Leamington man pleads guilty to 40 child sex offences

Andrew Pykett, from Clarendon Avenue in Leamington Spa, pleaded guilty to 40 child sex offences at the Warwick Crown Court last Friday 17 March.

The 38-year-old pleaded guilty to 20 counts of sexual activity with a child, one count of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation, one count of taking indecent photographs of a child, six counts of making indecent photographs of a child, one count of making an indecent image of a child and two counts of drug possession.

Mr Pykett also pleaded guilty to seven charges of meeting girls aged 14 or 15, after sexually grooming them online with the intent to engage in sexual activity. He also admitted to two charges of attempting to meet a further two 14-year-old girls following grooming.

While the crimes took place for over a decade between 2004 and 2016, the majority happened between 2011 and the end of 2015.

The offences involved ten victims, aged between 13 and 16, from South Yorkshire, Essex, London, Wiltshire, South Wales, Nottingham, Birmingham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Chesterfield and the United States.

Judge Andrew Lockhart ordered him to register as a sex offender, a status which will last for life. He was also remanded in custody prior to his sentencing on Friday 12 May.

Mr Pykett has denied three counts of trafficking allegations and pleaded not guilty to 13 counts of sexual activity and attempted grooming. These charges were allowed to lie on the court file at the request of the prosecutor.

A Freedom of Information response from the Warwickshire Police has revealed 266 reported sex offences against children under 13 in 2015, as opposed to 106 in 2013. Many of these were historic crimes, which took place a year or more before they were reported.

Between the two years, the number of students recorded as victims of sexual assault more than halved, from 130 to 63, while the amount of student detected offenders or suspects dropped from 20 to 16.

Meanwhile, an article in the Coventry Telegraph last January revealed a 13% rise in the number of sexual offences in the West Midlands over the past year. The West Midlands Police reported over 4,600 sex offences in the year leading up to September 2016.

This means that, on average, a sex crime is recorded every two hours in the area.

Coventry accounted for 565 of the crimes recorded, whilst Birmingham represented 2041. While the number of recorded sex offences rose across the country, in the West Midlands it rose slightly above the national average.

However, the Office for National Statistics has argued that this trend does not mean sex crime is on the rise nationwide. Instead, it suggests that the police are now recording sexual offenses more efficiently as a result of recent mainstream publicity over such issues as the football abuse allegations and the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012.