‘Unfair’ to ban molester from Facebook

A MAN who used Facebook to groom young teenage boys, some of whom he later molested, was allowed to continue using the social networking site yesterday after a judge decided banning him from it would be unfair.

Callum Dower, 19, used the site to entice young boys to send him pictures of themselves naked. When they refused his advances he posed as a girl to try again.

He later molested one young boy in a supermarket toilet and another after allowing him to drive his car in a car park in return for giving in to his advances.

But Judge Graham Hume Jones, sentencing Dower to a three-year community order for child sex and pornography offences, agreed with a plea from defence barrister Patrick Mason that a Facebook ban would bar the young man from “social traffic” taken for granted by people of his age.

“A ban from using social networking sites is particularly excessive,” the barrister told Taunton Crown Court.

Baby-faced Dower, of Queen Camel, near Yeovil in Somerset, was aged 17 and 18 when he carried out the offences.

He would use Facebook to contact boys aged 14 and 15 and make homosexual advances towards them.

He urged them to send him lewd images via their mobile phones. If they refused, he posed as girls called “Georgina”, “Georgia”, “Georgie” and “Jade”, sending the boys images of naked girls in return for lewd images of themselves.

He was found out when one boy became suspicious that two pictures sent to him by “Georgina” seemed to be of two different girls.

Brendon Moorhouse, prosecuting, told the court: “She was a complete fiction. She was a person concocted by Dower to continue his sexual conversations with these boys.”

The court also heard he had already been warned by police about his affection for teenage boys.

Dower had previously admitted six charges of making an indecent image of a child, five charges of causing or inciting a child to take part in pornography and two charges of sexual activity with a child.

Mason said that Dower, who also lived briefly in Bournemouth, Dorset, was an intelligent but “confused’ young man, who had received grades at college good enough to attend university, but who had lost his job and college place because of his crimes.

Aware that he was gay from a young age, the court heard that Dower was attracted to boys his own age when he was a young teenager and, as he got older, he had remained attracted to them.

Mason said both boys he molested had consented to the activity, though both were underage.

Judge Jones also banned Dower from working with children, ordered him to sign the sex offenders’ register for five years and ordered him to be electronically tagged and placed under a 12-hour overnight curfew for the next three months.