A leading scholar on child abuse, who was sought out for guidance by police forces on matters related to child pornography online, has pled guilty to producing 16 indecent images featuring minors. The court heard yesterday that Professor Christopher Bagley, 66, from Sutton, Surrey, acknowledged downloading the images from the internet, but contended that he had done so purely for the purpose of research.
A trial was held at Portsmouth Crown Court to investigate whether Bagley had obtained the images for his own sexual pleasure, or as part of legitimate research for his academic publications at the University of Southampton department of social science. Previously, Bagley had been granted permission by both Dorset and Hampshire police forces to access pornographic materials and offender files as part of his research. Notably, his publication history includes works such as Child Sex Abuses and Adult Offenders: New Theory & Research (1999), and Children, Sex & Social Policy.
In light of this, prosecutors sought to establish whether the images were obtained for clear academic research reasons, or to satisfy Professor Bagley’s personal proclivities. The trial of issue aimed to determine this before sentencing. The Crown argued that the professor had downloaded the images to fulfill his own sexual desires, using research as a guise for his personal obsession. Allegedly, Bagley’s surreptitious method of downloading the images and his failure to keep a record indicated that the images could not have been downloaded for legitimate research purposes.
Furthermore, Bagley had not notified the necessary authorities, including the police forces he had worked with and his own university, of his intention to access these images. Additionally, he had not communicated with co-author Professor Colin Pritchard about the book Sex Abusers, which they were writing together and for which the research was supposedly necessary. Prosecutors drew attention to certain dreams Bagley had chronicled for psychoanalysis in the late 1980s. These dreams, featuring him as a paedophile, were inferred to suggest his paedophilic tendencies.
The hearing is ongoing.
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