Mark Andrew Vinden, 53, of Seymour, pleaded guilty in Shepparton County Court to sexually assaulting a child under the age of 16, using a carriage service to access child abuse material and possessing or controlling child abuse material obtained or accessed using a carriage service.
In documents submitted to the court, the prosecution said Vinden inappropriately touched a nine-year-old girl at his Seymour home on March 24, 2022.
Vinden stopped when the victim asked him to, and she looked “shocked, upset and angry” when she got home, the prosecution said.
When interviewed by police, Vinden denied any sexual contact with the victim.
Crown prosecutor David Cordy called the sexual assault a “significant breach of trust”, due to the significant age gap between Vinden and the victim.
Police seized two mobile phones and an imitation firearm when they searched Vinden’s home on May 10, 2023.
One of the phones contained 449 files of child abuse material.
Of those, one image and 168 videos were evaluated as category one images, or the worst under the Interpol Baseline Scale, and 13 images and 267 videos were evaluated as category two.
There was child abuse material also stored on the other phone in a hidden secure folder disguised as a calculator app; however, it couldn’t be examined because police believed extracting it could alter the metadata.
Commonwealth Prosecutor Christina Hill said the offences were neither spontaneous nor isolated, as Vinden accessed the material almost every day.
Ms Hill told the court that Vinden showed no expression of sympathy for the children who were in the material he accessed for “personal sexual gratification”.
She also said hiding the “quite depraved” material in an app disguised as a calculator was an aggravating factor.
Vinden’s defence barrister, Philip Skehan, said his client happened upon the material by accident at first, before he found it “excited” him and “turned me (Vinden) on”.
Mr Skehan told the court Vinden had a “troubled upbringing” and had since been diagnosed within the extreme range of clinical depression.
In a report, a doctor said Vinden had below-average intelligence, low self-esteem and low self-confidence; however, commended him because it’s “not that frequent this type of offender is so open and honest”.
Vinden possessed a relatively small amount of material compared to similar cases and only possessed it for a short period of time, Mr Skehan said.
Mr Skehan also said it should “give the court some hope” Vinden “understands some boundaries” because he stopped when the victim asked him to.
Vinden will be sentenced in the Shepparton County Court in October.
15°C