Warning: This story deals with sexual abuse and may be upsetting.

• Kenneth John Alderton has been sent to prison for 13 years for decades of sexual abuse against three children.
• He was finally caught after one of the victims posted an incident on social media, and others came forward.
• Judge Jane Forrest highlighted the victims’ vulnerability and the scale of Alderton’s offences.

A game of hide-and-seek more than 30 years ago was the end of one woman’s childhood.

Locked in an outhouse with Kenneth John Alderton, having been lured reluctantly by the promise of a game with other children, the 7-year-old’s fate was sealed when she was told to cover her eyes.

“Close your eyes and count,” he said.

“I wanted to believe it was just an innocent game of hide and go seek, but I knew deep down that something was wrong,” Abigail* said.

She was afraid of him, having already been threatened with a “hiding” if she whispered a word of the night when she was aged about 6 and he, aged in his mid-20s, tried to take off her underwear as she slept in a lounge full of other children.

Kenneth Alderton has been sent to prison for 13 years for sexual offending against three young children over the course of 24 years.

The indecent act that followed in the outhouse brought her to tears and a warning from Alderton that no one would believe her if she told anyone. They would believe only him.

And that is what happened.

“I walked out of that outhouse forever changed,” she said.

When she tried to tell other people about what happened to her in the years between 1991 to 1994, she was accused of lying and was beaten and abused for speaking up.

Facing her abuser

Abigail faced Alderton in a room of the Manukau District Court where he was sentenced to 13 years in prison this week, and delivered a eulogy to her childhood, which died decades ago.

She said in her victim impact statement that the damage caused by adults who chose to protect Alderton over her was immeasurable.

While she raged over no one doing anything out of “biased loyalties”, she also learned that by keeping quiet, she was only harming herself.

Abigail told NZME outside court that the tables were finally turned when she took to social media, enraged over an incident she had witnessed.

“I just laid bare what he had done to me.”

One of Kenneth Alderton's victims says that while she raged over no one having protected her, she learned that by keeping quiet, she was only harming herself.

She never anticipated what would happen next, but it was the catalyst for others to come forward, and the mother of one of the other victims immediately went to the police.

“That caused a ripple effect because as soon as she went to the police, I was like, ‘I have to go too’.”

Alderton was arrested soon after.

It only partly dampened the guilt she felt through not being able to stop him from destroying the lives of other innocent children.

“I had convinced myself he could never harm anyone else; however, as we have all discovered, that was not the case.”

Drowning in a puddle of sadness

Alderton went on to violate another young child between 2006 and 2008. This time the victim was half the age of Abigail.

That victim described the offending it in her victim impact statement, read on her behalf, as the “tornado” that had wrecked her childhood.

“Growing up, he made me think keeping secrets was normal,” when in reality, she was “drowning in a puddle of sadness”.

He locked the child in a garage and blindfolded her, telling her they were “going to play pool”. It led to a representative charge of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection when it was revealed he had offended against the child at least 12 other times.

Defence lawyer Shane Tait challenged the evidence of a child so young and how well her memory might have served her.

“How much weight do we place on that?” he asked at sentencing.

But there had been little doubt in the jury’s mind, which Judge Jane Forrest reiterated had found Alderton guilty last November.

His third victim from 2013 to 2015 was a child aged between 6 and 7, when he was in his mid-to-late 40s.

She was woken one night by him covering her mouth with one hand and indecently touching her with his other hand while telling her to be quiet.

It progressed to him later playing a game, “guess the object”, which began with a bottle of beer as she was blindfolded.

He later showed her the pornography he was watching on his laptop as he placed his hands down the child’s pants, but he quickly stopped when his partner came into the room.

“I am satisfied from the evidence that this occurred,” Judge Forrest said.

She said in sentencing Alderton the aggravating factors were the victims’ vulnerability, the scale of the offending, and the degree of violation.

Neither did she accept that the offending was spontaneous because of the patterns involved, including the efforts made to isolate his victims.

The jury swiftly delivered its verdict for offences against the children that spanned 24 years.

Alderton was also found guilty on two further charges of performing an indecency with a girl under 12 and four charges of indecent assault on a child under 12.

Stolen childhood

Now, all these decades on, Alderton is in prison, and Abigail can start to bury the demons that have chased her.

Throughout the trial, Abigail said she listened as she was unfairly painted as the instigator of some “elaborate, baseless vendetta” against Alderton and those around him.

“Kenneth Alderton stole my childhood. He stole years of my life. And he has never once shown remorse for it,” she said.

Judge Forrest said in sentencing him it was gruelling listening to the harm caused, but what was particularly distressing was that the victim, who as a child, was not believed when she flagged what had happened.

Crown prosecutor Sophie Bicknell said with two of the victims, the majority of the offending had involved skin-on-skin contact.

The Crown sought a sentence of 12 years with a two-year uplift, or 14 years total.

Where Bicknell differed with the defence over the sentencing starting point was the frequency of the offending and questions around Alderton having shown one of the victims pornography.

Tait also raised points over the first victim’s statement that referenced the outhouse, which he said had not been tested in cross-examination.

Judge Forrest landed on a sentence of 11 years, plus a two-year uplift, after summarising the facts of the case, which mentioned what had happened in the outhouse during the game of hide-and-seek.

“She cried, ‘I don’t want to do this – I want to go, and again you said, ‘no one will believe you, they will believe me’,” Judge Forrest said.

She said it was not appropriate to consider “good character” as a discount in sentencing Alderton because of the extent of the offending over decades.

“There are no personal mitigating factors in the circumstances,” she said.

Sentence ‘exceeded expectations’

Abigail told NZME the sentence exceeded her expectations.

She said it had been disheartening in the years leading up to their case, reading news articles about the plight of others in similar situations, where the offender had been “let off lightly”.

“None of us expected a sentence like this.”

Another of the victims has found it within herself to forgive, because “hate is just another shadow that will condemn me”.

However, for Abigail, the wound may never fully heal. Trauma doesn’t just “disappear”, it seeps into every single part of your life, she said.

“What scares me most is that he still refuses to admit what he is. How can someone ever change if they won’t even acknowledge their crimes? How can society be safe when he won’t accept the truth about himself?”

A day after sentencing, Abigail was still “numb” from the effort it had taken to bring Alderton to justice and the relationships it had destroyed.

“I don’t know what to feel in the fact that the story has been swept under the rug for so long.

“For me, I never pictured a life where this was going to be my new reality, that this was going to be something that was out in the open, that everyone would know what he was.”

Abigail said she now had a lot of adjusting to do, to a “new normal”, but in a good way.

But it was going to take time.

“No matter how many years he is sentenced to, he will one day walk free. But we will never be free from the damage he has caused.

“We will carry this with us for the rest of our lives. And that is the cruellest injustice of all. ”

*Name changed to protect the victim’s identity.

SEXUAL HARM

Where to get help:
If it's an emergency and you feel that you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
If you've ever experienced sexual assault or abuse and need to talk to someone, contact Safe to Talk confidentially, any time 24/7:
• Call 0800 044 334
• Text 4334
• Email [email protected]
• For more info or to web chat visit safetotalk.nz
Alternatively contact your local police station - click here for a list.
If you have been sexually assaulted, remember it's not your fault. Safe to talk - He pai ki te kōreroSafe to talk - He pai ki te kōrero Sexual Harm. Do you want to talk? (2 MB) https://safetotalk.nz/ New Zealand PoliceNew Zealand Police Find Police stations by map New Zealand Police

Tracy Neal is a Nelson-based Open Justice reporter at NZME. She was previously RNZ’s regional reporter in Nelson-Marlborough and has covered general news, including court and local government for the Nelson Mail.