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A “vile and sadistic” online groomer has been jailed for 20 years in a UK legal first for sexually abusing a 14-year-old girl he encouraged to self-harm.
Karl Davies contacted the “extremely vulnerable” schoolgirl on the gaming app Discord and targeted her for months using fake profiles on Snapchat.
The victim was 13 when she was first messaged by Davies, 43, who she believed was a teenage boy.
The girl, who had been in care and had learning disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), was tricked into sending explicit videos and footage of her self-harming.
Handing out the sentence, which will include 20 years’ imprisonment plus being on licence for an additional five years due to the severity of the crimes, Judge Manley called Davies “depraved and sadistic” and said he had “plumbed the depths of abhorrent behaviour”.
“You have displayed a monstrous sense of sexual entitlement and a sick desire for control, and you will go to any lengths to get what you want,” Manley said. “For a year after your arrest your victim has been deprived of education and friends. You’ve not just destroyed her childhood and adolescence, you destroyed her family.”
Davies, a married father of two, set up bogus identities on Snapchat using stolen Facebook profiles and used them to threaten the teenager into sending more abuse images.
He then posed as a user named Mark to act as her “saviour” and protect her from the other fictitious accounts, which he was controlling.
Davies sexually assaulted the girl in his car multiple times after driving 50 miles to collect her from school in June and July last year. On one occasion, he brought a razor blade and encouraged her to harm herself on video, which she later did.
Police described Davies as a “family man” with no previous convictions. However, the Guardian has learned he was arrested nearly five years ago on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children but prosecutors dropped the case.
The National Crime Agency arrested Davies in November 2020, three years before he targeted the schoolgirl, and provided a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service, which decided not to charge him.
The NCA said it shared its intelligence with police forces to help any future investigations.
Davies, a quantity surveyor from Wirral in Merseyside, was arrested in February this year after the victim in this case gave a harrowing three-hour police interview.
He was jailed on Friday after becoming the first person in the UK to be prosecuted for encouraging a child to self-harm, an offence under the Online Safety Act 2023.
Stacey Gosling, of the CPS, said she had “never before seen such sophisticated methods used to target a young person”. She added: “Karl Davies went to great lengths to hide his identity and position himself as the child’s protector when he was anything but.”
The defendant, who police said showed no sign of remorse, pleaded guilty at Manchester crown court in May to 17 offences including 10 counts of sexual activity with a child.
DS Robert Griffiths, of Greater Manchester police, described the offender as “sadistic” and said he believed Davies would have tried to target other young girls, although police were not aware of other victims.
“It’s much easier for an offender to sit in their living room and spam out a load of messages and wait for the replies to come in, which is the worrying and most concerning thing about online exploitation,” he said.
Davies first contacted the teenager in 2023 on Discord. Police were first alerted when the girl told her schoolfriend that she had got into a car with a man in July 2024.
At that point the victim declined to cooperate with the investigation. She was assigned to a social worker who spent six months establishing her trust and the victim was eventually able to give a three-hour police interview.
The girl, who did not know Davies’s true identity, eventually led police to the perpetrator by pinpointing one of the dates he had picked her up from school. She was then able to identify the make and model of the Seat Ateca car he had leased to carry out his crimes, which allowed police to track its movements from Merseyside.
Davies was arrested at his family home after police connected him to the fake Discord and Snapchat accounts.
Police discovered that Davies’s wife had suspected he was having an affair and had called the girl’s number but the victim hung up.
Griffiths said it was “very worrying” that someone not previously known to the police could carry out such “abhorrent and vile” abuse.
