Dad fails to overturn judgment ordering him to pay for assaulting daughter (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada)

It's nearly impossible to summarize the crimes of UNNAMED DAD. I'd call him total scum, but that would be an insult to scum. The adult daughter is now pursuing a $500,000 judgement for damages to a childhood utterly destroyed by her father's abuse.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Father+fails+overturn+judgment+ordering+assaulting+daughter/1910168/story.html

B.C. father fails to overturn judgment ordering him to pay for assaulting daughter

By Kelly Sinoski, Vancouver SunAugust 19, 2009

A father who physically and emotionally assaulted his daughter throughout her childhood has failed to overturn a judgment ordering him to pay her close to half a million dollars in damages.

The Court of Appeal on Wednesday dismissed the man’s claim that the $500,000 judgment was too high and didn’t take into account the sexual abuse his daughter suffered at the hands of her uncle and their neighbours.

But while the judges threw out the appeal, they agreed to reduce the total damages by $30,000 — the amount of a settlement the woman received after suing her uncle for sexual abuse that led to a miscarriage when she was 11.

The woman’s lawyer, Garth Edwards, said his client was pleased with the appeal ruling, which comes after 11 years in the courts, although it doesn’t address past or future wages losses.

“It’s been an awfully long time coming,” he said, noting that “people that have suffered from this time of abuse typically have trouble facing it. They have to be strong enough to relive it.”

The woman, who is about 44 years old now, has been unable to hold down a steady job since leaving school at age 15 because she suffers from panic attacks and anxiety.

She sued her father for breach of fiduciary duty and for physical and emotional abuse in 1999 following a life riddled with abuse, beginning from the time her family moved to Canada from the former Yugoslavia when she was about four-and-a-half years old.

The court heard how the woman, as a little girl, tried to intervene as her father beat her mother and then became the “punching bag” as the family moved from Windsor to Kitimat and eventually Surrey and Delta.

“When I was a child I was terrified every single day of my life,” she had told the court.
In the years that followed, she suffered verbal degradation, sexual insults, threats, assault and battery, usually with a belt. Her father beat her if a child took her coat or her boots, if she had a non-Caucasian friend, or if she had a pillow fight with her sister.

When she was eight, she experienced more degradation when her uncle started sexually abusing her. That stopped when she was 11 and had a miscarriage.

By the time she was in Grade 8, the girl nearly died at the hands of her father, after she was severely bruised, strangled and bitten. Her father pleaded guilty to a charge of assault causing bodily harm.

She was later sexually assaulted by her neighbours — both the husband and wife — while she stayed at their home to babysit, the court heard.

There is a publication ban on names to protect the victim.

The woman told the court she always longed for her father’s love and approval. But it appears her father, a retired millwright, never wanted to give it to her.

In his appeal, her father argued he wasn’t solely responsible for his daughter’s emotional state.

He also claimed she was barred from seeking compensation from him because she had already settled with her uncle.

But the court of appeal disagreed. In his written ruling, Justice Edward Chiasson agreed with an earlier ruling in 2006 by the trial judge that while the sexual abuse by her uncle “undoubtedly caused significant psychological damage,” the woman’s psychological health was affected by prolonged and “devastating” abuse by her father.

According to the trial judge, the “abuse of the [woman] was of such severity that it alone would have caused significant impairment of her psychological health and function.”

Edwards said evidence from the woman’s mother and sister made “it was crystal clear there was no doubt about the abuse.”

He said he hopes the ruling will finally help the woman, who has two grown children — a son and a daughter — move on with her life.