June 2015 Jailed: Man, 30, who had sex with 15-year-old he used to babysit A 30-year-old man who repeatedly had sex with an underage girl he babysat for ten years earlier has been jailed. Shane Welch and the 15-year-old victim, who he knew when she was just six, got back on touch over Facebook after she started to see her dad again. And over the following months the defendant, who has children of his own, repeatedly had sex with the child at the flat of one of her schoolmates. Now he has been jailed for two-and-a-half years and told he must register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Claire Marlow, prosecuting, told Swindon Crown Court that the girl’s parents knew Welch through his family when their daughter was still a young child and he used to babysit her with his sister’s children while she was six. But in the following years she lost contact with him because her parents split up and she lived with her mum. Miss Marlow said: “18 months before these offences she started to see her father, started to become reacquainted with the defendant’s sister. “She said on August 16 this year she saw the Facebook account with a picture of him and sent him a text commenting on it. “The relationship started from there, before it went on to become a sexual relationship.” Miss Marlow said that the girl insisted that she had been the instigator of the flirting and then the kissing before they went on to have sex in October. “She had made it plain that he had never made her do anything she didn’t want to and he had never given her anything for it,” she said. The couple would meet up at the bedsit of one of her school friends, she said, and at about 10pm the pal would go out so they could have sex. Miss Marlow told the court that the girl said it happened three or four times before her father found out on November 5 and put a stop to it. Welch, of Welcombe Avenue, Park South, pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual activity with a child. Mark Sharman, defending, said: “The girl has been very frank in terms of how this relationship developed.” Shortly before they got together he said his client had just split from his partner of eight years. “That perhaps made him vulnerable in some way to the advances of the girl but I repeat, he does not put that forwards as an excuse,” he said. “He accepts even if she was 16, there would be no criminal liability but the disparity in years and life experience, the disparity in age would still not be appropriate.” Since he was arrested he said he had struggled to have contact with his children as unsurprisingly his former partner is reluctant for him to have contact with them. Jailing him Recorder David Bartlett said: “It is clear she was entirely consenting in that activity. She may have encouraged you but you should have resisted. “She was still 15, you were 30 at the time. I have to consider the fact that you have committed these serious offences. They attract imprisonment without any doubt.” As a result of jailing him for 30 months he must also register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.