A SEXUAL deviant who shared his perverted interests with like minded people on the internet has narrowly avoided an immediate prison sentence.

Paul Rawcliffe was caught by police in Canada after he uploaded child sex abuse images and videos onto a website used to share the work of amateur photographers.

The specially trained officers alerted North Yorkshire Police about the 51-year-old's online activities and he was arrested in October 2019.

Lewis Kerr, prosecuting, said a forensic search of Rawcliffe's digital devices showed that he stored some images onto his mobile phone while others were saved to an online digital storage system.

Mr Kerr told the court that some of the children being sexually abused were very young and in police interview the defendant said he had started looking at the images after spending more and more time at home after suffering an injury at work.

Rawcliffe, of Manor House Track, Newsham, near Richmond, pleaded guilty to possession of 162 category A images – the worst category; possession of 250 category B images and 197 category C images.

Amrit Jandoo, mitigating, said his client had made full admissions at the earliest opportunity.

He said: "It is with terrible regret and shame that he finds himself in this situation.

"It appears my client engaged in alcohol consumption to cope with the boredom and started with adult pornography but progresses to darker elements of the web and that is when these offences occurred."

The Recorder of Middlesbrough Judge Paul Watson QC sentenced Rawcliffe to ten months in prison, suspended for 18 months.

He said: "These were images of young children being subjected to physical and sexual abuse – this not a victimless crime.

"This sort of abuse that these children are subjected to invariably has a lasting affect, indeed it is hard to see given the nature of some of the images you were looking at how it could be otherwise.

"What you were doing by viewing and downloading these images was encouraging that very exploitation. It is right that a custodial sentence is virtually inescapable for offences of this nature."

Rawcliffe was also made subject to a ten year sexual harm prevention order and ordered to sign on the sex offenders' register for the same period.