St Leonards man Mark Oak has gone to prison after a Sussex Police investigation found that he had been making some of the most degrading of indecent images of children available to others on the internet, including one video lasting 17 minutes.

Oak, 45, of Cloudesley Road, St Leonards, was given a sentence totalling 32 months at Lewes Crown Court on Monday (March 16th) after pleading guilty to eight counts of making and distributing 5,700 indecent images of children, possessing 1,270 extreme images and possessing 14 prohibited images, all relating to children.

He will be a registered sex offender for life and was given a Sexual Harm Prevention Order (SHPO) to last indefinitely, severely restricting his access to computers and other digital devices.

Detective Constable Gary Baker of the Sussex Paedophile Online Investigation Team (POLIT) said: “Our investigation started when we received intelligence that Oak had been accessing indecent images of children, including videos, from the internet and had made hundreds of them further available by online recirculation.

“We arrested him at an address at which he was then living in Hastings, and seized laptops and hard drives which were his personal property. Once we interviewed him and confronted him with the evidence he had little option but to admit what he had been systematically doing over a period of years.

“Each one of the images represents a child being abused and this was reflected in the court’s sentence.”

All the images were taken from the Internet and there is no evidence that any were of local children. All Oak’s offending took place at the address in Hastings where he was living when he was arrested.