ANN HEALY
A family friend forced a seven-year-old girl to wear her mother’s dress and make-up, before forcing her to lie across a pool table in provocative poses while he took explicitly sexual photographs of her on his mobile phone, a trial has heard.
The now 15-year-old girl told the jury at Galway Circuit Criminal Court that she was in second or third class when she first met the man. He was a friend of her mother's and he often called to her family home and would push his thumb into her mouth at every opportunity. The first time he did this, she said, he told her to suck it, but she felt sick and bit it instead.
The now 55-year-old man, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, has denied 19 charges involving the sexual exploitation and sexual assault of the girl on dates between 2006 and 2009, when she was aged between seven and 10 years of age. He also denies a separate charge of sexually assaulting the girl’s older sister, on dates between October 2006 and November 2007.
The first five charges relate to the sexual exploitation of the younger girl by coercing her into engaging in the production of child pornography on dates between October 6th, 2006, and June 30th, 2009. The man also denies four further charges of the sexual exploitation of the girl by forcing her to engage in a sexual act on dates between November 26th, 2007, and June 6th, 2008. He further denies 10 charges of sexually assaulting the child on dates between November 26th , 2007, and June 30th, 2009.
The girl told the jury of four men and eight women that she and her family had lived in four different houses when she was a child and the man had abused her at each house. The abuse started in the first house when he offered her a fiver to sit on his lap where he held her closely against his crotch.
She ran from him, but he followed her, grabbed her by the shoulder and stuck his thumb in her mouth. He told her to suck it but she bit it and ran. “It made me gag and I bit it. He called me a bitch then and I ran from him,” the girl said.
The practice of forcing his thumb into her mouth every time he met the child continued for the next three years after that.
The girl said the man first started to take pictures of her on his mobile phone when he was left minding her and her siblings at the second house the family had moved to after her mother and her new partner went to England for a few days. She was eight at the time and had been told by her mother to look after her one-year-old sister.
The girl said the man would push his fingers down her throat every morning to make her vomit and then keep her at home from school. He would drive the other children to school and return home to her where the abuse would begin while her baby sister slept.
The girl said the man made her wear her mother’s favourite dress and would go into the mother’s room and get her make-up. The girl said she would have to put on her mother’s mascara, eyeshadow and lipstick. “He would make me do poses on the pool table and he would hurt me [sexually] if I didn’t do what I was told. I had to lie on the pool table and he would hurt me if I didn’t do the poses he wanted.
“He would then stand at the bottom of the pool table and I would hear the ‘click’ of the camera on his phone.” She said the man often sexually abused her as she lay on the table. Sometimes she kicked out at him and he would say to her, “That is what you get for not doing what you’re told.”
The girl said the man made her pose naked in various sexual positions on the pool table on a number of other occasions and took pictures of her on his phone then too.
“I felt horrible. It was really scary. I felt terrified. It went on for at least half an hour each time,” she said. The man continued to visit the family when they moved a third time. Sometimes the girls’ mother collected him and brought him to the house. The girl said the man continued to push his thumb into her mouth whenever he got the chance and he got her to pose on the pool table, which had been put in a shed when they moved to this third house.
Mr Conor Fahy, prosecuting, asked the girl why did she do what the man told her to do. “He told me that if I didn’t do it, he would hurt me and abuse me. He told me no one would believe me either. “When I refused, he would sexually assault me,” the girl replied.
In reply to Mr Fahy, the girl said she had looked through pictures on the man’s phone once after he had left the phone on the kitchen table. She saw several pictures of herself on the pool table and got a chance to delete up to 10 of them. The family moved a fourth time and the man again visited that house. The girl said she was around 10 years old at the time. She recalled taking a shower one day when the man came into the bathroom and began sexually assaulting her.
“There was no lock on the door and anyone could walk in,” she said. Her older sister walked in and the man shouted at her to get out. The sister went and told her mother. The accused denied the incident when confronted by the girl and her mother.
The girl’s mother told the jury the accused had visited each house on only one or two occasions. She had met him at a funeral of a mutual friend and had allowed him to stay in her house for a week shortly after meeting him. She said she and her partner had only been away from the house for two days and one night when they went to England to buy a car a few months later.
Mr Fahy asked her why she had not reported the accused to the Garda. She said she was afraid social workers would take her other children from her and put them into care if she went to the Garda. The woman (38) confirmed the family already had a social worker assigned to them from 2006 to 2011.
Mr Fahy said that shortly after the children visited their maternal grandmother in another part of the country during the summer of 2009, HSE Galway social workers made contact with the mother. Bernard Madden SC, defending, put it to her that if the accused only visited occasionally, why had she left her children in his care when she went to England. “I trusted him,” she said.
The trial continues.