A paedophile who avoided jail 13 years ago for attempting to sexually message a child has been jailed after downloading indecent images.
Phillip Dawson, of Springfield Road, Wantage, was sentenced at Oxford Crown Court on Thursday (February 27) for three counts of making indecent images of a child and one count of possessing a prohibited image of a child.
The 50-year-old was caught with 19 Category A images, 14 Category B images, 53 Category C images and seven prohibited images between April 2019 and December 2022.
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Sentencing him to 14 months imprisonment, Judge Emma Nott said: “This is the second time you appear before the courts for sexual offending involving children.
“Accepting your guilty is not the same as accepting your underlying behaviour. It’s clear you’re minimizing the sexual satisfaction you get from seeking out and viewing these images.
“This is serious offending – this offence is so serious that only an immediate custodial sentence can be justified.”
Opening the case, prosecutor Bethan Chichester explained that police had attended his address on December 6, 2022 to execute a search warrant.
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Once officers explained why they were there, Dawson shut the door saying he needed to get dressed and refused to open the door again.
Police forced entry and Dawson was arrested. A Samsung phone and tablet were seized and forensically examined.
A range of still and moving images were found including images depicting penetrative activity of a child aged between nine and 11 as well as sexual abuse images involving an adult and a child.
Dawson was interviewed twice. During the first interview, he denied any offending and claimed that another person accessed his Kik messaging account and that ‘people can make up IP addresses’.
He answered ‘no comment’ to his second interview.
The court heard he has one previous conviction for a similar offence in 2013 when he was handed a three-year community order for attempting to incite a female to engage in sexual activity.
Defending Dawson, barrister George Joseph said the offending was ‘born out of social isolation and a lack of personal intimacy’.
“It was the tail end of the covid lockdown,” said Mr Joseph.
“He was extremely lonely, his mother and father had passed away, he doesn’t have a huge amount of friends to speak of.”
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Mr Joseph added that his client would find the experience of prison ‘extremely difficult’.
“He would find it quite mortifying,” he added.
The court heard that the defendant had been an electrician but has recently lost his job due to pleaded guilty to the offences.
