Mick Hartley

If you thought it couldn't get any worse:

A Canadian man who was convicted of the horrific rape of a 3-month-old infant boy has begun identifying as transgender while incarcerated and is currently being held in a women’s correctional facility with a mother and child unit.

In 1997, Adam Laboucan sexually assaulted a three-month-old baby boy in Quesnel, British Columbia. Laboucan was 15-years-old at the time and had been hired to babysit the child. The infant was so brutally injured by the attack that he had to be flown to Vancouver, 410 miles away, to undergo reconstructive surgery….

The forensic psychiatrist said that he believed intensive treatment would be necessary. “With the history and severity of the offenses of Mr. Laboucan, it’s difficult to say how long his treatment would last,” he said. “He’s not a regular sexual offender. I would say it would be a very long time, possibly years. I would be very, very concerned to hear that Laboucan would be released into the community in the near future.”

According to a 1999 news report by the CBC, clinical psychologist Dr. Steve Sigmond testified in court that when he examined Laboucan in 1997, the teen had also admitted to drowning a 3-year-old boy in Quesnel in 1993. Laboucan was 11 when he allegedly committed the killing, and no charges were ever lodged against him because under the law, an accused must be at least 12 years old.,…

Due to the horrific nature of the crime, Laboucan was handed a rare indeterminate prison sentence in 1999 at the age of 17, and was declared the nation’s youngest criminally violent sex offender.

But housing him in a women's prison – with a special mother-child unit? No problem.

An advocate for the rights of incarcerated women made direct mention of Laboucan’s situation at Fraser Valley in a 2021 brief to members of the House of Commons. Addressing the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, Heather Mason told members of Canada’s federal government that multiple women had reported being the victim of sexual harassment by trans-identified males who had been placed in female institutions.

“One of these women reported that while in the mother-child program, two transgender individuals with convictions for pedophilia, Madilyn Harks and Tara Desousa, would loiter near her and her child, making sexist and inappropriate antagonizing comments,” Mason said in her statement.

Harks, whose given name is Matthew, is a serial pedophile who has been described as having “all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls.” Authorities believe he targeted at least 60 victims before being charged for approximately 200 offenses related to sexual abuse.

In 2019, a sexual assault report was filed against him by a female inmate, but no charges were pursued. That same year, the former Deputy Commissioner for Women, Kelly Blanchette, revealed that of all the requests from men to transfer into women’s prisons, half were from convicted sex offenders.

Mason shared with Reduxx exchanges she’d had with women being held in Fraser Valley. One inmate confirmed that Laboucan was being housed in a unit next to the Mother-Child Program residence, and said that he had been “staring” at the children to “antagonize” the women.