Porn student jailed; COURT: Shame of undergraduate with 'revolting' shared child sex images.

Byline: By Emma Stone

A WARWICKSHIRE student has been jailed after admitting to a string of "revolting" child pornography offences.

James Russell, of Manor Lane, Shipston, admitted sending images of a young woman stripping to teenage boys in a bid to persuade them to perform sex acts in front of their web cams.

He also downloaded hundreds of indecent images of children from a file-sharing site and put a picture of naked young girl on the site himself.

The 22-year-old was caught after police received a tip-off from an American officer who had been investigating the site.

At Warwick Crown Court Russell sat sobbing in the dock as a judge told him the public would be revolted by his behaviour before jailing him for ten months.

Russell admitted 12 charges of making indecent images of children, one of possessing such images and one of distributing an image.

He also admitted two charges of causing a child to look at images of a person engaging in sexual activity and two of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity.

Prosecuting, Kate Iliffe explained a US investigation into a website called Highfive.com showed an e-mail address Russell had set up in the name of Kate Smith.

She said: "The defendant was part of a group of users who regularly shared pornographic images including, but not exclusively, photographs of children."

Between August 2006 and June 2007 Russell received e-mails with attachments of still and moving images that showed children posing naked and being sexually abused by adults.

The information was passed to Warwickshire police who raided Russell's home in March last year.

On his computer and a USB device were 577 indecent images of children and of adults engaging in sexual activity with children.

Officers also found chat line correspondence Russell, posing as a 21-year-old woman, had had with a 13-year-old boy in October 2006, during which he turned the chat to sexual matters.

After establishing the boy had a webcam, he sent pictures of a young woman stripping to persuade the boy to expose himself and perform a sex act in front of the camera. He did the same with a 15-year-old boy in April 2007.

Peter Freeman, defending, said Russell, who had been abused as a child, had been reading politics and international relationships at university and would have graduated in October.

He said Russell was a "lonely lad" who had been using the internet "trying to fathom what had happened to him", which led to his involvement with the site, about which he is now "disgusted and appalled".

Jailing Russell, Judge Richard Grif-fith-Jones ordered him to register as a sex offender for ten years and banned him from working with children, living at an address where any child lives, having a private internet account or using the internet for anything other than work or study.

He said: "Small children have been forced to engage in sexual activity.

That happened because people like you are prepared to see those pictures."