August 2003

York man created indecent images of children

A MAN with a compulsion to search out pornographic images of young women had 175 indecent images of children on his computer files, a court heard.

Kevin Holland, 44, was given a two-year conditional discharge after pleading guilty to child pornography charges at York Magistrates Court yesterday.

Holland, of Hempland Drive, Heworth, had pleaded guilty to nine charges of creating an indecent image of a child and one charge of possession of indecent images of children. The court heard that Holland became suicidal following his arrest in November last year, as part of an international crackdown on child pornography.

His solicitor, Colin Byrne, said: “He went to the cliff edge, and looked down the face, before deciding not to jump.”

Mr Byrne said Holland suffered from a type of obsessive compulsive disorder which made him compulsively seek pornographic images of young women aged 16 to 19.

He said after his arrest Holland had sought medical treatment for his obsession, and had been seeing a psychotherapist since earlier this year.

Mr Byrne said Holland had come across the pictures of children in his search for the legal pornographic images of 16 to 19-year-olds. A total of 175 indecent images of children were found in his computer files, 166downloaded from the internet.

The images were mostly mild in content on an official five-point scale of obsenity, with the majority graded level one, but the collection contained some images graded two, three and four.

Mr Byrne said the images of children had been found as a by-product of the obsessive search for young women, with 98 per cent of the images of children used then deleted from the computer. David Garnett, prosecuting, said Holland had subscribed to a website which had many indecent images of young people on it.

He said: “There are nine images he admitted making, one of which is level two.”

Holland was told by magistrates that if he did not offend again within the two years “that would be the end of the matter”.

He was ordered to pay costs of £120 and to forfeit the drive on the computer where the images were stored, and all the disks and storage materials containing indecent child images.