"Abhorrent" paedophile caught online by undercover officer

Tuesday 30 October 2018

Undercover police officers have put a local paedophile behind bars, after he was caught using online adult chat rooms to ask for, and distribute, sexual images of young children.

Paul Rumens, 28, was sentenced in front of Guernsey's Royal Court yesterday, and received two years and six months in prison for making (downloading) 47 indecent images of children - he also was given a 10 year supervision period and a three year extended sentence.

Rumens was only caught after he went into an online adult chat room under the name "Barry Dad", and started talking to another account about his sexual fantasies involving "very young children". Unbeknownst to him, however, that account was operated by an undercover police officer in the UK. The conversation the defendant had with the officer was read out in court, and involved him talking about how he had molested a baby inside of a public toilet, and to "talk dirty about babies". Rumens later told police these stories were his fantasies, and did not actually occur.

Police used the defendants IP address to track him to his home in Guernsey, where they arrested him and seized a computer, laptop and mobile phone. The High Tech Crime Unit then examined the devices, and found 47 illegal images on the computer, along with evidence that a large amount of files had recently been deleted off of the memory. 

The images found were placed in four of five categories of child pornography. 40 of them were category one, nudity with no sexual activity, one was category two, solo sexual activity, one was category three, non-penetrative sexual activity with an adult, and five were category four, penetrative sexual activity with an adult. There were no images in category five, which is where the child depicted is involved in either sadism or bestiality. 

"He liked the danger of it, it was like an addiction, he said." - the Crown Prosecution during Rumens' sentencing. 

In interview, Rumens told police he had asked for images on these chat rooms, as well as distributing them to others. They were equivalent to a "currency" to keep the conversations he had with people going. Rumens was also quoted as saying "I didn't do it because I wanted to, I just couldn't stop myself", and also that he had been exchanging indecent images of children online "for years", but he never wanted to answer the question of why. He estimated that over those years he had been sent thousands of images which he had deleted.

During those police interviews, Rumens also refused to hear descriptions of the images he had downloaded, because it would "make him unstable".

Outlining Rumens' mitigating circumstances, his Advocate said her client had always used the online chat rooms to find friends - something he struggled with as a "loner". It then progressed from finding friends to having adult conversations. 

Now, since his arrest, the court was told Rumens was afraid to leave his home "because of fear of persecution". 

Pictured: Guernsey Prison. 

Overall, Rumens will be behind bars for two years and six months, then following his release, he will be on an extended sentence of three years. This means he will be under strict supervision for a three year period, and if he breaks any of the rules he is set, which include things like no access to the internet, he will be returned to prison for three more years. In addition to all of that, Rumens will also be under a 10 year sexual offenders supervision order. 

Judge Russell Finch said: "These are abhorrent offences to all right thinking people, who despise any sort of abuse to the young and vulnerable. Police officers, investigators, lawyers and the court have all had the very unpleasant duty of looking at these images, which is just one of many aspects of your crimes."