By Grâçia Ada Obi
An Army Cadet leader collected and shared images of children being sexually abused and raped, a court has heard. Michael Monks was exposed as a paedophile after police executed a search warrant at his home and seized his phone.
An examination of the device showed he was part of a chat group on an encrypted messaging app where members “traded” indecent images. A judge at Swansea Crown Court, United Kingdom (UK) told 55-year-old Monks that the images of children found on his phone were of real children somewhere in the world being horribly abused so people like him – “that is, paedophiles” – could masturbate over them.
Matthew Murphy, prosecuting, told the court that in May 2022 police executed a search warrant at the defendant’s property and seized a number of electronic devices.
He said that on a Huawei phone forensic investigators found four dozen indecent images of children – including 25 of Category A showing the most serious kinds of sexual abuse – along with three photos depicting bestiality.
The court heard the examination of the phone also found Monks was part of a group on the Wickr encrypted app where like-minded people were chatting and “trading” indecent images. As well as receiving images from other group members, the defendant had swapped four of his own images with others.
In his subsequent interview Monks denied having any sexual interest in children. The court heard that at the time of his arrest the defendant had been a leader at the Army Cadet centre in Llanelli.
Michael Monks, of Russell Terrace, Carmarthen, appeared for sentencing having previously pleaded guilty to three counts of possessing indecent images of children of Categories A, B, and C, three counts of making indecent images of children of Categories A, B, and C, two counts of distributing indecent images of children of Categories B and C, and possessing extreme pornography. He has no previous convictions.
Judge Paul Thomas KC asked Monks’ advocate, Dan Griffiths, whether his client maintained the stance as set out to the police and to the author of the pre-sentence report that he had not obtained any sexual gratification from looking at the pictures on his phone.
After taking instructions from his client, the advocate said Monks no longer maintained that.
The advocate said Monks’ reluctance to admit he has a sexual interest in children may be due to “embarrassment” rather than anything else.
He said there had been no further offending in the three-and-a-half years since his arrest which demonstrated “he has the ability to contain whatever urges he had, whatever underlying issues caused him to behave in the way he did”.
He said that Monks acts as a carer for his wife and that he had expressed a willingness to comply with any order the court saw fit to make. The advocate added that the delay in the case was “unconscionable”.
Judge Thomas told Monks it was concerning that it hadn’t been until minutes earlier that the defendant had finally accepted that which was obvious – namely that he had a sexual interest in children and had found sexual gratification in viewing the images. He said that for any meaningful work to be done with offenders they first had to acknowledge there was a problem.
The judge added that if he had a pound for every time a defendant had told a court he had viewed such images simply out of curiosity “I would now have my own Caribbean island”.
With a one-third discount for his guilty pleas Monks was sentenced to 12 months in prison, a term which was suspended for 12 months.
He was also ordered to complete a rehabilitation course designed to address his sexual offending and to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work in the community. The defendant will be a registered sex offender for the next 10 years and was made subject of a sexual harm prevention order to control his access to the internet for the same length of time.
The judge said no doubt the Army Cadet organisation would take such steps as were necessary given the defendant’s conviction.
Asked by Judge Thomas about the delay in the case coming to court, the prosecutor said police had received the forensic report detailing the phone’s contents in March 2023 and subsequently approached the Crown Prosecution service for charging advice in January 2025 – he said it had to be accepted there was “no reasonable explanation” for the delay. The judge described the delay as “wholly unacceptable”.
