50 year old Philip Swift from Shanklin has been jailed for three years and four months for sexual grooming and sexual activity with a child, reports the Bournemouth Echo.
He was sentenced on Friday last week at Bournemouth Crown Court after admitting “meeting a child following sexual grooming and sexual activity with a child”.
Posed as a teen
The Echo say the court heard that Swift had posed as a 15 year old boy on the penpals Website, InterPals, where he struck up a relationship with the victim.
Within hours of the communications starting, Swift revealed his real age to the victim, but the secret communications continued for a year, with them using Skype to “watch the other performing sex acts upon themselves”.
Taken to hotel
In November 2013 Swift is reported to have traveled to Bournemouth to meet the victim.
He’d booked a hotel room for the night, pre-booking breakfast and telling the girl to “put a hood and jacket on so she would be disguised”.
Caught out
The secret relationship was finally exposed when a family member saw a photograph of Swift on the teen’s iPod and informed her mother.
Before he could be arrested, Swift left the country and spent six months in South Africa visiting relatives. He was arrested at the airport on his return the UK.
Judge: “The nightmare of every mother”
Judge John Harrow is reported as saying,
“You must represent the nightmare of every mother of a teenage girl.
“You are 50 now, and were 49 at the time. You employed quite a degree of subterfuge and craftiness to establish contact with this young girl on an innocent Internet site.”
Once he is released, Swift will be subject to an indefinite Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
