Liam Warlow 27

Description

A man who pleaded guilty to filming a teenager undressing in a changing room has been spared jail.

Liam Warlow, 27, had attempted to record footage of the school girl with his phone under the divider of a cubicle in the unisex changing area of LC Swansea waterpark, south Wales, when she spotted the phone and kicked it from his hand, a court heard.

“Most people would expect me to send you to prison,” Judge Geraint Walters told him after he pleaded guilty to observing a private act for sexual gratification.

Warlow was given a six-month sentence suspended for two years on Dec 20. Judge Walters also ordered him to undertake a 43-day programme to address his issues around filming in public for sexual excitement and to attend 45 days of “general rehabilitation”.

CCTV footage shows Warlow loitering in the doorway of a cubicle in the changing rooms before the incident. He had finished getting dressed when he spotted the girl and then entered the cubicle next to her.

Warlow is then seen running out of the leisure centre after being discovered attempting to film the girl undressing.

He told police he had dropped his phone which had “managed to start recording by itself”, Swansea Crown Court heard.

Despite this Judge Walters said it was “perfectly obvious” what Warlow was doing.

He said: “Having set eyes upon her, you quite purposefully, and with a fair degree of determination, hung about in the changing area - including viewing her through a mirror at one stage - until she entered a cubicle.

‘The phone was plainly recording’

“You entered the adjoining cubicle, and while there you used your phone to film her. She said the phone was plainly recording and she could see herself on it.”

Upon his arrest, Warlow told the police he could not remember the code to access the “private area” of his phone, but the judge said his claim was not plausible.

Warlow has previous convictions for burglary and cannabis possession from 2013.

Judge Walters added: “Your conduct that day has, for a considerable period of time, blighted you. And it will.

“You will be on the sex offenders register. You’ve lost your partner, by the looks of it. No doubt in any future relationship you have, you will end up coming under the scrutiny of social services.”

Warlow will be placed on the sex offenders register and subject to a sexual harm prevention order for seven years.