A PORN addict who downloaded hundreds of child sex videos and images was an adrenaline junky, addicted to ‘the shock’ of extreme pornography a court has heard.

Mitchell Baxter, of Bolton Road, Banbury, escaped an immediate jail term after admitting three counts of possessing indecent images and one count of possessing bestiality images.

At his sentencing at Oxford Crown Court yesterday the court heard how his addiction to pornography began when he was a teenager and stemmed from watching his father at his work in an abbatoir.

Alexandra Bull, defending, said that this had turned him into a thrill seeker and that it led to him seeking out more and more extreme pornography.

She said: “There is a suggestion of a long-term addiction to pornography.

“He had a normal and a happy childhood and it is in his teenage years that he began experimenting with pornography.

“His does suffer from low self-esteem, he was shy…and he was exposed to his father’s work at an abattoir and would often see the animals being killed.

“This appears to have had an impact to lead to seeking gratification through shock.”

The court heard that the 51-year old began with ‘video nasties’ before the advent of the internet, which saw him seeking more extreme forms of pornography online.

His addiction was exposed when police raided his home address on April 28, 2014, as part of a crackdown and seized a silver Dell laptop along with a Mono tablet and a memory card.

On analysing the devices they discovered he had downloaded 23 images and videos of the lower category C, 262 of the upper category B, and 101 images and videos of the most extreme pornography, Class A, involving very young children.

He had used peer-to-peer software to share the pornography and used search terms including ‘pre-teen hardcore’, ‘incest’ and ‘Lolita’.

Baxter had also installed special software which permanently erases browser history, called C-Cleaner, although experts could not determine if he had made use of it to delete any images.

The offences took place between 2012 and 2014 according to police analysts who seized the hardware and sifted through the images.

Sentencing, Judge Zoe Smith said: “The children were young, seven and eight years of age.

“They were moving images and I think a sharing platform as well was used.

“These are real children in these pictures subjected to nothing less than actual torture.”

For possessing the class A images he was given a 12-month prison term, for the class B images he was given six months and for class C three months, each to run concurrently.

The jail term was suspended for two years.

He is also subject to a community order for 24 months with a supervision requirement of 15 days and supervised activity requirement and must pay court costs of £500.

Baxter will remain on the sex offences register for the next 10 years.