Main Edition
US
FR
September 16, 2024 - 1:50pm
Former BBC News presenter Huw Edwards was today handed a six-month suspended prison sentence after he pleaded guilty to accessing indecent images of children.
Many people will rightly feel outraged by the leniency of Edwards’s sentence. That is partly because of the severity of his crimes — two of the Category A images he was sent showed children aged between seven and nine — and partly because the viewing public placed their trust in him, and now feel betrayed by his facade of sober authority and moral integrity.
The defence insisted that key mitigating factors were Edwards’s lack of prior convictions and history of mental health problems, supposedly exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and alcohol use. The prosecution rebutted that key aggravating factors were that some of the images were “moving images”, and that Edwards clearly knew what he was looking at, given that some of the file names included ages such as “13-year-old”. Meanwhile, the police were only able to recover WhatsApp messages, but Edwards communicated over other platforms too.
Despite what some may assume, the former newsreader’s suspended sentence has nothing to do with his former fame or position: in fact, eight out of 10 people in the UK caught with images of children being sexually abused avoid going to jail. Alexander Williams, the man who sent Edwards the indecent images, also received a suspended sentence earlier this year.
Edwards’s sentencing is therefore unfortunately the norm rather than an anomaly. Roger Spackman, a former Labour councillor who worked in a children’s home and was later caught with over a million images of child sex abuse, was only given a suspended sentence of two years. Suspended sentences were also given to a 57-year-old RAF veteran who was caught trying to meet a 14-year-old girl for sex in an online sting operation; a 45-year-old “family man” who not only possessed child abuse images but boasted online about his sexual interest in young girls and that he was going to “try” a 10-year-old girl on holiday in Spain; and a grooming gang member who repeatedly had sex with a 15-year-old girl.
Another convicted child rapist also recently escaped jail because of the overcrowding crisis in Britain’s prisons. He was ordered to sign the sex offenders’ register and notify police if he went on holiday, but in May he jetted off to Egypt without informing authorities. He is still managing to avoid prison.
Some may contend that the legal definition of “making” an image might make Edwards’s crimes seem worse than they actually are. Here, “making” is used to mean possession, which could refer to downloading an image rather than “creating” it in the traditional sense. Regardless, the fact that you can go to prison for three years for a retweet but escape jail time despite sharing the most despicable forms of child abuse suggests that there is something fundamentally wrong with our justice system.
A suspended sentence is no deterrent, and no justice for the children shown in these images, who have already been condemned to a life sentence of their own. Even if Edwards and Williams did not technically “create” any of these images, they still helped to create a market for them — and deserve to see the inside of a prison cell for doing so.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe