You would have thought that having 41 indecent child porn images stored on his phone, some of them more serious, would have been sufficient to warrant a jail sentence.
However his sentencing was pretty much in line with what other paedos get who 'only' view such images rather than being more directly involved with child abuse.
I don't imagine your average judge wants to be lenient on paedophiles, the slack sentencing is more a matter of practicality.
The simple fact is that around 850 men a month are arrested for viewing such images, and many of these cases involve images much worse than Edwards'.
If we were to pass out mandatory sentences to even half of these individuals, you're looking at 5000 extra jail places a year. There simply isn't room in our prisons to house them all.
Many of these men can use techniques of neutralisation to justify what they were doing - 'we weren't directly involved in harming the victims', and in at least some of these 850 cases a month a suspended sentence isn't going to discourage the viewing.... they'll probably just be more motivated to get better VPNs or whatever other tech they need to cover their tracks.
It might be better to put tighter controls and penalties on the websites which host such images, although that might be easier said than done, but one thing we could do is maybe regulate more tightly the most obvious gateways to such porn....
I guess naming and shaming is another option which would possibly work in some cases as a deterrent, one thing is for sure, the people doing this certainly don't want anyone to know they are doing it!
But I don't know, there's just something inherently unsatisfying about this lack of justice not being served against the perpetrators of this particular crime!
