A 36-year-old man from Vries was sentenced to four years in prison for raping his 12-year-old stepdaughter. One year of this is conditional. In addition to rape, the judge also found fornication and possession of child pornography proven. The man was sentenced to six years in prison.
The man abused the child for 2.5 years from 2018. She was 12 years old when this started. By making videos and photos of this, the man was guilty of making and possessing child pornography.
The child began to resist her stepfather’s sexual advances in 2020. From that time on she received messages via social media from one Kevin van der Ploeg, a figure completely unknown to her. He asked her for sex photos, both without and with her stepfather. This continued until early 2022.
The victim’s mother and her convicted partner were in a deep marital crisis, in which the man left for a campsite in Tynaarlo. The girl’s mother logged into her partner’s Instagram account and was immediately redirected to an account called Kevin. She saw nude photos of her daughter and photos of sexual acts with her partner. She took this to the police.
The judge blames the man for having betrayed the deep trust his daughter had in him. He abused his position within the family. “He only had an eye for his feelings of lust and sexual needs and never thought about the suffering he caused the victim,” says the judge. He has seriously disrupted her psychological and physical development, is his opinion.
Two weeks ago, the man tried to put the blame on his underage stepdaughter during the court hearing. The initiative came from her, the man said.
She would have created the account herself under the name of Kevin van der Ploeg. “Bad, very bad,” says the judge. Yet he arrives at a lower sentence than demanded. The judge is not convinced that the father in the role of ‘Kevin’ forced the child to continue having sex.
As ‘Kevin’, the man sent his stepdaughter the photos he had taken of the sexual acts, stating: ‘I got those from your dad’. This was followed by requests for more of such material. It does not indicate that she was instructed to do so or that she was threatened or forced in this way.
The role of the father in this, by pretending to be someone else to get his way, however, the judge calls ‘very disturbing’.
The court finds it important that the man is treated and that he only returns to his family after permission from the doctors.