Porn shame father avoids jail

A family man from Wolverhampton who was caught with indecent photographs of children has escaped a jail sentence.

Neal Hirons, aged 30, who admitted to police he had a fetish for girls in school uniform, was caught with 67 indecent images on his home computer.

Police discovered the pictures after an early morning raid on the father-of-five on August 31, 2008, Wolverhampton magistrates were told yesterday.

Hirons, who is currently living with his parents in Raby Street, All Saints, had 65 Level One images of children, one Level Two and one Level Three. Level Five is deemed the most serious.

Officers found that Hirons had typed in particular words and phrases into the internet to find pornographic images. Police acting on intelligence obtained a search warrant to raid his house after he downloaded images from a particular website.

Mr Roger Bleazard, prosecuting, said: "He said he had a fetish for school girls in uniform and typed into the search engine words such as St Trinian's, pre-teens and Lolita.

"He said to the police he thought they were adults in uniform but if you saw the pictures, any right-minded person would think they were pre-pubescent girls.

"He knew exactly what he was looking for. Demand like this is fuelling supply from people abroad abusing children."

Mr Gerald Thorne, defending, said the whole experience had been a huge wake-up call and a lesson for Hirons, who claimed to use the computer mainly for late-night gaming.

Mr Thorne argued that Hirons had not downloaded a large amount of indecent images on to his computer. "Mr Hirons is under no illusions about the seriousness of all of this. He has been required to live away from his family during all of this. As a result he missed the birth of his child who is now six months old. He is a family man."

Hirons pleaded guilty at an earlier hearing to four counts of possessing indecent photographs of children.

Chairman of the bench Paul Eckett told him: "You did this deliberately." Hirons was given an eight-week jail sentence, suspended for three years, and was told to sign the sex offenders register for seven years. He was also banned from working with children for five years and owning a computer to access the internet.

* More than 1.5 million indecent images and videos of children have been destroyed by the West Midlands Police's Child Exploitation and Investigation Team in the past year.

The team of seven target the worst child sex offenders and carry out investigations into rape, grooming, inciting children to commit sexual acts, breach of sex offender prevention orders and distributing indecent images of children. In the past 12 months their work has led to 54 convictions.