Cambridge don avoids jail despite sharing child porn

A CAMBRIDGE University poetry expert who shared child rape fantasies and abuse images online avoided jail yesterday.

Professor Simon Jarvis, 53, was found with almost 2,000 illegal images on various computers and in online accounts when his city home and college room were raided by the National Crime Agency in September.

The poetry professor broke down in tears as Cambridge Crown Court heard abuse images, including one of a baby, were discovered on four computers seized.

Other images showed ‘pubescent and pre-pubescent’ girls as young as ten being sexually abused.

Of the almost 2,000 indecent images found, 45 were in the most serious Category A. ‘Yahoo chat logs’ containing ‘ extremely graphic’ child abuse fantasies and software allowing access to the ‘Dark Web’ were also found.

Jarvis pleaded guilty to four charges of making and two of distributing indecent images of children, five charges of possessing prohibited images and one of possessing extreme pornography, at yesterday’s hearing.

Judge David Farrell QC said: ‘You must have known that by accessing indecent images of children you were indirectly encouraging the abuse of children.

‘You were looking at these images for your own perverted sexual gratification.’

Jarvis was sentenced to 12 months, suspended for two years, with a ten-year sexual harm prevention order and must pay £670 prosecution costs. But the judge added that Jarvis had been open with police about ‘having an addiction to porn that progressed to indecent images of children’.

He said Jarvis posed a ‘low to moderate risk’ to children and had taken steps since his arrest to get help, and would receive better treatment and rehabilitation if he was not immediately jailed.