Newark man jailed for sex offences to a 14-year-old girl from Grantham

A registered sexual offender has been jailed after sending inappropriate messages to a 14-year-old girl.

Christopher David Clark, of Vernon Avenue, Newark was sentenced to a total of 44 months comprising of 20 months imprisonment and 2 years extension after sending indecent messages to a teenager.

The 56-year-old man was sentenced to a sexual harm prevention order for life, put on the sex offenders register for life and potentially barred from working with vulnerable adults and/or children.

He was first arrested on January 1 last year, after the Grantham girl showed the messages to her family who followed to contact the police.

“She gave me permission to check the messages and they were of a sexual nature,” said the girl’s mother.

“They were talking about inappropriate things such as shaving your private parts and masturbation.”

In 2016, Clark was given three years of community service and made to complete a sex offenders’ programme following a sexual offence case.

He was found to have 81 photographs of children on a memory stick, a photograph and two videos on his computer and seven photographs on his iPhone.

At the time, the court heard that he was contacted by what he believed to be a 13-year-old girl on an online forum who sent him explicit pictures.

The 13-year-old girl turned out to be a man from South Wales who then blackmailed Clarke out of £1,000.

Clark, who at the time was known as Christopher Ivermee – also received a sexual harm prevention order lasting five years for that incident

In 1995, when he was 28, his was convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl.

His recent victim’s mother said: “In my mind, I thought I knew him and he made me believe that stuff in the past had not been his fault.

“I feel a lot of guilt because I feel stupid for listening to his side when other people were telling me he wasn’t a good person and we let him into our house and our lives thinking that the people who made claims in the past were liars.”

The mother says her daughter feels betrayed over anything else when thinking of the situation as she trusted the man, who was a good family friend.

“She very much realises now. She wrote a victim impact statement which was quite hard for us to hear and it says in there how she didn’t understand at the time but now she does.

“This made her very wary of males, the only male she would be on her own with is my dad, her grandad.”