Mark Coad faces District Court after pleading guilty to selling, possessing child exploitation material

“You can’t look at someone who’s 15 years of age and say, ‘I don’t want to know how old you are’,” the judge said.

A Mitchell Park man who told a teenage girl he would have raped her “at any age” says he believed she was over 18 because she claimed to have been charged with prostitution, a court has heard.

Mark Dilrukshan Coad, 33, appeared in the District Court on Monday in front of Judge Anthony Allen after pleading guilty to ten different child exploitation offences, including dissemination, possession and procuring a child for sexual activity.

Coad told the court he isn’t attracted to children and sold child exploitation material only to fund his drug addiction – all of which were dismissed by prosecution and Judge Allen.

Judge Allen told the court Coad’s “disgraceful conversation” with his 15-year-old victim “clearly demonstrates a sexual interest in children”.

“If you’ve got child exploitation material, and you have a sexual interest in children, you don’t have to be a genius to work out why someone might have it,” he said.

“Being wilfully blind about the age of this girl is not really going to cut it in these circumstances. You can’t look at someone who’s 15 years of age and say, ‘I don’t want to know how old you are’.”

Mark Coad faced the District Court for sentencing submissions on Monday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Naomi Jellicoe

The court heard Coad told his victim: ‘If you were my sexy daughter it wouldn’t have mattered – I would have raped you at any age from ten’.

It also heard he assumed his victim was an adult because she told him she had just “got off home detention bail for prostitution charges”.

“That made him think: ‘Oh, she must have been over 18’,” Michael Crampton, for Coad, said.

“Well, that doesn’t follow,” Judge Allen replied. “There’s a child-sex trade is there not, Mr Crampton? You don’t have to be over 18 to be a prostitute, so I don’t necessarily think that carries a great deal of weight.”

Prosecution told Judge Allen the offending was “extremely high on the scale of seriousness”.

“There was a submission made on the last occasion that Mr Coad was disseminating child exploitation material for profit to fund his own drug habit and that, in effect, he was not doing it for his own sexual gratification,” they said.

“We do not accept that submission, we say there is a dual purpose – the evidence clearly demonstrates that there is a dual purpose.

“Here we have an accused who has denied that he derived any sexual gratification – that he was simply funding his drug habit – and, as Your Honour has rightly pointed out, there is luminous material that rebuts that.

“What we have here is he’s not only paying for this material, he’s also receiving money for it. So we say this places this extremely high on the scale of seriousness because he’s in possession of it, he’s disseminating it, he’s paying for it and then he’s gaining a profit from it and doing it for his own sexual gratification. Every box is ticked.”

Coad is expected to return to court in March next year to give evidence.

Originally published as Mark Coad faces District Court after pleading guilty to selling, possessing child exploitation material