Maths teacher jailed over child porn

AN IPSWICH maths teacher was starting a jail term last night after he admitted possessing more than 52,000 pornographic images of children – some featuring dead youngsters.

Richard Sugden, 53, who worked as a teacher for 18 years, most recently at Suffolk College, was jailed for 14 months.

The images found included photographs and short films ranging from erotic posing to sadism and bestiality and some featured dead children, including a child lying in a coffin.

Father-of-four Sugden left his job as a teacher at Suffolk College earlier this year when police began investigating him.

He admitted 15 specimen charges of downloading child pornography from the internet between February 2001 and September 2002.

Peter Gair, prosecuting, said officers raided the teacher's home in Nottidge Road, Ipswich, on January 7 this year, seizing his computer and a case containing compact discs.

They found just over 52,000 pornographic images from internet sites, including 28 that showed scenes of sadism or bestiality involving children and 59 with images of sex between children and adults, Ipswich Crown Court heard yesterday.

Adam Budworth, mitigating, read the court a statement from Sugden explaining his reasons for using child pornography.

Sugden said he had fallen upon bad times after losing contact with his two young children after a divorce in 1981 and was parted from another two children after a further divorce in 1991.

He said that due to the stress and pressures of work he had "little time and space to realise how badly my mental health had deteriorated".

Sugden added: "I turned to pornography as a distraction – to relieve the stress I experienced at work. I always thought of it as a temporary phenomenon."

He said he had never harmed a child, contacted children through an internet chatroom, photographed a child or "hung around in playgrounds".

Mr Budworth said Sugden realised he should not have collected the images but had originally thought what he was doing was legal.