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'Abhorrent' UK paedophile back behind bars for sexually abusing
a second young girl
nechronicle
A paedophile is back behind bars after he was convicted of sick sex attacks on a seven-year-old girl.
Glen Dickinson had already served a prison sentence for abusing another young girl when she was aged under 10.
Now he has been jailed for 11 years after the second victim bravely came forward to tell police what he had done to her.
As he was locked up at Newcastle Crown Court, a victim impact statement from the girl was read out. She said she had been left with anxiety and depression and had to move as she felt like people knew what had happened.
She added: "I'm scared to go out by myself and I can't face going anywhere near the area where this happened. I have flashbacks and nightmares about what happened and I struggle to get to sleep. Even though he was put in jail it doesn't take away what he did to me.
"I'm left with this my whole life and it doesn't go away. It doesn't give me peace that he's in jail, no sentence ever would. The abuse has had a catastrophic effect. I'm also serving a sentence, except mine is for life."
Dickinson, 37, of Kearsley Close, Seaton Delaval, Northumberland, was found guilty by a jury of two serious sexual assaults on the child.
It was in 2014 that he was convicted of the earlier sex offences on the first victim. The new offending happened before that but only came to light more recently.
Judge Tim Gittins said Dickinson had an "abhorrent paedophilic interest" in young girls.
Referring to the victim, he added: "She had a bear a dreadful secret and has been deeply affected by your actions towards her and continues to be so." The judge said the abuse had left the girl "hurt and distressed". He added: "What you have done to her will endure, no doubt, for some time."
Judge Gittins said Dickinson poses a substantial risk to girls of cause serious harm and concluded he is a dangerous offender.
He was jailed for 11 years with an extended licence period of a further year. Sex offender registration and a sexual offences prevention order imposed in 2014 continue to be in force.
Catalonia bar worker arrested after cutting off boss’s penis,
claims she was defending herself from repeated rape
1 Jun, 2021 12:34
© Getty Images / Glasshouse Images
Catalonian police have arrested a woman after she cut off the penis of a man who owns the bar she worked at. The man is in hospital and is facing an investigation into repeated sexual assaults against the woman.
The mutilation took place in Sant Andreu de la Barca, a municipality located some 10km northwest from Catalonia’s capital Barcelona. The unnamed woman showed up at a local police precinct at around midnight on Monday, saying her boss tried to rape her. She told officers she took a knife to fend off the attack and cut off the man’s penis, local press reported.
The police took the woman, who works as a bar waitress, into custody, pending an investigation into her accusations against the man. She alleged she had suffered a number of sexual assaults from the bar owner, who she said repeatedly “forced her to have non-consensual sexual relations.” The Monday night scuffle that ended with blood was reportedly the first time she found the strength to say no and defend herself.
The mutilated man was taken to the nearby Bellvitge Hospital, where the authorities intend to arrest and question him after he recovers from surgery. It was not immediately clear if doctors managed to successfully reattach his amputated male appendage.
The woman was reportedly of Bangladeshi origin and some media suggested that so was the man. The names of the parties involved were not disclosed to the public.
Link to porn site found in Ukrainian textbook for schools
leads to criminal investigation
1 Jun, 2021 19:14
A criminal case on the distribution of pornographic content among minors has been launched in Ukraine after the discovery of a link to an adult website in a Ukrainian language textbook, the country’s Prosecutor General said.
A link to a porn site was recently found in a textbook which had been used to teach tenth graders the Ukrainian language since 2018, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Irina Venediktova, announced on Tuesday.
Children in Ukraine start school at the age of six, with the country’s tenth graders on average being 16 years old.
“It’s unclear if it was a joke or some sort of prank. But can you imagine how many kids we’ve raised over the past three years with such a book,” she pointed out.
The authorities reacted to the revelation “in an appropriate manner,” with the prosecutors launching a criminal case and cyberpolice blocking the adult website in question, Venediktova assured.
The blunder was first reported two weeks ago by the author of the ill-fated textbook, Aleksandr Avramenko. The famous educator and host of TV and radio shows took to Facebook to complain about the sluggishness of the Ukrainian authorities, who, according to him, were in no hurry to fulfill his appeal to block the R-rated website.
Avramenko explained that he cited some materials from what used to be an official news portal of one of the districts in Ukraine’s Kirovograd Region in his textbook and included a hyperlink in accordance with the copyright laws.
When his text was published in 2018, the website still belonged to the Novomyrhorod District, but last year the site was transferred to a new owner, who began using it to host a pornographic site, the author insisted, adding that “this metamorphosis has been discovered just now.”
The author suggested that this whole ordeal could be a provocation by some unnamed competitors who are jealous of his success.
“Why did this happen to my book? This year I submitted four textbooks to various contests and all of them won first places, leaving the rivals far behind. Maybe this is the reason? Unfortunately, I have enemies,” Avramenko wrote.
He also didn’t rule out that it could all have been a simple coincidence. It’s now up to the Ukrainian investigators to confirm or deny the author’s suspicions.
South Korean architect of violent pornographic ring
has sentence reduced
By Elizabeth Shim
June 1 (UPI) -- The criminal mastermind behind an online pornography ring in South Korea had his sentence reduced to 42 years from 45 after an appeal.
OK, I'll go along with that since I don't think he will survive either sentence.
Cho Ju-bin, 25, the founder of sexually exploitive chat rooms in which users could purchase explicit videos of women performing pornographic acts, was sentenced to 45 years in prison earlier this year. That sentence has been reduced, local news network YTN reported Tuesday.
The Seoul High Court said in its ruling that Cho acted as part of an organized crime ring and had accomplices. The court also said Cho caused "irreparable damage" to victims, but because he reached out to his victims during the appeal process, his sentence was reduced by three years, the report said.
Five other people were indicted with running the illegal site. Two out of the five defendants also had their sentences partly reduced, according to YTN.
Cho Ju-bin's father, who was not identified by name in local media, appeared before reporters to read a letter of apology from his son at court.
"I am so sorry to everyone," Cho wrote, according to Newsis. "I am ashamed of my nasty past, when I hid behind the mask of 'Doctor.'"
Cho, whose screen name was Doctor or Doc, has been accused of blackmailing dozens of women and forcing them to be filmed in violent videos that sometimes involved on-screen rape.
Cho initially lured the women, some of them minors, with promises of riches if they agreed to make videos that he sold online. Cho's transactions and those of his accomplices were conducted in cryptocurrency in 2019 and 2020, according to the New York Times in December.
Cho used the videos to blackmail the women to force them to make more videos that became increasingly violent and even "tailor-made" for their audience, according to the report.
Shin Yu-jin, an activist with Korea Cyber Sexual Violence Response Center, said Tuesday her group condemns the commutation.
The court also did not explicitly state the crimes specifically targeted women, Shin said, according to YTN.
Teacher in China sentenced to death for raping young girls
By Elizabeth Shim
Chinese students at Baisha primary school in Luxi County, Hunan Province, were raped and molested for decades, according to Chinese authorities Tuesday. File Photo by Stephen Shaver/UPI | License Photo
June 1 (UPI) -- A Chinese teacher at an elementary school has been sentenced to death for raping several students from 2001 to 2020, the Supreme People's Prosecutor's Office of China said Monday at a press conference.
Chinese authorities said the man, identified only by his surname Yang, raped and molested young girls at Baisha primary school in Luxi County, Hunan Province. Nine students were raped, China's highest prosecution authority said.
The crimes were carried out behind closed doors in offices and classrooms of the school, authorities said.
According to China's Procuratorate Daily, Baisha primary school did not hold Yang and an accomplice with the surname Mi accountable despite growing allegations.
In 2017, parents issued a complaint to the principal and vice principal, but the school did not follow up with an investigation. Yang and Mi continued to terrorize students after 2017, state media said.
Local police in Hunan did not begin investigations until May 2020 after two victims reported the alleged crimes to police.
The Prosecutors' Office said the sentencing occurred in August of last year. Yang was sentenced to death and Mi received a 17-year prison sentence, after authorities concluded Mi joined Yang in the gang rape of a 12-year-old girl, according to the South China Morning Post Tuesday.
Authorities in China did not confirm Tuesday whether Yang's execution already had taken place. Amnesty International said in a report in April that China is the world's No. 1 executioner, but the government does not publish numbers.
"The true extent of the use of the death penalty in China is unknown as this data is classified as a state secret," the organization. "The global figure of at least 483 excludes the thousands of executions believed to have been carried out in China."
In February, Wang Shujin, a man convicted of the murder and rape of several women, was executed in Hebei Province, according to China Daily. Wang was convicted after another man, Nie Shubin, was wrongly convicted and executed in 1995. Nie's name was cleared in 2016.
Young con artist left a global trail of deceit, including sex abuse victim
'Aurora' in Calgary
Shari Kulha 7 hrs ago
MSN.com
Samantha Azzopardi could pull off being 14 or 18, while actually being in her late 20s or early 30s.
© Provided by National Post
Over the years and in various countries, she pretended to be a victim of sex trafficking, a member of Swedish royalty, a Russian gymnast, and in Calgary, she said she was a victim of abuse and had escaped a kidnapping.
Samantha Azzopardi, of Sydney, is 32 but often portrayed herself as a teenager, the BBC says. She’s called herself Emily Peet, Lindsay Coughlin, Dakota Johnson, Georgia McAuliffe, Harper Hernandez, Harper Hart and more.
In a Melbourne court on Friday, a judge sentenced her to two years in prison after she faked her CV in 2019 to get a job as a live-in nanny — aged 18 — during which time she took her charges, aged four and 10 months, 200 kilometres across Australian state lines without permission. Her defence lawyer and the judge acknowledged they believed she had no intent to hurt the children.
A previous job as an au pair had seen her using her employer’s identity to pretend to be a casting agent. She had told a 12-year-old girl she could get her a job as a voiceover artist for Pixar.
When she was in Calgary in 2014, Azzopardi walked into a city clinic claiming to be Aurora Hepburn, a 14-year-old victim of prolonged sexual abuse and torture who had escaped a kidnapper. She was 26 at the time. She was convicted of public mischief — having caused police and health officials to spend $150,000 investigating her case — and deported.
They had spent weeks that fall searching for her background and discovered she had tried that ruse the previous year in Dublin, where she had been found pacing outside the famed General Post Office looking distressed but refusing to speak.
In the hospital she spoke not a word for weeks, but indicated through hand signals that was 14. The authorities began to suspect she had been a victim of human trafficking.
They went to considerable lengths trying to determine who she was. According to the BBC, they examined CCTV footage, went door-to-door, worked with child welfare specialists, missing persons services, Interpol, a forensic science laboratory, the immigration bureau, the domestic violence and sexual assault unit. They even contacted orthodontists across the country, as Azzopardi was wearing braces on her teeth.
“She was put in a children’s hospital, not eating, not talking,” the investigating police said. “It wasn’t fun.”
Samantha Azzopardi as seen while she was in Ireland.© Dublin police handout Samantha Azzopardi
as seen while she was in Ireland.
Similarly, Kelly Campbell of Calgary police’s child abuse unit, told the Calgary Herald at the time of their investigation that “There was considerable impact to a lot of the professionals that were working on this investigation, as we were led to believe that this was an actual occurrence and our concern was that there were victims that were out there, more victims.”
The Calgary court ordered her deported but held her in jail until her flight home, believing she was a flight risk; an officer with the Canadian Border Security Agency suggested to the adjudicator that the woman’s use of 40 aliases to commit offences in Australia were evidence she might disappear.
“She’s been uncooperative with CBSA,” a hearing officer had said, “refusing to answer our questions about how she obtained the travel documents needed to gain entry to Canada.”
The Herald reported that documents submitted at the hearing showed that, just six months after Azzopardi was deported from Ireland, she was back in that country again working as an au pair, having managed to get another passport from Australian authorities.
In Calgary, Azzopardi faced a maximum five years in prison, but after pleading guilty was sentenced to the two months she had already served in custody. She was put on a flight with a CBSA officer and sent home.
During the Irish trial, the court heard that she had been diagnosed with a severe personality disorder and a rare condition called pseudologia fantastica, which manifests itself in compulsive lying.
Other identities she’s used include telling a U.S. backpacker she was a Swedish royal, Annika Dekker, and she had been kidnapped when she was a young girl. On another occasion, Azzopardi told an Australian family she was a Russian gymnast, whose family had died by murder-suicide.
The question of how she paid for her various flights, let alone day-to-day living in Australia and elsewhere, has not been clarified, but she did once convince social services in Sydney that she was a teen victim and was enrolled in a school and placed in a foster home.
Through all this, authorities noted that Azzopardi had never spoken of monetary gain nor the desire for fame.
Curious girl.
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Bexhill Army Cadet leaders jailed over sexual abuse of girl
By Aidan Barlow @ArgusAidan
Crime Reporter
AN ARMY cadet leader sexually abused a girl in his troop after a Remembrance Sunday event marking the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
Lieutenant Dennis Bowie groomed the girl while he was a detachment commander of the army cadets in Bexhill.
The married 49-year-old was in cahoots with Sergeant Alice McElhinney, 33, where they groomed the cadets and shared their perverted fantasies with one another.
At Lewes Crown Court it was revealed Bowie had groped and kissed a 14-year-old girl. The victim, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, said the abuse left her self-harming.
In a statement she said: “I was used and felt trapped, I didn’t see any way of getting out of it.”
Bowie admitted an offence of sexual communication with a child, two offences of sexual activity with a child, and also three offences of making indecent images of children.
He was sentenced to five years and two months in prison.
McElhinney admitted one offence of sexual communication with a child, and two offences of sexual activity with a child. She was sentenced to a total of three years and nine months imprisonment.
Her Honour Judge Janet Waddicor described the offending as a massive breach of trust. The judge said: “It’s an abuse of trust by her family and the trust placed in them by the cadets. It was almost as if they were playthings.”
It's exactly as if they were playthings.
Amy Packham, prosecuting, told the court how Bowie and McElhinney shared hundreds of text messages about their desires to sexually abuse cadets.
In one message, Bowie told McElhinney he was disappointed with his attempts to abuse the girl after buying alcohol for cadets after the Remembrance Day service.
“Hey, I paid £75 and you got the snog. Lol,” Bowie sent in a text to McElhinney.
They had both been volunteers with the army cadets in Bexhill for years, Ms Packham said.
“There was discussion about what they were doing or trying to do with the young cadets on their phones,” Ms Packham said.
The messages showed the relationship between defendants was open and they were relaxed about the comments they were making to each other. “They trust each other with what would be seen as highly controversial views.
“Both were interested in the cadets sexually and suggested relations with previous cadets,” Ms Packham said.
Four young females had been identified as possible victims after McElhinney’s phone was seized by police. McElhinney tried to claim the messages were just “banter”.
The victim said: “I felt like my life would fall apart. I felt like nothing. I felt like a toy. It took me a long time to realise it wasn’t my fault.”
Bowie, of Orchard Road, Bexhill, and McElhinney, of Cornwall Road, Bexhill, are both now behind bars. They will both be registered sex offenders for life, and Sexual Harm Prevention Orders were issued to both which will restrict their access to children.
After the case, the Ministry of Defence said: “We can confirm that two former Army Cadet Force adult instructors were sentenced on Friday, May 28 at the Crown Court in Lewes following their guilty pleas to sexual offences.
“Child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime, and we have robust procedures in place to protect cadets. This includes all adults who work with children undergoing mandatory security and background checks, rigorous disclosure procedures and regular safeguarding training.
“We encourage anyone who has been a victim, or knows someone who has, to report it to the police.
“With the limitations of the Sexual Offences (Amendments) Act 1976 and 1992 we will never be able to give any details concerning the alleged victim which could lead to identification.”
The indecent images found on Bowie’s phone were taken from the internet and are not believed to be related to any local children.
East Sussex Safeguarding Investigations Unit Detective Constable Anthony Luke said: "The defendants committed sexual offences against a young girl which were also a serious breach of trust in relation to their roles having responsibility for the care and welfare of young people.
"The court heard that three girl cadets in the same Unit had also been subject of personal and online attention from Bowie and McElhinney in a way which clearly breached ACF rules on contact between staff and cadets."
'Monster' choirmaster convicted of child abuse
By Connor Stringer
Argus
A FORMER choirmaster and school teacher described by his victims as a “monster” has been found guilty of sexually abusing 13 children over four decades.
Mark Burgess, of St Chads Avenue, Portsmouth, Hampshire, was convicted at Portsmouth Crown Court of 48 counts of child abuse.
The charges, against children aged under 16, date to the 68-year-old’s time as a choirmaster at All Saints Church choir in Portsmouth and Westbourne Choir in West Sussex, between 1975 and 2009.
A Hampshire Police spokesman said: “The court heard that Burgess had previously been a music teacher and choir master, vocations which had brought him into contact with children time and again.
“Burgess had taught at Portsmouth City Boys’ School and also ran choirs in St John’s church in Westbourne, Sussex, and All Saints church in Commercial Road in Portsmouth.
“The court heard that, over the years, his attention became ‘fixed’ on a series of children. Burgess then took advantage of his positions of trust, either in the school or choir settings, in order to get closer to these children and draw them, and sometimes their families, into his trust.
“These children were then sexually abused by Burgess, with assaults taking place during piano lessons at Burgess’s home address or in the church vestry, in Burgess’s car, on choir trips out of county, and in the school music room.
“After decades of keeping this a secret, the children – all now adults – found the confidence to report this abuse to the police.”
Detective Inspector Adam Edwards said: “I want to commend the bravery of all the survivors who came forward to speak to police about this abuse.
“They have had to relive some of the worst experiences of their lives by going through the trial process, but their courage and commitment to bringing Mark Burgess to justice has ensured that he will be rightly punished for these horrific crimes.”
In a joint statement, some of the survivors said: “The extent of Mark Burgess’ abuse on all of us has been shocking and has turned our worlds upside down. Having to bury such a dark secret for decades, only to have to relive it all again, has been indescribable.
“Bringing up the past and coming to terms with what has happened at the hands of this monster has not been easy. The abuse was horrific and calculated. We had passions: music, singing, and the church. He exploited those passions for his ends.
“He manipulated, groomed, charmed, and bribed his way into our lives for his sexual gratification. He knew better.
“In court, his lies and attempts to manipulate and besmirch, show his abundance of arrogance and that he has never stopped abusing us; to put us through it in the first place was abhorrent, to put us through it again in court, beneath contempt.”
Burgess was remanded in custody for sentencing on June 30.
