This is Andrew Boeckman he was charged under his mothers name of Pickard with child abuse. He is eighteen he was seventeen when he was caught. Andrews original hearing was in October 2015 at a magistrates court where it was deemed the charges were so serious the case had to be heard at Crown Court.
Andrew was a pupil at Eton and it was at Eton the police found the evidence against him on the computer he had there. He pleaded guilty to the charges and his barrister explained Andrew knew and accepted the gravity of the crime he had committed and was receiving counselling.
The judge was incredibly lenient Andrew was given a suspended sentence and was made subject to a Sexual Harm Prevention Order and fined £1200.
For some reason known only to the judiciary Andrew was allowed to use his mothers surname instead of his own I assume that was in an effort to keep his family out of the limelight and to allow him to get on with his life when the trial was over.
It almost worked the magistrates court was in October 2015 as far as I know his actual surname was not discovered until after the Crown Court trial in February 2016.
Here is a link to the Daily Telegraph which gives full details of the trial. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/12173680/Eton-schoolboy-who-shared-appalling-child-abuse-images-from-dorm-computer-is-spared-prison.html
I think Andrew should have got a custodial sentence, been placed on the sex offenders register for a number of years and he should have received all counselling in prison in exactly the same way as the vast majority of sex offenders. We don’t know what if any investigation was carried out regarding his home life does he have siblings were they at risk and if they were are they safe now?
A young mans life may be wrecked and if he acted on his fantasies others may be hurting, what we know is children were being hurt and crying in the films he watched and offered to share.
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Eton itself is not without a history of problems which could be described as sexual, in the sixties and seventies the ‘fag’ system where young boys are made to serve older pupils caused something of a scandal when allegations of bullying and sexual abuse were made.
Now we have the antics of the prime minister predilection for pigs heads and his own and other ex Eton cabinet ministers membership of the notorious Bullingdon Club, which is apparently a club where debonair young men get blind drunk, throw up, and burn £50.00 notes in front of homeless people.
None of it says much for Eton, nor does the ex Eton headmaster who refused to report a teacher accused of child sexual abuse to police because he ‘didn’t think it was necessarily my business,’ to report the claims to the police. Here is a link to the case which was at Geelong Grammar School in Australia. where the ex head worked before Eton
Eton is a very proud, very old school but what bothers me about it is do we know what if any investigation did the police officers working on the Picard case make into the circumstances at Eton and what supervision of pupils online activity does Eton enforce in the school?
So many questions about this case and one of them is the suitability of Eton as a school.
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