North Saanich man handed five-year sentence in child porn case

An online profile picture is shown for Jean-Pierre Lévesque, a North Saanich, B.C. man who was sentenced to five years in jail for possession of child pornography on Thursday, June 27, 2013.

A B.C. man who used Skype to direct a father to sexually abuse his young son has been sentenced to five years in prison in what is believed to be Canada’s first case of cyber sex tourism.

Jean-Pierre Lévesque, 62, was handed the sentence Thursday after pleading guilty to possession of child pornography and counselling to commit a sexual assault.

RCMP Sgt. Darren Parisien, an online child exploitation expert, uncovered Lévesque’s harrowing child pornography collection by downloading several of his videos using the file-sharing program Gigatribe.

The videos, which showed the sexual abuse of young children and even infants, prompted police to execute a search warrant at Lévesque’s North Saanich home.

That’s where they made an even more gruesome discovery – Skype video chat logs on Lévesque’s computer that showed him watching and directing a man in China to sexually assault his son, who looked about five years old.

“Obviously it’s very disturbing and quite sad, to be honest,” Parisien said. “A very young boy, innocent boy, literally on the other side of the world, became a sexual object for Mr. Lévesque and his perverse beliefs of what should happen to children for his own sexual gratification.”

It’s a new type of child abuse, one that is infinitely harder to monitor and control, said Crown Counsel Daniel Scanlan.

“What this is, is a kind of cyber-sex tourism where a child on another continent is abused by somebody with the participation of somebody on this continent who doesn’t have to take the risk of travelling but gets the gratification, and then is in possession of more child porn,” he said.

Lévesque’s case is only a fraction of what has become a shockingly prevalent problem in B.C., Parisien said.

He tracked networks in the province and discovered that around 3,600 computers in the province were trading images of sexually abused children every single day – and that number continues to grow.

“This is something that’s happening every day around the world, where people are abusing their own children for their own purposes and these innocent children are forever scarred,” he said.

“Obviously technology is, in a lot of instances, the only reason this is happening, certainly to the extent that it is.”

Sentences have gotten tougher for convicted child pornography collectors, and at five years behind bars, Lévesque will serve one of the toughest for the offence, Scanlan said.

“Our approach to it was to follow the principle that he should be as guilty as if he had physically abused the child himself,” he said. “It’s a good, stiff sentence, in my view, which should hopefully have some deterrent effect on people who are considering this kind of things.”

As for the young boy in China, his fate, at this point, is unknown.

“Once they found the child in China, they did alert the Chinese authorities, but as to the details of what happened, we didn’t get any back other than that they told us that they had dealt with the matter,” Scanlan said.

With a report from CTV British Columbia's Mi-Jung Lee