Locations
Park Road, Wigan, Greater Manchester, WN6
Description
Former town hall colleagues of the now sacked Matthew Bennett, who worked with some of the borough’s most vulnerable youngsters, today told of their shock at discovering his sordid secrets.
The 26-year-old, of Park Road, Wigan, is beginning a seven-year jail sentence after pleading guilty to a total of 11 sexual offence charges.
They included sending lewd pictures of himself to girls under 16, supposedly persuading a girl of 12 to send an indecent picture of herself to him and inciting the mother of a seven-year-old to perform a sex act on him and allow her to be sexually assaulted by him.
But the woman and girls with whom Bennett was communicating were in fact vice squad officers. Bennett further admitted to distributing indecent images of children which fall into the lowest, category C, of seriousness.
The offences took place place online between January and July this year.
A Bolton Crown Court hearing was told that Bennett didn’t back off from a first brush with the law.
He communicated with two undercover officers on the KIK messenger app thinking they were young girls and was arrested on March 3 then bailed.
But on July 20 he communicated with an undercover officer on XHamster.com whom he thought was the mother of a young girl and tried to talk her into agreeing to involve the child in illegal sexual activities.
He deleted information from his phone immediately prior to his arrests. But he used his own surname in his username and sent photographs that displayed his face.
One former workmate said: “My background is in counselling and am quite switched on about spotting character traits but I was caught completely by surprise about Bennett.
“He just seemed an ordinary guy who kept himself to himself.
“He was working for the council’s ‘targeted youth services’ which put him in contact at schools, groups and homes with some of the borough’s most vulnerable children, which is of course a worry, although we understand that the offences had nothing to do with his job.
“Ten months ago he went off on long-term sick and that was the first we knew of anything being wrong.”
Another said: “To say we were shocked and repulsed after seeing that he had pleaded guilty to those sex crimes is an understatement.”
A Wigan Council spokesperson said: “We can confirm that Matthew Bennett was dismissed from Wigan Council as soon as these allegations came to light.
“Neither the allegations or convictions relate to his employment at the Council.”
As well as his prison sentence, Bennett will then be on extended licence for five years, will be the subject of an indefinte Sexual Harm Prevention Order and will also sign on the Sex Offenders’ Register indefinitely.