In all, investigators discovered 25,066 child p*rnography images on more than 50 electronic devices when they executed a search warrant on April 25, 2016, including 111 child p*rn movies.
Earlier this year, McEwen also pleaded guilty to s*xual assault and two child p*rnography offences. She was sentenced to six years.
But what the presiding judge would not do was declare McEwen a dangerous offender, which the Crown had sought and with impassioned urgency.
In rejecting the long-term offender order, Justice Kathleen Caldwell weighed the various criteria that must be met, primarily a “substantial risk of reoffence.”
Caldwell determined that McEwen wasn’t such a risk, relying heavily on the evidence and psychiatric report prepared by a forensic psychiatrist with expertise in paraphilia and s*xual deviancy.
Dr. Mark Pearce was agreed upon as an expert witness by both the Crown and the defence when he testified in February. He diagnosed McEwen as a masochist and low-risk to reoffend.
Caldwell accepted Pearce’s conclusion that McEwen derived s*xual arousal not from acts committed against children but from the “extreme humiliation” of her involvement in those acts, which fed her masochism, described as on the moderately severe end.
The judge wrote (and read aloud in court): “Dr. Pearce testified that the current research suggests that women do not suffer from paraphilic disorders apart from masochism. This fact lends further weight to the conclusion that p*dophilia does not apply to you.”
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It is not absolutely conclusive that women can’t be p*dophiles.
There are numerous instances of women s*xually assaulting children, albeit most often at the direction — many have claimed coercion — of a male partner.
In this particular case, McEwen was her husband’s slave, committed to do his bidding.
Court also heard, however, that McEwen had initiated at least one of the toddler videos without her “Master” present.
And in at least two earlier instances, McEwen had obtained child p*rnography from two men she’d met online before she’d even met Dickens.
As for the risk-assessment testing, Caldwell acknowledged that such testing hasn’t been validated as being accurate in predicting risk with female, as opposed to male, sex offenders.
They don’t really know what they’re talking about, the experts, because they haven’t looked at the phenomenon closely enough.
That doesn’t mean the phenomenon doesn’t exist.
Thus, women are more inclined to get the justice pass or, as in this case, be sprung out of the dangerous offender category.
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In an interview this week with the Star, Pearce emphasized the scarcity of research literature on female s*x offenders.
“I’m not saying there’s no such thing as a female p*dophile, but it is almost an exclusively male disorder.
“That’s not to say no woman has it. There may be some outliers. But women (s*x offenders) usually offend for other reasons, not because of an innate s*xual attraction to children.”
Yet what of female teachers who’ve become sexually involved with young students?
“These are damaged, needy, lonely women,” says Pearce, “not necessarily p*dophiles.”
Surely gender should not be an exculpatory factor in diagnosing p*dophilia.
Women have definitely preyed on children s*xually.
This woman, McEwen, certainly did — on a 2-year-old.