BARROW: OBSESSIVE COLLECTOR HOARDED CHILD PORN ON ‘INDUSTRIAL SCALE’
An obsessive collector who owns more than 40,000 empty beer cans faces jail after police seized a ‘staggering’ catalogue of child porn images.
Robert Barrow, 48, who has also kept every transport ticket he has ever used, built up a hoard of at least three quarters of a million clips and pictures – the largest collection of indecent images recovered by the Metropolitan police.
The films and still photographs included horrifying footage of young children being sexually abused and even tortured by adults.
He also made 170,000 images from his collection available online for paedophiles to access.
Barrow pleaded guilty to a series of child pornography offences at Southwark Crown Court.
Judge Anthony Leonard, QC, adjourned sentencing until 16 September to allow probation and psychological reports to be prepared.
He told the defendant: ‘You must understand that offences of this seriousness almost inevitably result in custodial sentences.’
Barrow’s barrister Andrew Cohen specifically asked for doctors to assess his client’s obsessive compulsive disorder, which he said had led to him collecting such a large number of images.
He said: ‘He is a diabetic, and he has not been for a long time sexually functioning, and the possession of all these images and the collection of them, I will be ultimately submitting, is something that arises out of his interest in collecting objects.
‘He is an obsessive collector of tickets, and he has about 40,000 beer cans at home. He keeps every ticket he has ever had.
‘The number of images here is quite a staggering one, but there is an explanation for it in terms of what I have just set out.’
Barrow, from Plaistow, east London, admitted seven counts of downloading indecent images of children and two of possessing such images with a view to showing or distributing them on dates on or before August 13 last year.
The charges itemise 743,607 images which were downloaded and 169,900 which were made available for distribution.
The images are categorised from level one to level five – the most serious level in terms of sentencing.
Detective Inspector Noel McHugh, from the Met’s paedophile unit, said: ‘This is the largest seizure of indecent images of children that the Met’s Paedophile Unit has recovered from one individual.
‘Barrow’s activities were on an industrial scale.
‘This investigation demonstrates the commitment of the Met Police to target paedophiles both on and offline.
‘This is not a victimless crime as each indecent image of a child possessed or distributed represents a child that has been abused in order that the image can exist.’
ENDS
