Sisters damaged by online porn snatched girl, 2, from Primark
By Virginia Newman TWO teenagers tricked a mother into thinking they were “sweet” before kidnapping her toddler in order to hurt her, a court was told as the girls were ordered to be detained for three years.
The sisters, aged 13 and 14, skipped school and spent hours waiting with “evil intent” to find a child to abduct in a Primark store.
They played with their target, a twoyear-old girl, for 15 minutes, fooling her mother before enticing her away with sweets.
The pair had already approached two other children at the Newcastle shop and tried to engage another mother by saying the child was “beautiful” and asking whether she could speak.
They were “working together, quite co-ordinated” with a “degree of planning”, prosecutor Sarah Barlow told Newcastle Crown Court.
Sentencing, Mr Justice Globe said the younger girl had been targeted by a paedophile online and exposed to child abuse images. The judge described their exposure to abuse via the oovoo app on their iPad as the “true reason” for the abduction.
In the weeks leading up to the kidnap the girls had made horrifying online searches.
At an earlier hearing the court was told the girls had searched for “African woman sexual activity”, suggesting they could have been targeting nonwhite children.
The teenagers took the girl into a lift, out of the store and headed straight on to the Metro for a three-mile journey to the suburb of Gosforth. They swung the youngster between them and fed her sweets and Coca Cola, assuring her “don’t worry we’ll find your mummy soon” – while taking her in the opposite direction.
The girls tried to take the toddler to a soft play area before stealing a bottle of milk from a supermarket to keep her quiet. They took the girl to the swings in a park before they were caught by police 90 minutes later after CCTV images of them in the Primark store were circultated.
The toddler’s mother was “so utterly distressed” she was seen banging her head against a wall, the court heard.
Sentencing the teenagers, Mr Justice Globe said: “I bear in mind no actual physical harm was caused to (the girl) in the two hours she was with you before she was found. However, extensive psychological harm was done to her mother. One can only imagine what she went through when she found that her two-year-old baby was missing from the shopping centre.”
In an apparent reference to the James Bulger case, Mr Justice Globe, who was prosecution junior counsel in the trial of killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, said: “The reality is that those children were also taken through shopping centres and public streets in the full view of members of the public.” Julie Clemitson, defending the younger girl, said she was vulnerable, and had been sexually exploited.
Andrew Walker, defending the older girl, said his client displayed signs of being on the autistic spectrum and had a lack of social understanding.
Ms Clemitson stressed the girls had not sought to hide the two-year-old.
Of 1,185 internet searches made since the younger sister was given the iPad for Christmas, 402 were of a porno- graphic nature. The paedophile who groomed the girl online was never caught despite a police investigation.
The judge initially sentenced the girls to three years and four months but took a month off having heard they have been subject to a curfew since they pleaded guilty to kidnap.
Mr Justice Globe said the girls posed a “significant risk of harm” to the public, specifically young children.
‘One can only imagine what the mother went through when she found her two-year-old baby was missing’