An Indian immigrant has lost a court battle to avoid deportation after being jailed for sexually abusing a 12-year-old Australian girl who had run away from home in Hobart.
The 35-year-old, who cannot be named due to a court order, contacted his victim on Grindr and met her at a Kmart in the suburb of New Town at 2am in April 2021 before taking her to his home and committing six sexual offences.
When he returned the girl to the Kmart the next morning she was found by police and taken to hospital where she told them about the abuse, and the man later made full admissions to police, claiming he thought she was 18 or 19 and that he “found it hard to judge the age of Australian girls”.
He pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent assault and five of penetrative sexual abuse of a child, and in 2023 was sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment with a six-month non-parole period by Supreme Court of Tasmania Chief Justice Alan Blow.
The judge accepted the man’s claims that he did not know the girl was 12 as her Grindr profile said she was 18, she told him she was married to a Pakistani man, and when he arrived at the Kmart she was with a man of South Asian appearance who he took to be her husband.
The judge also noted that two other men were convicted of sex crimes against the girl during the days she was missing from her parents’ home, and neither had been given custodial sentences, and described the girl as “sexually experienced and a willing participant in all the sexual activity on the night in question”.
But he found that the student visa holder, who had worked as an Uber, taxi and truck driver and at a Sikh temple after arriving in Tasmania, did not take all reasonable steps to ascertain the girl’s age, and that his mistaken belief about her age was neither honest or reasonable.
After serving his six-month sentence the man’s visa was cancelled as a result of his incarceration and due to failing the “character test”, and last year he tried unsuccessfully to have the revocation overturned in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
He then appealed that decision in the Federal Court in May, but earlier this month Justice John Snaden upheld the tribunal’s decision, meaning the visa cancellation is upheld and the man must return to India.
Header image: Supreme Court of Tasmania (Gary Houston, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
