A man never realised who he was really speaking to when trying to arrange some “genuine family fun” on a sexual fetish forum.
Depraved Darren Harkins revealed he thought age was “just a number” to him when arranging to have sex with a child.
The 48-year-old appeared at court yesterday where he was charged with attempting to incite a girl aged under 13 to engage in penetrative sexual activity.
Harkins, from Glyn Ceiriog, thought he was speaking to a depraved mother offering up her own nine-year-old daughter for that abuse. However, the messages were coming from someone completely different, according to North Wales Live.
Prosecutor Simon Rogers said that, in reality, there was no child being put at risk as Harkins had in fact been spotted online by an undercover police officer.
She made initial contact with him on the website that catered for those with an interest in BDSM - which the court heard stands for bondage, dominance, submission and sadomasochism.
Officers from the South West Regional Organised Crime Unit were tasked online in order to identify those that expressed a sexual interest in children, Mr Rogers said. It wasn’t long before they were onto Harkins.
The court heard that Harkins had set up his own discussion board online. He said he was “looking for the impossible” and seeking out “genuine family fun”.
In July 2020, an officer posed as a mum replying to Harkins’ post online. He responded and had their chat move onto another social media site because he worried about having the discussion openly online.
In the conversations that followed, Harkins took little issue with the woman offering up her primary school-aged daughter for sex. He told the “mum” that age is “just a number” to him.
Harkins - who said that he was “turned on by incest” - also sent videos of himself having sex to the woman. He would then ask that these were shown to the child to demonstrate “what he’d do to her”.
Harkins sent over a dozen videos in the weeks that followed to the undercover officer. They consisted of the 49-year-old performing sex acts upon himself and making reference to the child “wanting to play” with his genitals.
In further text messages, Mr Rogers told the court, the pair had started to make arrangements to meet at a hotel one afternoon in Gloucester. He made suggestions that, should the child enjoy the encounter, they could “do this every month or so”.
Harkins told the officer that he’d “never done anything like this before”. He continued to show signs of worry that he’d fallen into “some sort of trap” saying he was “scared” that upon meeting them there would in fact be “big cops there to take [him] down” instead.
North Wales Police carried out a warrant in October 2020 at Harkins’ Denbighshire home. Here, they found the phone he had been using to chat with the undercover officer hidden behind a desk drawer in his study.
Mark Connor, defending, said that Harkins was “deeply ashamed” but “well aware” of the seriousness of the offence. He knew that jail was the judge’s “only realistic option” for punishment, said Mr Connor.
He added that his client was not driven by a “desire to abuse children” but was a man with a general sex addiction. He said this caused him to “push the boundaries” when seeking “more extreme forms” of sexual activity with consenting adults.
Judge Niclas Parry said that, after hearing everything, he was unconvinced that Harkins was not a danger to children. He expressed that “mercifully” no actual child was put in harm’s way in this case.
Jailing Harkins for three years and four months, Judge Parry said: “You indicated by your depraved conduct that you were prepared to use a child aged only nine for sexual gratification. What makes this a particularly serious matter is that you were prepared to use the child’s equally depraved mother to assist.”
The court ordered that Harkins’ online activity be monitored for life. He was banned from having unsupervised contact with any child under the age of 16 without relevant parents and social services being aware of his convictions.
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