By Grâçia Ada Obi
A respected former BBC correspondent has been jailed for eight years after he was caught paying to watch live online shows of child sexual exploitation.
Duncan Bartlett, 52, made a series of payments to the Philippines over the course of seven years, so that he could watch sickening livestreams featuring girls as young as nine years old.
Bartlett was formerly the BBC’s correspondent in Tokyo, and he spent 15 years working on the World Business Report on BBC World Service.
In recent years he was the editor of Asian Affairs magazine, and in the last three years he had been working as a research associate at the SOAS China Institute in London.
SOAS said he was not involved in directly teaching students, but had been commissioned to produce a weekly podcast series called China in Context.
Bartlett, who was living in Judd Street, near King’s Cross, admitted 35 criminal offences relating to his activities online and collection of indecent images of children, with offences dating back to 2016.
The Metropolitan Police said he was first arrested in September 2021, after intelligence linked him to the download of indecent images of children.
Electronic devices were seized, and revealed Bartlett had nearly 6,000 illegal images of children.
Detectives also found evidence that Bartlett had been making payments to people in the Philippines who would arrange live shows involving children stripping naked.
Some of the victims have been identified and put under safeguarding measures in the Philippines, Scotland Yard said.
Detective Constable Emily Dawson who led the investigation said: “Over a period of seven years, Bartlett made multiple payments to people in the Philippines asking that they arrange children to be sexually exploited for his own gratification.
“With close liaison work with our counterparts in the Philippines, we managed to identify and safeguard some of these children while several adults were arrested.
“Bartlett’s behaviour was utterly abhorrent but thanks to the painstaking work of detectives, a case documenting his offending was put together – this left him with no option but to admit his guilt.”
Bartlett pleaded guilty to 11 counts of causing a girl under 13 to engage in sexual activity, nine counts of causing a girl 13-15 to engage in sexual activity, 10 counts of paying for the sexual services of girl under 13, three charges of making indecent images of children, and two offences of encouraging the commission of either way offences.
SOAS said Bartlett left his role at the university in September this year, having been a contractor since January 1 2021.
The BBC said Bartlett left the corporation in 2015.
