A man who committed repeated sexual acts against a teenage girl over a two-year period was ordered to pay more than $250,000 in damages by Quebec Superior Court.
In A c. B, 2022 QCCS 768, Justice Michel Yergeau ordered the defendant to pay her $150,000 in non-pecuniary damages, $15,000 for physical injury and $75,000 in punitive damages. Justice Yergeau also ordered the person to pay the victim’s mother $40,000 in moral damages and $11,388 in property damages.
[50]…the defendant’s misconduct lies in a continuum of repeated and insistent gestures, touching and sexual contact which in themselves are at odds with the rules of conduct…
[79]…the precise number of episodes does not matter. It is the repetitive and inexorable nature of the episodes that causes the harm.
[244] One must therefore be careful not to assume that because there was no rape, sodomy, full penetration or masturbation in the presence of the child, the defendant’s sexual acts…would have had only a modest impact on X. It would be forgetting that the harm must be assessed in terms of the impact it has had and continues to have on the victim, not in terms of a pre-established objective scale of severity.
Insofar as damages awarded to the victim’s mother, Justice Yergeau said:
[221] …once the defendant’s tort against the immediate victim was established, co-plaintiff A, in the Court’s view, succeeded in establishing her own injury and the causal link between her own injury and that caused to her daughter.
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