A CHILDREN’S charity has hit out at the sentence given to a Dorchester man who downloaded sexually-explicit pictures of young girls and boys.

Timothy Wright, 20, was given a community penalty with a requirement to take part in a sex offenders programme, after admitting 13 charges of possessing indecent images.

When sentencing the defendant, Judge Roger Jarvis said: “You have come as close as it possibly is to going to prison.”

Kidscape, a children’s charity aimed at preventing child abuse, has questioned if the sentence reflects the ‘true horror of the crime’.

Director Claude Knights said: “Ideally we would like the punishment to be more severe.

“For the offender, it could be something that sets him back on to a much more positive road, but for the public it doesn’t come over as reflecting the true horror of the crime.

“Generally, as a victim of sexual abuse there isn’t closure from this because you ask what price is really paid.

“He is left with access to comforts, he hasn’t been deprived of his freedom and ability to lead a normal life, whereas for the children, it’s a life-long pain.”

Anita Gibson-Lee, prosecuting, told Dorchester Crown Court that police were alerted in April last year after a work colleague spotted ‘file titles of an indecent nature’ on Wright’s laptop.

She said officers executed a warrant and sent the computer off for forensic analysis.

A total of 45 indecent images or movie clips were discovered downloaded onto the computer.

Indecent images are graded from one to five, with five being the most serious image.

Miss Gibson-Lee said there were 18 grade one images, nine grade two, 15 grade three and three grade four images.

She said the grade one images showed naked girls as young as 10 years old, while the grade four images involved movie clips of boys under the age of 14 engaging in sex acts.

Miss Gibson-Lee said in interview Wright admitted downloading the images using file-sharing programme LimeWire, but insisted he deleted them after viewing and didn’t store them or send them on to anyone else.

She said when asked why he had downloaded the images he compared them to ‘forbidden fruit’.

Nick Tucker, mitigating, said Wright, of High Street, Fordington, Dorchester, had ‘no real sexual urges towards children’ but was ‘tempted to find the most extreme form of images that he could’.

Mr Tucker added: “He has done something extremely foolish and he recognises that.”

He urged Judge Jarvis to find a ‘more constructive alternative’ to a prison sentence.

The judge told Wright: “I want you to reflect upon these young children. Their lives have been blighted and they have had no childhood as their innocence has been taken away from them.”

As well as a community penalty Judge Jarvis told Wright he would be on the Sex Offenders Register for five years and imposed a sexual offences prevention order.

After warning Wright that he was lucky to avoid jail, Judge Jarvis said: “You are a very lucky man, more lucky than those children.”