Jailed for child sexual abuse pictures

A Hastings man who pleaded guilty to 10 charges of possessing child sexual abuse images was today jailed for 12 months.

Judge Gerard Winter in the Hastings District Court told Andrew Craig Ward, 43, a leading hand, that home detention was not sufficient to denounce and deter offending.

In July 2014 an Internal Affairs inspector detected Ward on Internet file sharing areas offering child sexual abuse material. A search warrant was executed on his home where computer equipment showed such material being viewed from 2009. There were about a thousand unique images and movies depicting the sexual exploitation of children.

Internal Affairs’ Community Safety Manager, Steve O’Brien, welcomed the sentence as emphasising the seriousness of such offending.

“People who collect child sex abuse images create a market for more such abuse,” he said. “Trading or viewing these images is not passive offending because it condones the abuse children suffer and encourages those who actually photograph them. If you deal in or possess this material you can expect to get caught.”

The court ordered the forfeiture of the computers and the destruction of the images.

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