Christopher Jarvis was a child safety coordinator for the Catholic Church in England.
What that means, basically, is that he was responsible for investigating sexual abuse allegations. He was a married man and father of four. He was in charge of child protection at 120 churches and parish community groups for nine years. He was also a member of the Devon and Cornwall Multi-Agency Safeguarding Team, with access to police and social services information about victims of child abuse.
You know where this is headed. Just call him the Dexter of child porn.
http://liarcatchers.com/pedophile_tracking.html
Jarvis, 49, also had a sweet stash of more than 4,000 child pornographic images of boys aged 10-12 years stored on his church-supplied computer, according to the Daily Mail. Sadly, they were not for investigative purposes. The images were also stored on a memory stick. Jarvis got busted after trying to upload various images to the social networking site, Ning.
He was arrested back in March and sentenced to a year in prison at the end of October. The revelations, however, of the Catholic Church hiring a pedophile to investigate its sexual abuse allegations is downright chilling. It speaks to the similar systematic problems in large bureaucracies that has plagued Penn State throughout the Jerry Sandusky scandal. 1
According to the Daily Mail:
The court heard that 4,389 images were found on the laptop and memory stick. The majority, 3,721, were at Level One, the lowest level for abusive images. But there were 120 at Level Four, which includes scenes of child rape, and 12 at Level Five, which can include scenes of torture and sadism.
Jarvis, who the court heard claimed he was abused as a child, was sentenced at the city’s crown court after admitted 12 counts of making, possessing and distributing indecent images at a previous magistrates’ court hearing.
The court was told that Jarvis, who was fired as soon as he admitted his crimes to the police, has been barred from attending any Catholic services in Plymouth.
He felt ‘ostracised’ by the church since his arrest, the court was told, and had attempted to commit suicide.
Police who examined the computer after Jarvis’s arrest found that, as well as the images, he had viewed erotic content about a relationship between a nine-year-old boy and an adult man.
Jarvis was jailed for 36 weeks concurrently for each of the six charges of possessing indecent images of a child and five charges of making an indecent image of a child; he was sentenced to serve another 16 weeks consecutively in prison for one charge of distributing indecent images of children.
The Catholic Church and organizations that employed Jarvis maintain he was a qualified social worker and did not act improperly throughout his role in investigating sexual abuse allegations. A spokesman for the church said they were “shocked” by the charges and will remain “continually vigilant” as an organization to “manage the risk to vulnerable children.”
Jarvis’ defense attorney argued that her client was in need of psychological help due to suffering sexual abuse as a child and would not benefit from being locked away in prison. That argument, however, mattered little to the judge, who said Jarvis should have been “more aware than other” of the damage done by downloading child pornographic images.
