A Chinese paedophile father-of-two caught with more than 8,000 child sex abuse images claimed he didn’t know that downloading and viewing the vile material was illegal in Australia, a court has heard.
Former government employee Songnan Bao, 42, on Monday pleaded guilty to knowingly possessing child exploitation material in the South Australian District Court, the Advertiser reported.
The court heard Bao, who worked as an IT engineer with the Department of Human Services, used his computer skills to download and back up the 8,338 files across a “significant period of time”, storing 1,047 on a PC and the rest on a hard drive.
Bao’s lawyer Casey Isaacs told the court that his China-born client downloaded the child abuse images in bulk out of “habit” and had not necessarily viewed each one, and said Bao was interested in pubescent girls rather than young children.
“While [a psychiatrist] concludes he meets the diagnostic criteria for paedophilia, he’s interested in pubescent girls, not younger. She found he was vulnerable to developing interest in this material due to years of pornography use which caused him to be desensitised to what a normal person would consider to be abhorrent,” Mr Isaacs argued.
He said Bao had lost his job and been forced to live separately from his wife and children since he was arrested and charged, and asked Judge Carmen Matteo to allow him to seek help to rehabilitate in the community.
But prosecutors told the judge Bao should be jailed as a report from a counsellor stated that he was in “denial” about his offending by saying he thought he was acting legally.
“I note [in a report] that Mr Bao also attempts to minimise his engagement with the material when he claimed he did not know it was illegal in Australia to download and view this kind of material,” the prosecutor said.
Bao will be sentenced later this year.
The depraved IT worker is the second immigrant Department of Human Services worker to face the SA District Court for a sex crime in recent months, after Nepalese care worker Arjun Kandel was jailed for raping an intellectually disabled woman.
