A judge has decided not to send a woman to jail for having sex with a young boy.

She was 28 and he was 13 when they had sexual intercourse in her room. Her two-year-old child was sleeping at the other bed.

Having sex with person under the age of 16 is a serious criminal offence.

The act happened in a transition house. The boy and his siblings and their mother were staying there. They left their father.

The woman and her child were also staying at the same house. She was having troubles at the time with her marriage.

In coming up with a suspended sentence for the offender, judge Catherine Murray of the B.C. Supreme Court struggled with the question of how the woman’s “tragic upbringing” affected her “moral blameworthiness”.

“After much consideration I have concluded that it significantly impacts it,” Murray stated in her oral reasons for sentence. “While it does not decrease the seriousness of the offence it makes her less morally blameworthy.”

According to Murray, the woman was the “victim of serious childhood abuse at the hands of her father for most of her life”.

Beginning when she was about six years old, her father made her watch him sexually assault her mother.

“Soon after he began sexually assaulting her,” according to Murray. “The sexual assaults included sexual intercourse. He assaulted her regularly until she was 15 and went away to university. At one point she told her mother but she refused to believe her.”

When she stood up to her father, he “responded by beating her and threatening to hurt her young brother and her mother if she complained”.

“She decided to be compliant so her mother and brother would not be hurt,” Murray related.

The sexual assaults became less frequent when she got older but did not stop.

She immigrated to Canada, where she married.

When the woman and her husband visited her family in China in 2010, her father, “then very ill, sexually assaulted her”.

A neighbor also sexually abused her when she was nine by fondling her “through her underpants”.

“According to the psychologists, this abuse, particularly at the hands of her father, has had a profound impact on her,” Murray noted. “She has trouble managing her emotions and is extremely immature.”

Because of this, she has been “unable to have healthy sexual relationships in her adult life”.

“She has been abused by almost all of her male partners,” according to Murray.

It’s not an easy case for the judge.

“This is a particularly challenging sentencing that involves unusual facts and a constellation of unique factors,” Murray noted.

In the woman’s favour, the judge believes that she “poses little to no risk of reoffending sexually”.

The woman has been on bail since November 2015, and there had been “no issues”.

“In my view Ms. Chen’s moral culpability is reduced as a result of her troubled upbringing and her mental health issues,” Murray stated.

Taking all of the evidence and circumstances of this “unique and exceptional case into consideration”, Murray ruled that “incarceration would not serve in the public interest”.

The woman will be on probation for two years.

The woman was found guilty by a jury in September 2017, and the sentencing judge noted that this conviction “has been and will continue to be devastating” to the woman “in many ways”.