VANCOUVER - A Canadian sex tourist who admitted to having sex with girls ranging in age from eight to 14 told police he was "guilty of loving women too much."
The prosecutor in the case told a B.C. Supreme Court that Kenneth Klassen should serve at least 12 years in prison for his crimes.
Klassen, 59, pleaded guilty to 15 counts involving girls in Cambodia and Colombia in May after a failed constitutional challenge to Canada's child-sex tourism law.
Crown lawyer Brendan McCabe told a B.C. Supreme Court judge at Klassen's sentencing hearing Thursday that the Burnaby, B.C., man was caught trying to ship 21 homemade DVDs back to Canada that contained images of him having sex with prepubescent girls.
"These children were all disenfranchised, desperate, poverty stricken and ... enslaved in the industry that people like Mr. Klassen (frequented)," McCabe told the court.
McCabe said that, according to witness statements, Klassen gave the girls cash and gifts and even offered to pay for a thyroid operation for one girl, but that never materialized.
He said some of the victims were offered the equivalent of $45, "which would have been like a king's ransom."
One girl told investigators she met Klassen when she was 11 years old.
"She agreed to be with Mr. Klassen so she could buy new clothes for her 12th birthday," he said, adding the girl told them she had no one to buy her things.
Klassen originally faced three dozen charges in connection to allegations that spanned from 1998 to 2002, but just as his trial was about to start he pleaded guilty to 15 counts involving sex with the underage girls and one count of importing child pornography.
The DVDs containing bestiality and child pornography were discovered by customs officers in a package of bedding that Klassen had sent to himself from abroad. Among the titles in his home-made collection were "First Timer" and "Child Abuse."
Court heard that after the father of three was arrested he denied he was a sex tourist, telling police "I'm guilty of loving women too much."
McCabe said Klassen told police that the DVDs were "souvenirs" of his trips abroad.
"I may have my fantasies, but they're my own fantasies," McCabe quoted from Klassen's police interview.
"He went on to state it was all consensual," McCabe told the court.
Klassen was charged under the rarely used sex-tourism law, which allows prosecution of someone in Canada for criminal acts in another country. Only three other Canadian men have been prosecuted under the law since it was enacted in 1997.
Vancouver hotel employee Donald Bakker was the first in 2005. He received a 10-year sentence for 10 sexual assaults on girls between seven and 12 in Cambodia, where he videotaped the abuse.
And in November of 2008, two Quebec aid workers pleaded guilty in a Quebec City courtroom to sexually abusing teenage boys while working at an orphanage in Haiti. Armand Huard was sentenced to three years in prison and Denis Rochefort was given two years.
McCabe told the hearing that the 12-year sentence he was asking for would deter others from travelling to foreign countries to sexually abuse children.
Had Klassen been prosecuted in the countries involved, McCabe said, he would have faced up to 20 years in prison with hard labour.
The sentencing hearing is expected to be finished by Friday.
