Jordon Brook 26

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A TEENAGER carried on having sex with his underage girlfriend despite a police warning.

But Jordon Brook was spared an immediate prison sentence at Oxford Crown Court as a judge said jail time would not address his behaviour.

The Oxfordshire man now 23 - was 19 when he struck up the relationship with the girl, who was in her mid-teens.

Prosecutor Charles Ward-Jackson said the teenagers began talking to each other over Snapchat. Their relationship quickly became sexual, with the couple meeting at Brooks fathers home. He told his father the girl was over-16.

In May 2018, a few months after they began seeing each other, the police served Brook with a Child Abduction Warning Notice. The order came after the girls mother found out about the relationship. The girl said that her boyfriend had begun to hit her and had started seeing another girl.

The police warned Brook to stay away from the girl. Mr Ward-Jackson said: It appears he ignored that warning and carried on seeing her. They exchanged sexualised messages.

By the following year, the girl was increasingly upset and told her mother the relationship had continued. Brook was arrested and, when interviewed, admitted to the police that hed kept on seeing his victim.

The court heard Brook had received two other Child Abduction Warning Notices in 2017 and 2019 relating to underage girls.

Mitigating, Kellie Enever said the case could not be likened to that of a man in his 20s or 30s grooming underage girls on social media.

In this young mans mind this was a relationship. He loved her and it was a relationship which of course he acknowledges he should not have carried on with, she said.

Brook had intellectual difficulties of his own, although Ms Enever said those mental health issues were not put forward as an excuse for his behaviour.

Judge Nigel Daly said he was not going to send Brook to prison as he did not think it would affect his behaviour.

Sentencing him to two years imprisonment suspended for two years, the judge ordered he complete a sex offender treatment programme and 180 hours of unpaid work.

The judge said: If you breach the suspended sentence, if you breach the requirements, you will be brought to this court and you will be in front of me and I know exactly what Ive said to you today and I tell you now I will send you to prison. Clear?

He noted that there had been a significant disparity in the ages of Brook and his victim. He said: Girls need protection not only from men but from themselves... at [that age] they are going through a very difficult period in their lives and they need protection.

Brook, of Cholsey, near Wallingford, pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to two counts of sexual activity with a child.

He must register as a sex offender for 10 years. A sexual harm prevention order limits his access to digital devices for the same period of time.