April 2012 St Leonards paedophile jailed for five years A PAEDOPHILE has been jailed for five years for distributing and possessing indecent images of children. Simon Rose, 35, of Lovat Mead, St Leonards, was also sent to prison for breaching court orders. He was jailed on Wednesday after a hearing at Hove Crown Court, having pleaded guilty to 20 offences of distributing and possessing indecent images of children, and possession of prohibited images. Rose also pleaded guilty to three further offences of breaching a court-imposed Sexual Offences Prevention Order (SOPO), and failure to comply with court-imposed notification requirements as a registered sex offender. He was served with an Indefinite Sexual Offence Prevention Order and on his release will be a registered sex offender for life. In 2008 Rose was convicted in Essex, where he then lived, of making indecent images of children and received a 24-month suspended sentence, along with the SOPO and sex offender registration requirement. The Sussex Police Paedophile Online Investigation Team (POLIT) began a new intelligence-led investigation into Rose in 2010 after new information was received that he was offending online yet again. While Rose was attending a Sex Offenders Treatment Programme (SOTP) in Brighton as part of his previous sentence, he used internet cafés in Brighton and Hastings to distribute indecent images of children. He was arrested and released on conditional bail, but, as he was about to be charged with the offences last September, Kent Police were contacted quite separately by a mother who had become concerned about a man using Facebook to contact her to try to develop a relationship. Officers found out Rose had contacted the woman under a different name, and arrested him for breaching his SOPO. He was then charged with that offence, and with the indecent image offences and the sex offenders registration breach. There is no evidence to suggest that Rose had committed any actual contact offences against children, or that images of any local children were involved in the offences. But Detective Constable Jane Tunnicliff said: “Rose was still using the internet to distribute indecent images of very young children, mainly young boys, even after being sentenced for a similar offence. Every image is of child sexual abuse and exploitation. “It was of even more concern that he was seeking to develop an online relationship with a woman who had young children and we have no doubt that part of his motivation was to groom very young boys for sexual activity. “We are very glad that the woman came forward. She was very quickly informed about Rose and was assured that action was being taken to ensure that he posed no further threat.” Detective Inspector Jez Prior said “Sussex Police will always treat calls from members of the public seriously where they raise concerns that a child may be at risk, and where necessary, as in this case, we will take immediate steps to safeguard a child in danger. “The police want to work together with our communities to keep children safe and the relatively new Child Sex Offenders Disclosure Scheme (CSODS) enables parents and others to ask police for information on someone who is in contact with families and about whom they have concerns.”