Christian Schoolteacher in UK Gets 22 Life Sentences for Raping as Many as 200 Christian Children

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Wednesday, June 08, 2016

A Christian schoolteacher from England who police believe sexually abused as many as 200 children from poor communities in Malaysia and bragged about his exploits online, was given 22 life sentences after admitting to 71 charges of sex abuse against children aged 6 months to 12 years.

Richard Huckle, 30, the schoolteacher from Ashford, Kent, fancied himself such an expert in abusing minors, he wrote a 60-page how-to manual for other pedophiles to follow that Judge Peter Rook QC, called a "truly evil document" according to the BBC.

"Impoverished kids are definitely much easier to seduce than middle-class Western kids," Huckle reportedly wrote online, according to the BBC. "I still plan on publishing a guide on this subject sometime."

"I'd hit the jackpot," he said on another occasion, "a 3yo girl as loyal to me as my dog and nobody seemed to care."

Huckle first visited Malaysia on a teaching gap year at the age of 18 or 19, and presented himself as a practicing Christian. While doing voluntary work there, however, he began grooming children.

In sentencing Huckle, Rook said: "It is very rare indeed that a judge has to sentence sexual offending by one person on such a scale as this."

The sentence, he explained, reflected "public abhorrence" over Huckle's "campaign of rape" which took place between 2006 and 2014.

Rook told Huckle his life "revolved around your obsession with your own sexual gratification by child sex abuse."

"It is also clear that, had you not been arrested, you planned to continue the same lifestyle using the expertise that you were keen to show off to and share with other abusers so as to continue your sexual exploitation of the children of such communities," he said.

More than 20,000 indecent pictures and videos of Huckle's assaults on children, which were shared with pedophiles through a website hidden in what is known as the dark web, were found by investigators.

At the time of his arrest in December 2014, he was trying to crowdfund the release of the images in his manual for pedophiles.

According to the BBC, Australian police who traced Huckle also suspected 17 other British men of using the same websites. Five of these men have already been convicted, another five have been arrested and are on bail while two committed suicide.

Before his sentencing, Huckle told a psychiatrist that he wanted to put his "madness" behind him and settle down with a south Indian woman. In a 2013 post shared with the court, however, Huckle highlighted plans to marry one of his victims who could help him abuse more children.

"In my view, you may well harbor feelings of regret but there is no feeling of genuine remorse in this case," Rook told him.

James Traynor of England's National Crime Agency's child exploitation and online protection command said Huckle had "deliberately travelled to a part of the world where he thought he could abuse vulnerable children without being caught."

"He spent several years integrating himself into the community in which he lived, making himself a trusted figure. But he abused that trust in the worst possible way," said Traynor.