A MAN caught with movies on his computer of children as young as four being sexually abused, including sex acts with animals, has been jailed.
John Hill had pleaded guilty to three charges of making indecent images of children, and also admitted possessing extreme pornography and prohibited images.
Hill (57) of Wappenbury Close, Coventry, at the time, was jailed for 12 months by a judge at Warwick Crown Court who also ordered him to register as a sex offender for ten years.
Prosecutor Stuart Clarkson said that in November last year the police went to Hill’s home with a warrant.
Hill, now of Newtown Road, Bedworth, was arrested, and immediately admitted: “There’s no use denying it, it’s me.”
Officers seized his desktop computer, a hard drive and 16 DVDs on which indecent images, which had been downloaded over more than four years, were stored.
There were 215 movies classed as category A, showing children mainly aged between four and 13 being subjected to penetrative sex acts.
Mr Clarkson pointed out they were not just brief clips, but ‘lengthy moving images’ with one involving a four-year-old girl lasting ten-and-a-half minutes.
There were also 61 category B movies, defined as showing children involved in non-penetrative sex acts, and 32 category C movies of children in naked or indecent poses.
There were 28 images of extreme pornography showing adults and children involved in sex acts with animals, and prohibited images – cartoons or drawings depicting children in an indecent manner.
When he was questioned, Hill said he had obtained the images through peer-to-peer file-sharing software, but had switched off the sharing ability so no-one else could obtain images from his computer.
Jonathan Veasey-Pugh, defending, said Hill was a man of previous good character, apart from an old domestic violence matter.
Since the offences came to light, Hill had voluntarily been in contact with a charity which deals with sex offenders and had paid to undertake a course.
“He knows Your Honour is likely to remind him the true cost of his crime is that it provides a market, or at least an outlet, for very much more serious offending.
“But I ask Your Honour to consider stepping back from an immediate custodial sentence. It may be a three-year community order gives society, as well as him, the better option.”
But jailing Hill, Judge Sylvia de Bertodano remarked: “You know why this is so serious, because these are images of real children being abused.
“They are images being made for a market, and were there not a market, it may well be that the individual children in these images may not have been abused in this way – and the market is made up of people like you.
“You have a 19-year-old son who knows nothing about what you are in trouble for. It is said your accommodation, and his, depends on you not going to prison, and I accept you have sought help since these matters.
“But these offences are made worse by the fact that there were children of such a young age, and the added degradation of there being children and animals.”
