Four years jail for sex offender

09/07/2008

A second man has been jailed today following Internal Affairs Department investigations into Internet activity involving the possession of pictures of adults sexually abusing children. The investigation also revealed that the man had been abusing a young New Zealand girl.

In the Timaru District Court, Judge Stephen Erber, jailed a 33-year-old freezing worker of Pareora, for four years after he pleaded guilty to two charges of sexual conduct with an eight-year-old girl, four charges of making and 40 of possessing an objectionable publication. Two years eight months was for the objectionable images charges and one year four months for the sexual conduct offending. The terms are cumulative.

Judge Erber accepted the offending was unprecedented given the grossly obscene nature of the 250,000 images Robinson had gathered in 10 years. The sentence would have been six years had the man not pleaded guilty, shown remorse and a willingness to take treatment

Crown counsel, Andrew McRae, said there were no mitigating factors in the offending. The man had breached the trust of his young victim’s parents who had trusted him with the care of their child while on a camping holiday.

“His offending escalated in seriousness in that he graduated from mere possession of images to the production of photographs while offending against a child,” Mr McRae said.

An FBI tipoff led to censorship inspectors seizing computer equipment from the offender’s home. They discovered some 250,000 obscene images showing young girls and new born babies being sexually abused by adult men.

Internal Affairs Deputy Secretary, Keith Manch, praised the censorship inspectors’ work in revealing the man's physical offending.

“They suspected from the way he had doctored images that he was a physical sex offender and it was only after they had trawled through most of the 250,000 images that they found two pictures of a man doing an indecent act on a young girl in what appeared to be a New Zealand setting,” he said. “It was only the dedicated work and expertise of this team which revealed the identity of the girl and enabled the police to prosecute for the physical offending.

“It is unusual for a local victim to be uncovered during the team’s monitoring of the Internet but this case shows we are not immune from such abuse. It also shows that paedophiles are active on the Internet.”
Earlier today in Christchurch a 28-year-old former computer systems administrator, was jailed for two years and three months on 28 charges of possessing child sex abuse pictures.

Media Contact:
Keith Manch, Deputy Secretary, Department of Internal Affairs
Ph 04 495 9329; cell 021 227 6363
Trevor Henry, communications adviser, Department of Internal Affairs
Ph 04 495 7211; cell 0275 843 679