Description
An online sexual predator who distributed sickening images of children to 374 members of seedy internet groups fell foul of the police when he started exchanging intimate messages with a decoy 13-year-old girl.
Andrew Whitelam boasted in other online chats that young girls "turn me on so much" and he had a large collection of indecent images of children, Hull Crown Court heard.
Whitelam, 39, of Sutton Park, Hull, admitted attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child and attempting to cause a child to watch or look at sexual activity between April 20 and May 4, 2023. He also admitted distributing and making indecent images of children, possessing extreme pornography and possessing prohibited images of children.
Stephen Welch, prosecuting, said that Whitelam exchanged messages online with a decoy 13-year-old girl and he repeatedly sent highly sexualised images and a video of sexual behaviour. He asked for images of the girl and he made it clear that he wanted sexual contact with her.
The police arrested him at his home on July 14, 2023 and seized a mobile phone and other equipment. He had 114 images and 209 videos of children in the most serious Category A as well as 54 images and 86 videos in Category B and 356 images and 42 videos in Category C.
There were 21 prohibited images and one movie of children as well as 11 extreme pornography images of bestiality and 16 videos. A total of 143 images of children, including 49 in Category A, had been distributed to 374 other people in various groups.
Four conversations with girls aged 14, 13 and 11, were discovered, although there were no charges involving these. One chatroom was called "School girls ready to love."
Whitelam said of young girls: "They turn me on so much." Grooming behaviour was used by him. He had no previous convictions.
Catherine Silverton, mitigating, said that Whitelam had completed a course aimed at changing his behaviour and he had paid for a further seven months of treatment. He had "done remarkably well" through the work he had completed and he had made "very considerable progress".
Whitelam had made a clear decision to learn from his past lifestyle. A prison sentence would put him back among drug users and would be "very counter-productive" to his rehabilitation, a course official had said.
The offences were serious:
"He is deeply remorseful," said Miss Silverton. "He is, frankly, horrified by what he has done. He can't fathom how he could, in his words, have sunk to such depths.
"He is in no doubt about the seriousness of his conduct. He is in no doubt that he only has himself to blame. He is disgusted. He is deeply ashamed of his behaviour.
"There has been no repetition in the time since." Whitelam had a drug addiction at the time of the offences but he was now clear of this. He worked as a joiner.
Judge Alexander Menary told Whitelam:
"The offences are so serious, the number and nature of them, that I am simply unable to impose a community order."
Whitelam, who had been on bail, was jailed for two years and five months. He was given a 10-year sexual harm prevention order and he must register as a sex offender for 10 years.