lost on Eamon who stood up in court and acknowledged that the child’s grandmother has stood by his son and said it breaks his heart that she can no longer have a normal relationship with the child.

“I fully believe that his grandmother has the best interests of my son at heart,” he told the Leader.

“I said that in the court, and I wanted it on the record so that if my son ever wanted to go through the transcripts he could see, that he knew that his father believed that his grandmother had nothing but good intentions for him.

“Now, I know she’s going to look after her own son first. But I know she’s going to look after my boy as well, in whatever way she can now, going forward.”

Access to pornographic material at such a young age was one of the reasons cited by the defence for the teenager’s actions but the victim’s father is adamant that such excuses are not acceptable.

“I find that an excuse and a cop out,” he said.

“My son has access to all that on his phone; if he didn't have access to it on his phone he had access to my desktop or my mobile, where he’d have access to all that kind of stuff. It’s more about the education.

“I think parents or people or campaigners who use that as an excuse, that’s an easy cop out. That’s like in America, when they say about the mass shootings happening because of video games. If that was the case then there’d be mass shootings in Ireland.”

The sentence reported in the papers, Eamon explained, seemed “soft” at first, but it’s important to note that the judge found a middle ground which not only protected the victim of these particular crimes, but could protect other potential victims in the future.

“Believe me, I wanted him strung up. My son complains when it pops into his head, wants him strung up, every which way possible, and cut, quartered, buried, you name it,” he said.

“But what the judge has done is he found the middle ground, and he was very strict and he was very harsh. I’d say in time he’s hoping that proper rehabilitation will work, with the uncle.

“But my son isn’t a victim anymore, he is a survivor,” Eamon stressed.

“And he’s a hundred times stronger for coming out the other side, and he’s been happy too. It’s been explained to him along the way what the judge has said, what the defence has said. And once all these things had been explained to him, it was therapy in itself.

“He knows, this has been dealt with correctly, and he’s safe going forward. He was happy with that. He started sleeping better at night.

“My son will have a good life going forward, whatever life he chooses to live. And if he decides down the years, he’ll talk about this to victim support groups about how he came through it, he’ll be an even better person than me.”

Court report: Midlands teen gets suspended sentence for rape of nephew