September 2015

Pervert jailed for illicit chat with 14-year-old girl

A NUNEATON man who asked a 14-year-old girl to send him pictures of her performing sex acts has been jailed for two-and-a-half years.

Richard Tighe, aged 28, of Willow Close, Hartshill, Nuneaton, who had pleaded guilty to inciting the girl to engage in sexual activity, was also ordered to register as a sex offender for life.

He had denied a further charge of meeting the girl with the intention of committing a sexual offence following grooming, which was allowed to lie on the court file.

Prosecutor Gerald Bermingham explained that although they did meet in September last year, nothing sexual actually happened.

Mr Bermingham said Tighe and the girl had first come into contact over the internet, but her evidence was that he was well aware of her age at a very early stage.

Tighe’s contact with the girl was said to have been ‘sophisticated’, in that he had taken advantage of a ‘vulnerable friend’ by using that man’s computer to communicate with her.

Mr Bermingham said: “We say that was a method by which he sought to avoid detection, and conversations took place over Skype and Facebook, and there are also dozens of text messages.”

As their contact continued, Tighe asked the girl to send him progressively more sexual images of herself, and he also sent her intimate pictures of himself in return.

Judge Sylvia de Bertodano said there was mention of the pictures of the girl being shown to Tighe’s friend, but was told there was no evidence of that apart from what that man had said.

Matthew Brooke, defending, said of Tighe using a friend’s computer, it was not a matter of him manipulating the other man, who he had known since they were at a special school together.

The reason he was going to that man’s address was simply because he did not have internet access at his own home, rather than in a bid to hide his own identity, argued Mr Brooke.

Tighe and the girl had made contact after they had each put themselves onto different but connected adult websites, and at first he was just asking to be friends.

There were a couple of weeks when there was no contact, and it was then the girl, who had been active on the sites in a similar way before, re-established contact between them and asked for his mobile phone number so they could text and Skype.

And Mr Brooke said: “Of course, what he then went on to do over the internet was criminal, but he was making it quite clear that sexual intercourse would not take place until she was 16.”

Although there was a Skype conversation while she was naked on a bed after showering, and he asked her to send images of her performing sex acts, it did not lead to such ones being sent.

Mr Brooke said that there were ‘alternatives to custody’ which were set out in a pre-sentence report.

But jailing Tighe, Judge de Bertodano told him: “In the summer of last year you started chatting to a 14-year-old girl after she had put herself onto a dating site.

“You very quickly realised she was 14 years old, and you carried on. You persuaded her to send naked pictures of herself.

“I do find it an unpleasant feature of the case that you used someone else’s computer to do this; and a further unpleasant feature is the attitude you take towards her in blaming her to some extent for continuing this relationship.

“Fourteen-year-old girls are protected for a reason. They are at a difficult stage of their lives, trying to find their own identity in an adult world when they are still children.

“Children are increasingly vulnerable to the outside world at an early age because of, among other things, their exposure to the internet. Parents need to know that if people prey on their children in this way, they will go to prison.”