Bda v Domenico Quirino
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | His Honour Judge Graham Wood |
| Judgment Date | 23 October 2015 |
| Neutral Citation | [2015] EWHC 2974 (QB) |
| Court | Queen's Bench Division |
| Docket Number | Case No: HQ14X01834 |
| Date | 23 October 2015 |
[2015] EWHC 2974 (QB)
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
His Honour Judge Graham Wood QC
(Sitting as a Judge of the High Court)
Case No: HQ14X01834
Richard Davison (instructed by Bolt Burden Kemp) for the Claimant
The Defendant in person
Hearing dates: 15 October 2015
His Honour Judge Graham Wood QC:
Introduction
A claim has been brought by BDA, as she is now known in these proceedings, to recover damages for the consequences of systematic sexual abuse to which she was subjected by the Defendant, her then karate instructor, during her teenage years, that is from late 2001 until December 2005. The Claimant is now 28 years of age.
The matter has proceeded before this Court by way of assessment of damages, following the entry of interlocutory default judgment towards the end of last year, and after Master McCloud refused to set aside judgment in April of this year. Although the Defendant was at one point represented, he has participated in these proceedings as a litigant in person with the assistance of a McKenzie friend. However, he had served no evidence, and thus was not in a position to give any testimony (although this is unlikely to have been relevant to causation/quantum issues for the most part) but I permitted him to ask questions of the Claimant through me.
In this respect, and reflecting the procedure which was followed in the criminal proceedings in which the Defendant had been involved, special measures were allowed, and the Claimant gave her evidence from behind a screen, visible only to myself and her own counsel. Further, and in view of the sensitivity of the subject matter of this claim, and in respect of her privacy, I agreed that an order for anonymity should be continued.
The issues which fall to be determined in this case, therefore, relate to general damages, with the assessment of PSLA for psychiatric injury, the assessment of damages for mental distress and injury to feelings, whether any separate award should be made for aggravated damages in addition, and the quantification of the pecuniary loss claim in relation to lost earnings. However, fundamental to that determination is the proof that the sexual abuse which is established by the interlocutory judgment on liability has been the cause of the subsequent loss and damage.
The only oral evidence before the court was that of the Claimant herself. Witness statements had been provided by two friends and her mother but a decision had been made by her legal team not to call these witnesses and instead to rely upon them as hearsay statements. It was acknowledged that they do not advance the Claimant's case significantly further than her own testimony, which is considered in the context of the agreed medical evidence from the psychiatrist, Dr Rozewicz.
Without any evidence of his own to contradict the Claimant's account and the expert evidence, the Defendant has been unable to play anything other than a very limited role in the forensic process. With the help of his McKenzie friend, Mr Quirino conducted himself with respect and dignity accepting that it was his own behaviour over the identified years which entitled the Claimant to pursue this claim for damages. Whilst he maintained a challenge to the factual basis, he acknowledged that he could not go behind the judgment, and simply sought to question the Claimant on the extent to which other factors might have played a role in her resultant psychiatric presentation.
Having heard evidence within the fairly limited scope of this trial, I reserved my judgment to enable a consideration of the several authorities relied upon and to look in more detail at some of the documentary evidence.
Background
BDA had a normal and uneventful upbringing with her sibling sisters, notwithstanding the divorce of her parents when she was only four. She continued to live with her mother who remarried, but maintained regular contact with her father.
When she was at junior school, BDA took karate lessons from the age of ten years, and it was on this occasion that she first met the Defendant, then a senior grade at the centre where she was training. However she had no close involvement with him. It was not until 14 years of age, when she returned to the sport, that the Defendant became her instructor and head trainer in conjunction with a number of other children from her school, Coombe Girls School in New Malden, Surrey. As she progressed in her training, in early 2002 BDA began to attend evening classes at the Malden Centre, and because of her enthusiasm, the Defendant began to take more interest in her, becoming involved in closer instruction.
This was the beginning of the grooming process throughout 2002 as he moved to private lessons, and then started personal text messaging which BDA considered at the time to be inappropriate and bizarre. When on his own with the Claimant, at a time when she was only 15, he made unprompted comments about her body and her figure, and often brought the conversation round to sex and kissing. These were classic grooming ingredients, because by the beginning of the following year he began to force the Claimant to kiss him in a way in which she could not refuse, progressing on to inappropriate touching of her breasts and genital area, initially over, and eventually under her clothing. This occurred when the Claimant was only 15.
The intimate touching occurred in circumstances where BDA felt unable to resist, and often in situations where she was on her own in his company, because he had picked her up, or she was involved with him in one-to-one training. The Claimant enjoyed her karate, but felt trapped by the Defendant's behaviour. She did not report any of his inappropriate touching, nor did she feel that she was able to stop going to her karate lessons.
When she was 16, in 2004, the Defendant began to engineer situations whereby he could be on his own with her in outdoor locations, and the sexual contact graduated, after initial attempts to resist penetration when he pressed himself against her when both were unclothed, to full sexual intercourse. At all times, the Claimant made it plain that she was an unwilling partner, and no occasion did she ever initiate sexual contact.
BDA's sexual involvement with the Defendant continued throughout the end of 2004 and into the early middle part of 2005, because she had maintained her interest in karate, and she felt trapped and unable to extricate herself from the situation of physical and sexual intimacy which the Defendant had maintained. On approximately six occasions sexual intercourse occurred and the Claimant would have been 16–17 during this time.
Eventually, after confiding in a friend about what was happening, she summoned the courage to set out in a letter her objection to the way in which the Defendant was using her, which she regarded as abusive, insisting that it should stop. She handed this letter to the Defendant shortly before Christmas 2005, by which time she was now 18 years old.
It seemed to have an effect on the Defendant, because there were no further occasions of sexual contact, although BDA remained in his karate circle for a significant time thereafter.
The above summary is provided as a brief outline of the circumstances in which the sexual abuse occurred. It is unnecessary to go into further detail of the history, but it was not just the abuse itself, but also what happened in the following years which had a role to play in the development of deleterious consequences for the Claimant. However, mention should be made briefly of the progress of the Claimant's education in this period, at a time when she was not reporting the Defendant's behaviour to anyone else.
She did exceptionally well in her GCSEs, obtaining for the most part A*s and As in the summer of 2003, with long term career aspirations towards medicine. However the Defendant's abusive behaviour had become established at this stage and in the following academic year by January, with her AS levels, the Claimant flunked in her first set of exams, and decided to leave the secondary school where she had been studying. She obtained a part-time job, but in September she started at Richmond College, a sixth form college, where she studied the International Baccalaureate (IB), an alternative to A level for university qualification. Whilst she had lost a year, over the following two years, she obtained sufficient marks within the IB to obtain a place at university commencing at St George's University London on a three-year biomedical science degree in October 2006 which she completed with first-class honours in 2009.
According to BDA, she was able to achieve such results through hard work, although concentration had been difficult. She had learned to blank out the events of her teenage years and her involvement with the Defendant, putting it to the back of her mind. She then enrolled in September 2009 on a four-year combined Masters with PhD in biomedical research at Imperial College where she had been awarded a scholarship. She completed her Masters with distinction without difficulty.
However, during her PhD year, and in the early part of 2011, BDA began to use the university counselling services. She had been having significant relationship difficulties at an intimate level, disliking any sort of physical or sexual touch. Her previous sexual relationships had been relatively limited and had been marred by poor experience and mistrust arising out of that...
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Kamil Najim Abdullah Alseran and Another v MRE and Others
...The Vento bands (as subsequently uprated) have been adopted by the courts in assessing damages in cases of assault. For example, in BDA v Domenico Quirino [2015] EWHC 2974 (QB), a case involving the sexual abuse of a girl by her karate teacher between the ages of 15 and 17, the court awarde......
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D Against The Bishop's Conference Of Scotland
...because of the various imponderables that inevitably arise: see e.g. LXA, BXL v Mrs Cynthia Willcox, at [79]; BDA v Domenico Quirino [2015] EWHC 2974, at [54]. In the present case, there were multiple imponderables that would result in a multiplier/multiplicand approach being manifestly uns......