A man disappeared to have sex with his girlfriend – leaving her three-and-a-half year old son in the bath.

The 29-year-old, who we are not naming in order to protect the toddler’s identity, said he’d returned to the bathroom to find the boy had seriously wounded his genitals.

He admitted neglect by leaving the boy alone in the bathroom but was found not guilty last month of causing him grievous bodily harm.

Sentencing the man to an 18 month community order and 150 hours of unpaid work on Wednesday, Judge Ian Pringle QC said: “According to you at some stage your partner suggested you and her go next door where you might be a bit more intimate at that stage and leaving the child in the bath on his own and that is what you did.

“You went next door, you had sex then you went back – not concerned about the boy’s state of health.

“This was a foolish, reckless thing, leaving a young boy in a bath at only three-and-three-quarters – a dangerous thing to do with a young child – because you and your partner decided to have sex.”

Mitigating, Paul Prior told the court: “What happened to the boy that day must be set into its proper context. This is not a family which was characterised by domestic violence, for example.

“He was step-father rather than father and he had no experience with children, although he had been left alone with the boy on previous occasions they were rare.”

His client had no previous convictions and ‘impressive’ references. They included a letter from barrister Anthony Trace QC, who described the defendant as a ‘fine young man with a great future ahead of him’.

During the week-long trial at Oxford Crown Court, jurors heard that the defendant and his then girlfriend, the boy’s mother, had bathed the child after watching cartoons with him in June 2018.

The mum claimed she had gone to her bedroom to check for messages from her own mother, with whom they were due to go on holiday the following day. She left her son in the bathroom with the defendant, she said. The boy, who had finished his bath and was being towelled dry, had said he needed to go to the toilet.

“I heard screaming and shouting coming from the bathroom. I dropped the phone and ran straight back into the bathroom,” she said. Her boyfriend, who looked ‘shocked’, was rubbing the boy’s back trying to calm him down.

Doctors said the boy's injury could not have been self-inflicted.

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