Ex-bank employee jailed over child abuse material
A 53-year-old bank employee found with "stomach turning" child abuse material and photos of girls at a popular Brisbane landmark has been jailed.
Mark Thomas Pashley-Partridge was arrested during a search at his home in the Brisbane suburb of Salisbury with about 950 child abuse images and videos on his phone and laptop, a court has heard.
He used four messaging applications to transmit, make available, solicit and access child abuse material over about two years until his arrest in September 2021.
Pashley-Partridge also admitted online grooming of two people he believed to be 14-years-old and another who claimed to be 12.
Detectives found messages with "like-minded" people in which Pashley-Partridge said he would watch children younger than his preference of nine to 12-years-old, Brisbane District Court Judge John Allen said.
"As long as they are young, I'm happy," he said in communications quoted in court.
After describing a video showing child abuse, Judge Allen told Pashley-Partridge: "You could have been under no illusion that real children had not suffered terribly to source the video and other image material with which you dealt and possessed."
Pashley-Partridge also had graphic discussions via text with a person purporting to be a mother who, with her husband, was sexually abusing her two daughters.
Actions that the 53-year-old with no criminal convictions described as his desires were stomach turning, Judge Allen said.
By soliciting images, Pashley-Partridge encouraged others to further abuse children.
He also accessed upskirting images of girls aged between six and 12 climbing letters that spell the word "Brisbane" in the city's Southbank precinct.
Offences involving criminal abuse material are not victimless crimes, Judge Allen said in sentencing Pashley-Partridge.
"Real children suffer terribly to provide those images and are re-victimised by the distribution of such images."
Written child abuse material was also not harmless offending as it had a tendency to normalise exploitative sexual activity involving children, Judge Allen added.
Pashley-Partridge worked in the financial services industry for more than 30 years, resigning when employers at the bank where he worked came to know about the charges.
Judge Allen said no sentence other than imprisonment was appropriate for the 10 charges to which Pashley-Partridge had pleaded guilty.
He handed down a head sentence of four years behind bars, ordering Pashley-Partridge be eligible to apply for parole after serving one year and four months in jail.
1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732)
National Sexual Abuse and Redress Support Service 1800 211 028
