Grandmother goes on trial for sexual interference

Two children described instances where their grandmother allegedly sexually abused them while watching TV in her bedroom during a trial in Brandon’s Court of King’s Bench on Monday.

The children — an eight-year-old girl and 11-year-old boy, who appeared in court by video — said the abuse occurred more than once.

A 51-year-old woman from a rural community in southwestern Manitoba pleaded not guilty to two counts of sexual interference before Judge Sandra Zinchuk at the start of a trial that’s scheduled for three days.

A publication ban protecting the children’s identities prevents The Brandon Sun from naming them or the accused.

The Crown says the incidents occurred between August 2019 and December 2021.

The girl testified from a separate room in the courthouse, sitting next to a victim services support worker while holding a plush white rabbit. She held onto the stuffed animal’s ears as she described how her grandmother would use her hand to touch her “front and back.”

Crown attorney Reid Girard asked the girl whether she was touched on her butt and the part where “pee comes out” and she answered “yes.”

When asked how many times her grandmother touched her, she said, “I don’t know, but it was more than once.”

She said her grandmother would go underneath the clothes she wore to touch her bare skin. During the incidents, her grandmother wore clothes and never said anything after touching her, she said.

The girl said she was only touched in a sexual manner when she was in her grandmother’s bedroom. Sometimes her brother was in the living room when it happened, but there were other times when the grandmother touched both of them in the bed as they watched TV together, she said.

She told Girard that she wasn’t sure how it made her feel when the incidents occurred.

Defence lawyer Anthony Dawson showed her a transcript of a March 2023 interview she had with a child advocate at the Toba Centre for Children and Youth in Winnipeg. Dawson said her account of what happened had changed, with her originally saying she had been touched once on the butt, but now saying her grandmother had touched her several times.

Parts of the boy’s interview with the child advocate were shown in court. During the interview, the boy — who was eight years old at the time — said his grandmother had touched his butt “more than one time” and then would smell her hand after.

He described an instance where he was watching TV next to his grandmother in her bedroom and she put her hands in his pants and started “rubbing.”

His grandmother called him “stinky” afterwards, he told the interviewer.

The boy said he saw the woman touch his sister twice when they stayed overnight for a sleepover.

When the interviewer asked what he was thinking when he was being touched, the boy said he “wondered why she was doing that.”

He said his grandmother’s clothes remained on and that he never touched her in that way.

The boy said he told his mother what happened because “he didn’t like it.”

During his testimony, the boy said the incidents would happen every time he went to his grandmother’s house when his parents weren’t around. Girard asked if his grandmother was working at his elementary school at the same time these assaults were taking place and he replied, “I think so.”

Dawson asked both children if their mother or anyone else had ever told them to lie about what happened, and they each answered no.

The children’s mother, 32, was the final Crown witness. She testified that her kids stopped wanting to go to school because they didn’t want to see their grandmother, who would pull them aside and make them late for class.

The mother said she kept asking her children why they didn’t want to see their grandmother, to which her son blurted out one evening at supper in January 2023 that the grandmother had put her hands down his sister’s pants. Her son eventually told her that the same had happened to him, she said.

“He was shy, embarrassed, quiet” and “worried he did something wrong,” she said, while wiping tears from her face.

She spoke to the RCMP and Child and Family Services.

“In my statement, I said … ‘I’m here today because my kids told me they were being abused by my mother, but I believe that they are being abused because she did it to me, too.’”

She said her mother moved about two hours closer to her family in August 2019 and would watch her children “fairly often” over the years, especially during harvest season.

The relationship she had with her mother changed throughout that time.

“I tried to be civil with her. Tried to have a relationship with her. She caused a lot of fights and drama between other family,” she said, adding that she was reluctant to allow her kids to see her and had to set boundaries.

The last time her children spent time with their grandmother was around Christmas in 2021, she said.

When the defence suggested she had asked her children to lie about what happened, she answered, “Absolutely not.”

The trial continues.

» tadamski@brandonsun.com