Former Radio 1 DJ Mark Page jailed for 12 years for string of child sex offences
10 March 2022, 17:57 | Updated: 10 March 2022, 18:11
Former Radio 1 DJ Mark Page has been jailed for 12 years for a string of child sex offences in the Philippines.
Page, 63, was found guilty of four counts of arranging the commission of a child sex offence across four years.
The divorced father-of-three from Stockton, Teesside, who worked at the station across the 1980s, arranged to have sex with vulnerable children in the Philippines, between 2016 and 2019.
Two of the charges related to contact he had via a webcam from his home, while two happened during his frequent trips to the Philippines.
The victims were as young as 12, and Page took advantage of their poverty, the sentencing judge Paul Watson said.
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Page was well known in Teesside as the match announcer at Middlesbrough FC games for 20 years until his arrest, and he had a lengthy career in broadcasting and set up a successful radio station for the British Army.
He used frequent business trips to the Philippines, as well as charity work, as a cover for his perverted interests.
One of his victims, a waitress then aged 13 with no father and who was the eldest of six children, has been traced and now lives in a place of safety, Teesside Crown Court heard.
His crimes were uncovered after Facebook alerted a charity following concerns raised about messaging on its platform.
The charity informed UK law enforcement and Cleveland Police carried out a search warrant at his home in January 2020.
Analysts studied a tablet, mobile phone and computer tower and checked his Skype activity, texts, bank account and money transfers before charging him.
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Page had denied all offences throughout his trial but failed to convince a jury his various devices had been hacked.
He was jailed by the judge and given a life-long Sexual Harm Prevention Order.
Sentencing, the judge said: "The offences of which you have been convicted involve the grotesque sexual abuse of young children for your own sexual gratification.
"You took advantage of the poverty and deprivation in an under-developed country in which children are routinely forced, through economic and social deprivation, into acts of prostitution.
"Your sole purpose was to engage children, as young as 12, in vile sexual activity to satisfy your perverted appetites.
"It did not matter to you that you were robbing them of the innocence of their childhoods, it did not matter to you what long-term trauma and emotional damage you were leading them to.
"You obviously delighted in their humiliation and the satisfaction of your own corrupt sexual desires.
"This was, in my view, the very embodiment of depravity."
