April 2013 Shipston loner collected ‘revolting’ sexual abuse images of children A LONER from Shipston who downloaded and stored ‘chillingly revolting’ images of young girls being sexually abused has narrowly escaped being jailed. ‘Sexually inadequate’ Darren Manders had pleaded guilty to six charges of making indecent images of children by downloading them onto his computer. Despite the explicit nature of the images, some of which involved girls as young as two, a judge at Warwick Crown Court heard Manders denied having them for sexual gratification. But following an adjournment, it was said the 28-year-old now accepted his motivation for having the images, which Judge Alan Parker said enabled him not to pass a prison sentence. Manders, of Greenway Road, was given a community order with three years supervision and ordered to take part in a three-year sex offenders group work programme. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender for five years, made subject to a sexual offences prevention order restricting his contact with children and his computer use, and was ordered to pay £340 costs. Prosecutor Glyn Samuel said that in June last year the police had information about internet use from Manders’s address. Mr Samuel said police seized various computers including a laptop from Manders’s bedroom. In a file on the computer officers found 134 still and moving indecent images of children – including 56 hardcore images. They included girls as young as two being sexually abused by adults. When interviewed, Manders painted himself as a loner who had no real friends and no job, so he spent his time making friends on the internet with people he did not know. He accepted creating a false identity as a nine-year-old girl called ‘Mary’, with a picture he had downloaded of a young girl in swimwear, and as a result he was sent images by men asking ‘Mary’ if she would like them to do the things shown in the images to her. But he claimed he was not a paedophile and did not get any sexual gratification from the images, added Mr Samuel. Nick Devine, defending, said: “There is no real way to dress this up gently; Mr Manders is plainly someone who is socially and sexually inexperienced and inadequate.” He asked the judge to pass a community sentence on Manders with an intensive programme to deal with his issues. Judge Alan Parker told Manders: “You acquired and stored the various images which have been described to me, and just those that were described were chillingly revolting. “You stored them for viewing from time to time for sexual gratification, and it has taken until today for you to confess to that. “I can tell you, if you had not confessed to your motivation I would have sent you to prison; but the fact that you now admit the full extent of all of this permits me to deal with you in a different way.”