The Taunton Crown Court recently allowed a 19-year old sexual predator to keep his Facebook account despite his transgressions. The judge said that a Facebook ban would be ‘particularly excessive’ and that doing so would only deprive the teen of ‘social traffic’ taken for granted by his peers.

Callum Dower had been using Facebook for sexual grooming when he was 17 and 18 years old. He enticed boys to send him naked pictures of themselves, sending them various homosexual advances. When they would refuse, Dower would try again – this time posing as a female. Under the aliases of “Georgina”, “Georgie”, “Georgia”, or “Jade”, he would send the boys naked pictures of “herself” and ask them to send her some in return. His ploy eventually got him caught, as one guy he targeted noticed that the pictures he sent were of two different girls.

Dower’s targets were pretty young, with some even as young as 14. He later went on to molest two of those boys he targeted, one in a supermarket toilet and another in his car. Dower admitted to six charges of making an indecent image of a child, five of causing or inciting a child to take part in pornography, and two of sexual activity with a child. Dower has already lost his place in college due to his crimes and was sentence to a three-year community order and was placed under a 12-hour overnight curfew for three months. He is also now banned from working with children and is now listed in the sex offender’s register for five years.

Dower has already been previously warned about the police about his interest in young boys and now this warning was reiterated by the judge. The judge called him “extremely manipulative” and said that if he continues on this path, he might just find himself in prison at some point.

With all his restrictions, though, the only thing he wasn’t deprived of was his Facebook account. The judge considered that doing so would be ‘particularly excessive’. However, since Facebook policies implicitly states that convicted sex offenders are disallowed from joining the site and creating an account. As such, Dower’s account has now been deleted.