Offending Across Childhood and Adulthood: Youth-Sensitive Sentencing, Concurrency and Proportionate Protective Orders

1. Introduction

This appeal concerned the sentencing of an adult whose offences involving indecent images of children began when he was 17 and continued until he was 19. The central questions were how childhood offending should influence a sentence imposed years later, how related offences spanning childhood and adulthood should be structured, and what weight should be given to substantial investigative delay and sustained rehabilitation.

A further issue concerned a sexual harm prevention order (“SHPO”): whether restrictions on the appellant’s internet activity remained necessary despite several offence-free years, and whether a ten-year duration was proportionate.

The Court of Appeal reduced the aggregate sentence from 24 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years, to 16 months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. It retained the SHPO but reduced its duration from ten years to five. The decision principally applies and reinforces existing authority rather than announcing an entirely new sentencing doctrine.

2. Background and Sentencing History

The offending and investigation

The appellant, who had no previous convictions, faced three charges of making indecent photographs of children and one charge of distributing such material. The chronology was important:

• Distribution: three category B videos were distributed in December 2019, when the appellant was 17.
• Two making offences: files relating to charges 1 and 4 were created in September 2020, when he was 18.
• The principal making offence: charge 3 concerned 93 images across categories A–C, with file dates between December 2019 and May 2022, spanning ages 17 to 19.

The police first became involved in September 2020 after a family member discovered an image. Following a further investigation, the appellant was arrested in June 2022. He was not charged until October 2025, approximately 40 months later. The explanation available to the appellate court was a backlog of devices awaiting examination.

The appellant pleaded guilty at his first appearance. The distribution charge was subsequently corrected, and he pleaded guilty to the amended charge before sentence.

Mitigation and rehabilitation

The mitigation included the appellant’s youth, previous good character, remorse, childhood trauma, health difficulties and vulnerability. During the period following arrest, he undertook substantial rehabilitative work with the Lucy Faithful Foundation and attended weekly psychotherapy for more than three years. Employment and supportive relationships were additional protective factors.

The pre-sentence report recorded full acceptance of responsibility and significant progress. Its assessment of a low risk of reoffending was conditional: it depended on continued abstinence from illegal substances, application of therapeutic learning, and an SHPO restricting and monitoring internet activity. The report recommended a community order with a rehabilitation activity requirement.

The Crown Court’s approach

The sentencing judge found that the custody threshold had been crossed. Aggravating features included moving images, the young ages of the children, discernible distress and the volume and duration of the offending. The judge also treated the principal making offence as an escalation after earlier police involvement.

The resulting aggregate sentence was 24 months’ imprisonment, suspended for 24 months, with a 30-day rehabilitation activity requirement. A ten-year SHPO was imposed. Although the judge referred to the relevant guidelines and mitigation, the Court of Appeal found that the sentencing explanation did not sufficiently demonstrate their effect on the length and structure of the sentences.

3. Summary of the Decision

The appeal succeeded in part. The Court of Appeal held that:

1. The sentences insufficiently reflected the appellant’s age when offending, including the fact that the distribution offence was committed in childhood.
2. The related offending spanning childhood and adulthood should have been addressed through an overall sentence on the principal charge, with concurrent sentences for the other offences.
3. The substantial delay and extensive personal mitigation required greater recognition.
4. A suspended custodial sentence remained appropriate; a community order was not required.
5. An SHPO remained necessary, but ten years was unnecessarily long.

The court also corrected the record to make clear that the eight-week sentence belonged to charge 4, not charge 2. Other ancillary orders remained unaltered. As the privately funded appeal had succeeded, the court ordered payment of the appellant’s costs from Central Funds.

4. Precedents Cited and Their Significance

R v Ghafoor [2002] EWCA Crim 1857

This authority supplied the starting principle: the sentencing court should consider the sentence likely to have been imposed at the time of the offence. The offender’s age at eventual sentence must not obscure the legal significance of having offended as a child.

Its importance here was practical. The appellant was an adult by conviction and sentence, but the distribution offence had been committed at 17. The court therefore had to reconstruct the appropriate childhood sentencing starting point rather than simply apply adult sentencing standards with a general allowance for youth.

R v Ahmed Nazir [2023] EWCA Crim 281

This decision confirmed the approach to adults sentenced for offences committed as children. As explained in the present judgment, the Sentencing Children and Young People guideline remains relevant and must be followed unless doing so would be contrary to the interests of justice. The starting point is the sentence likely to have been imposed had the offender been sentenced shortly after the offence.

Applying that approach, the court accepted that the distribution offence, considered alone and sentenced promptly, would probably have been dealt with in the Youth Court. Given the guilty plea and previous good character, the conditions for a compulsory referral order would have been satisfied.

That did not require the adult sentencing court to impose an unavailable youth disposal. Nor could the distribution offence be isolated from the remaining offending. The significance of the hypothetical youth sentence was that it demonstrated why an ordinary adult starting point required substantial adjustment.

R v Smith [2024] EWCA Crim 1183

This authority reaffirmed the childhood-sentencing principles and addressed offending beginning at a young age and continuing over several years. The suggested approach was to sentence the later offending in a way that took account of the earlier offending, while making the sentences for earlier offences concurrent.

That approach was central to the appeal. The Crown Court had increased the sentence on charge 3 to reflect continued offending and aggravating circumstances, yet also imposed consecutive punishment for earlier offending. The Court of Appeal concluded that the overall sentence should instead be carried by charge 3, with the remaining terms concurrent.

The decision therefore concerns both sentence length and sentence architecture. A court may acknowledge youth but still produce an excessive aggregate sentence if related offending is accumulated without proper attention to totality.

R v Eniola Balogun [2018] EWCA Crim 2933

The appellant relied on this authority for the proposition that turning 18 does not create a sentencing “cliff edge”. Although the Court of Appeal did not separately analyse that decision at length, its reasoning recognised the underlying point: offences committed at 18 or 19 still required meaningful consideration of youth and maturity.

The court distinguished the mandatory relevance of the children’s guideline to offences committed as a child from its possible relevance when sentencing a young adult. Neither position justified treating the appellant’s age merely as background information.

R v Hamilton [2022] EWCA Crim 127

This authority was relied on in opposition to the SHPO. The sentencing judge described it as involving a substantial offence-free period, a clear trajectory towards maturation and a different assessment of risk.

The Court of Appeal nevertheless upheld the need for an order in the present case. The appellant had continued offending after police involvement, deterioration in mental health had coincided with offending, and the pre-sentence report expressly treated internet restrictions and monitoring as protective.

The important distinction is evidential. An offence-free period and increasing maturity may weigh against an SHPO, but they do not automatically remove its necessity. Here, the favourable risk assessment itself depended partly on the proposed order.

5. Analysis of the Court’s Reasoning

A. Youth must be applied, not simply acknowledged

The sentencing judge had expressly referred to the children’s guideline and the appellant’s youth. The defect was not a complete failure to identify the relevant considerations, but a failure to show how they affected the result.

For the distribution offence committed at 17, the judge did not explain the application of childhood sentencing principles or identify the reduction from an adult sentence. For offending committed at 18 or 19, the remarks similarly failed to demonstrate sufficient consideration of age.

The judgment does not require a rigid numerical discount for every mitigating factor. It does, however, emphasise the need for reasons that make the practical influence of youth intelligible. Listing relevant guidelines cannot substitute for applying them.

B. Accurate chronology is essential

The appeal exposed errors in the Crown Court’s understanding of the timeline. Charges 1 and 4 appeared to have been committed when the appellant was 18, not 17. Charge 3 covered December 2019 to May 2022 rather than a wholly separate episode occurring “years later”.

The absence of a more detailed breakdown of file dates was unfortunate because it prevented precise allocation of all the material between childhood and young adulthood.

The Court of Appeal did not disregard continued offending after police intervention: that remained an aggravating consideration. It rejected an oversimplified chronology that obscured the overlap between the charges and distorted the overall sentencing exercise.

C. Concurrency gave effect to totality

The principal charge carried a 12-month guideline starting point. The aggravating features justified a substantial increase, but the sentence also had to reflect youth, delay, rehabilitation and the other mitigation.

The Court of Appeal concluded that 16 months after the guilty-plea reduction was appropriate for the whole course of offending, not merely charge 3 considered in isolation. Making the other terms concurrent then produced an aggregate sentence of 16 months.

This is not a universal rule that every offence committed before adulthood must run concurrently with every later offence. The reasoning addressed the connected course of offending before the court, applying the established authorities on offending spanning childhood and adulthood.

D. Delay mattered without a finding that it was unjustifiable

The court declined to accept that delay caused by a forensic backlog must necessarily be described as unjustifiable. It recognised inherent resource limitations. Nevertheless, 40 months awaiting a charging decision was a considerable period for a young person to remain in uncertainty and should have been reflected in sentence.

This separates two questions: whether the delay warrants criticism of the authorities, and whether its consequences matter to a proportionate sentence. The second can be answered affirmatively without deciding the first against the prosecution.

The delay also allowed the appellant to demonstrate sustained rehabilitation. That was not a reason to ignore the burden of waiting; it was an additional circumstance relevant to sentence and future risk.

E. Rehabilitation did not require a community order

The court accepted that a community order can sometimes be appropriate even where the seriousness of an offence crosses the custody threshold. The Imposition Guideline and the offence-specific guidance permit that outcome where a community sentence adequately serves sentencing purposes, including rehabilitation.

However, the court rejected the submission that this case required such a disposal. The seriousness of the offending justified custody, and suspension appropriately recognised the rehabilitation already achieved and continuing.

The distinction is important: the court found the original sentence excessive in length and structure, not wrong in its selection of a suspended custodial sentence. Rehabilitation influenced the sentence without displacing the seriousness of harm to the children depicted.

F. SHPO necessity and duration required separate decisions

The court stated that an SHPO may be imposed only where necessary for the relevant protective purpose. It must also last no longer than necessary.

Necessity was established by the combination of continued offending after earlier police involvement, the relationship between deteriorating wellbeing and offending, and the protective role attributed to monitoring and restrictions by the pre-sentence report.

The report’s low assessment of reoffending risk therefore did not undermine the order. That assessment was conditional on safeguards. Equally, the references to a medium risk of harm to children and a low risk of reoffending were not necessarily contradictory: the potential harm and the likelihood of recurrence are different questions.

Although the order was necessary, its original ten-year duration was excessive. Five years was sufficient. The court left the substantive restrictions unchanged, illustrating that proportionality may require adjustment of duration without removal of the order itself.

G. Notification requirements remained distinct

The reduction of the SHPO to five years did not shorten the separate notification requirements. The court expressly confirmed that the notification period remained ten years because of the applicable sentence-length category.

This distinction prevents a practical misunderstanding: the expiry of a protective order does not necessarily end all obligations arising from the conviction.

H. The later suspension provisions did not apply

The judgment noted that section 277A of the Sentencing Act 2020, introduced through section 1 of the Sentencing Act 2026, came into force on 22 March 2026. The original sentence had been imposed on 24 November 2025, and the court stated that those provisions did not apply.

The decision should therefore not be treated as an interpretation of the new statutory approach to suspension.

6. Potential Impact

The judgment provides useful guidance for delayed prosecutions involving offending that crosses the boundary between childhood and adulthood.

• Sentencing preparation: practitioners should establish the offender’s age at each offence and identify uncertainty in digital-file chronology.
• Sentencing reasons: courts should explain the practical consequences of childhood sentencing principles and young-adult mitigation, rather than merely naming the relevant guidelines.
• Totality: connected offending should be assessed as a whole before consecutive terms are imposed. The sentence carrying the overall criminality should be clearly identified.
• Delay: substantial investigative delay may mitigate sentence even without a finding that it was unjustifiable.
• Rehabilitation: sustained therapeutic work can materially affect sentence, but does not automatically justify a community order.
• Protective orders: necessity, restrictions and duration require individual justification. A favourable risk assessment must be read alongside its assumptions and safeguards.

The decision’s broader value is methodological: it shows how errors in chronology, insufficiently explained mitigation and inappropriate sentence structure can combine to produce a manifestly excessive result.

7. Complex Concepts Simplified

Manifestly excessive sentence

A sentence sufficiently excessive to justify appellate intervention, rather than one the appeal court would merely have set differently.

Custody threshold

The level of seriousness at which imprisonment becomes available. Crossing it does not invariably require a custodial sentence.

Suspended sentence

A custodial sentence not immediately served, subject to compliance during the suspension period. It remains a sentence of imprisonment.

Concurrent and consecutive sentences

Concurrent terms run together; consecutive terms run one after another. The choice can substantially change the total punishment.

Totality

The requirement that the overall sentence fairly reflects all the offending without becoming disproportionate through accumulation.

Referral order

A youth disposal involving referral to a youth offender panel. Its likely availability at the time of childhood offending can inform a later adult sentencing exercise, even when that disposal is no longer available.

Sexual harm prevention order

A protective order imposing restrictions to prevent sexual harm. Its necessity and duration must be justified separately from the main sentence.

Notification requirements

Separate obligations arising from qualifying convictions, including providing specified information to the police. Their duration need not match an SHPO.

8. Conclusion

The judgment reinforces that childhood offending must remain central to sentencing even where prosecution and sentence occur in adulthood. Youth-sensitive starting points, accurate chronology and proper totality must shape the outcome, not merely appear in the sentencing remarks.

At the same time, substantial rehabilitation did not remove the justification for suspended custody or protective restrictions. The appropriate response was a shorter, concurrently structured sentence and a shorter SHPO—not the abandonment of either. The result balances the seriousness of the offending with developmental age, delay, demonstrated rehabilitation and proportionate public protection.