A Dunedin man will serve eight months on home detention in the house where he posed online as a young girl and downloaded child pornography.
Dylan James Pauling (24) initially tried to make contact with adults through the internet but when that failed, his counsel, Sarah Saunderson-Warner, said, he turned to an ‘‘alternate persona’’.
The defendant pretended to be an under-aged girl and engaged in fantasy chats on forums for those interested in child sex abuse and incest, the court heard.
Pauling would download images or videos of child porn and then change file names and website addresses to pretend they were of him. One file found by investigators had been renamed ‘‘me 12 years old’’.
When Pauling was caught by the Department of Internal Affairs in 2016, he was charged with three counts of possessing objectionable publications.
Initially, he said the transfer of some objectionable files to his electronic devices had been ‘‘accidental’’ and some of them made him feel sick.
However, Pauling admitted he got sexual gratification from the online conversations.
Judge Kevin Phillips said the use of the female alter egos began in 2011.
By 2013, Pauling was discussing sexual matters online with a 13-year-old and 16-year-old girls.
They talked about incest and the defendant encouraged the younger girl to have unprotected sex.
In total, the authorities found 56 illegal files when a search warrant was executed.
The judge said he had viewed some of the images concerned.
He described them as ‘‘appalling’’ and ‘‘disturbing’’.
‘‘The faces of the children in the photos depict how victimised they have been,’’ Judge Phillips said.
Ms Saunderson-Warner provided letters to the court from Pauling’s mother — who attended sentencing — that described her son as ‘‘a good kid’’.
Family friends expressed a similar sentiment and the man’s employer described him as ‘‘honest and hardworking’’.
But the judge said that had to be viewed against his prolonged offending.
He questioned whether sentencing Pauling to home detention in the Dunedin home where he committed the offences would be of sufficient deterrent and denunciative value.
But by a ‘‘very very narrow margin’’, Judge Phillips decided against a term behind bars.
‘‘I don’t think you have the maturity or the background where you would survive in a prison environment,’’ he said. ‘‘I think it would destroy your mother.’’
While serving the home-detention term and for six months afterwards, Pauling is barred from using electronic devices or associating with children under 16, unless pre-approved by Probation.
He was told to complete a rehabilitation programme and the judge ordered the destruction of his laptop, cellphones and storage drives, which he had used in committing the offences.
Pauling was additionally sentenced to 200 hours’ community work.