A former deputy headmaster of a community college in East Sussex, England, who sexually groomed a 14-year-old Co Derry girl on an internet chatline before travelling to Derry city where he sexually abused her, was yesterday jailed for four years in the city's crown court.
In the first prosecution of its kind in Northern Ireland, Nigel Gordon Jackson (48), Seaford, East Sussex, admitted committing the offences between March 2004 and January 2005.
Jailing him for four years, Judge Corinne Philpott QC imposed a five-year ban on Jackson on all forms of unsupervised association with girls under the age of 17. She further ruled that he should be officially monitored upon his release.
She also imposed a sexual offences protection order which means he will never have unsupervised access to children unless the order is amended by the secretary of state.
Judge Philpott said the case highlighted the dangers internet chatrooms posed to children.
The court was told that Jackson was a paedophile, whose fixation with teenage girls was only manageable and not curable and who still did not accept that his actions were in any way wrong.
Det Insp Tara Nicholl of the PSNI's care unit in Derry, described Jackson as a "dangerous and cunning individual who had posed as an 18-year-old schoolboy to entice and entrap a young girl.
"The details of the outcome of this trial will be updated on our own computer systems and shared with the police national computer thereby ensuring up to date information on Jackson is available to all police services throughout the UK," she said.
He pleaded guilty to two charges of inciting his victim to commit an act of gross indecency with him, one of grooming her on the internet and one of indecently assaulting the schoolgirl.
Jackson resigned from his school in January 2004 "for family reasons". In April 2005 he was arrested at his home and brought back to Derry.