A pedophile in England has finally been banned from Facebook after he was caught using the social-networking site to pose as a girl and solicit nude photos from teen boys—for the second time in three years.
Callum Evans (né Dower), 21, got struck with a three-year community service order in Sept. 2011, after being found guilty of more than 10 different charges pertaining to child pornography. The presiding judge ruled that he shouldn’t have posed as a teenage girl to solicit explicit photos from teen boys on their phones.
The judge, a Taunton Crown Court presider named Graham Hume-Jones, ruled that the penalty was sufficient, that no jail time was required and that, for some reason, the convicted pedophile should not be barred from using Facebook, suggesting that a ban from the site would be “particularly excessive” and deprive him of the “social traffic” his peers got to enjoy each and every day.
Turns out that was sort of a bad idea.
Evans was back in court last week, standing once again before Taunton Crown’s Graham Hume-Jones, charged a second time with using Facebook to solicit sex from underage boys.
This round, the two boys were 14 years old and actually went through with meeting up with Evans, whom they quickly learned was not a young girl, but a 21-year-old male with blue eyes and fair skin.
Courts learned that Facebook had actually banned Evans from the site shortly after his 2011 conviction; Facebook’s terms of service ban convicted sex offenders from using the site, though in January, an American federal court ruled banning convicted sex offenders from social-networking sites unconstitutional.
After receiving the ban, Evans merely created a new account under a different alias. Since doing so, he’d accumulated more than 648 explicit images of children, all of which he’d stored on his phone and hard drive.
He was caught after the parents of one of those boys found pornographic images on his phone and got police to trace the source back to Evans. The 21-year-old faces a Friday sentencing from jail, where he has not been allowed to use Facebook.
Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III
