A retired civil servant has been jailed for playing an online video game which showed graphic cartoon images of child abuse.
Former environmental health officer David Arscott downloaded the sick interactive game in which he groomed young girls for sex, then undressed them before progressing to video sex.
The game featured highly realistic cartoon representations of adolescent girls being abused by adults, Exeter Crown Court was told.
The prosecution for playing the game is one of the first of its kind in the country to be taken to court under new laws passed to close an earlier loophole.
Arscott, aged 59, of Upper Crooked Meadow, Okehampton, was also found with 19,000 images of girls in sexual poses on his computer when it was seized by police. He admitted three offences of making and one of possessing child pornography, three of possessing prohibited images and three of possessing extreme adult pornography.
He was jailed for eight months by Judge Phillip Wassall who told him: “The two cartoons did not involve real children but did depict sexual activity between adults and children, progressing from petting through foreplay to full intercourse.
“The possession of all this material indicates a clear interest in child sexuality. You see children as sex objects.”
The judge also ordered Arscott to sign onto the Sex Offenders’ Register for ten years and made a Prevention Order for five years which stops him having contact with children.
Howard Phillips, prosecuting, said Arscott was traced by the police’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Service after he logged onto a paedophile site called Anything Goes.
Mr Phillips said: “Among the material they found were two Japanese graphic movies which were interactive. They were cartoons with a progressive story and one involved the abuse of girls aged 13 or 14.”
Arscott told police he had tried to stay within the law and did not realise that cartoon images were illegal, but Mr Phillips said the Japanese interactive cartoons were a new phenomenon prohibited under the 2009 Coroners and Criminal Justice Act.
Nigel Wraith, defending, said: “This became somewhat addictive for him. It became something of an obsession to him. He is a retired man with adult children and has never been in trouble before. The images found showed erotic posing.”
