The Record
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
By Brian Caldwell
KITCHENER — A judge only had to hear a few sentences about a woman’s tragic background in Somalia before giving her a break Monday for an assault with a knife.
As the woman cried at the front of a Kitchener courtroom, Justice Colin Westman cut short an account of rape and kidnapping given by her lawyer to argue for a discharge.
“The story I was about to hear would move anybody to tears,” he said.
Defence lawyer Sean Safa had started to explain that the 25-year-old woman has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from events in her childhood.
Safa said she was kidnapped when she was three and gang-raped as a young teenager.
A daughter from that incident died in her arms from poisoning, and she had a second child from another rape before being reunited with her family.
She came to Canada with relatives in 2009 and was living with a roommate in an apartment on Traynor Avenue in Kitchener when the assault took place this spring.
Westman said there was no need to make the woman re-live events by detailing them all in court, where her mother was also in tears as she looked on.
“I think we as a community should show compassion,” he said.
The woman was given a conditional discharge, meaning she won’t have a record after 18 months on probation, an unusual outcome for a crime as serious as assault with a weapon.
Outside court, Safa said the attack took place after she was mocked about the rapes by a woman who knew about them because she came from the same part of Somalia.
When she wouldn’t stop talking about them, he said, she punched and kicked the woman before threatening to kill her with a large kitchen knife.
“The doctor says when she’s confronted with a situation like that, she loses control,” Safa said.
The woman — who curled up in the fetal position on a bench outside court while waiting to sign papers — is now on medication and getting counselling.
The victim of the attack, a friend of the woman’s roommate, wasn’t seriously injured.
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