April 2009 Cwmbran father jailed for child sexual abuse images A CWMBRAN man was jailed after admitting making and distributing indecent images of children. Christopher Buttwell, 43, formerly of Stiels, Coed Eva, appeared in Newport crown court for sentencing having previously pleaded guilty to four counts of distributing indecent images and seven counts of making indecent images. Prosecutor David Webster said police raided Buttwell’s home in January 2008 acting on information from another force and his computer was seized. Buttwell told officers he used file sharing software, Google Hello, to chat to others who shared an interest in adult pornography. Mr Webster told the court Buttwell said he sometimes received images of children and would delete them, but claimed that on occasions he received such a bulk that some of the images were saved on his hard drive automatically. The court heard a forensic examination of Buttwell’s computer showed a total of 191 indecent images on the computer’s two hard drives, including three at level five the worst end of the scale, 28 level four, eight level three, seven level two and 145 level one. Officers were also able to recover text files of conversations Buttwell had via the internet and Mr Webster said it was clear the software was used to distribute adult and child pornography. One conversation involved Buttwell trying to persuade another chat user, he believed to be a young girl, to send him photographs of her committing a sexual act. Buttwell’s counsel, Heath Edwards said Buttwell mainly viewed adult pornography and the majority of the images were at level one and many were repeats of the same image. Mr Edwards said there was no evidence that Buttwell had paid to access sites or actively searched for child abuse images. Sentencing Buttwell, Judge David Morris said that people needed to know that those that used the internet to view child pornography will be “suitably and properly punished.” Judge Morris said: “If there were not people like you using the internet in this way, children would not be abused by the people making these images in the first place.” Buttwell was sentenced to six months imprisonment, disqualified from working with children and ordered to sign the Sex Offenders Register for seven years.