A MAN who posed as a 14-year-old girl called Gina on internet chat rooms and downloaded child porn has been spared jail.
Child protection charity Kidscape hit-out at the “very lenient” sentence handed to married father Phillip Grove.
The 59-year-old pleaded guilty to 18 counts of possessing, making and distributing indecent images of children as young as four, but was handed a suspended sentence at Cambridge Crown Court.
Judge Gareth Hawkesworth gave Grove a three-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, and also ordered him to complete a two-year supervision order on an internet sex offender treatment programme.
Claude Knights, director of child protection charity Kidscape, said: “It does seem very lenient as these images are quite grave and this is not a victimless crime.
“It is also disturbing he posed as a child on chatrooms – another betrayal.”
Judge Hawkesworth said Grove, who admitted having used chat rooms pretending to be a 14-year-old girl called Gina, was “a man profoundly in denial” with a “substantial problem”, but one who was “capable of being rehabilitated” back into society.
Grove was sentenced for one charge of possessing 73 images – including eight at level 4 on the Copine scale, the second most serious – along with 16 counts of making a total of 132 child porn images and one of distributing them.
A order was passed for the forfeiture and destruction of the computers he used – a laptop and the family PC.
He was banned form working with children under 16, ordered to notify the police of his whereabouts for the next 10 years, and pay £250 costs.
