Karl Davies – Merseyside

A married father has become the first person in the UK jailed for encouraging a child to self-harm – after he created a secret online world to control and abuse a young girl.

Karl Davies, from Merseyside, was jailed for 20 years today at Manchester Crown Court. He is the first person to be convicted under the new Online Safety Act for encouraging a child to self-harm.

He showed “no pity and no mercy” for the “catastrophic” impact on his victim and had a “monstrous sense of sexual entitlement”, the court was told.

Davies began targeting the girl in October 2023, when she was 13. He posed as a young boy named Ben, who was around the same age.

They began talking on Discord, later moving to Snapchat – where he asked for pictures, before other accounts became involved.

At first, detectives thought the girl was being abused by six different men.

Some of them would threaten her, some would warn her about the others – telling her she was dealing with dangerous men with criminal backgrounds.

They conspired together to blackmail her into sending sexual photos and videos, eventually telling her to self-harm and record the evidence.

It wasn’t long before officers discovered the accounts were all the same person. Davies had created a series of online personas, some completely fake, some using stolen identities – all designed to manipulate the girl.

Under the guise of Mark, in the summer of last year Davies began travelling to sexually abuse the girl in person – picking her up from school in “broad daylight” to sexually abuse her in his car on four occasions in the summer of 2024.

On one occasion he brought a razor blade and told her to use it. A blade and a girl’s scrunchie were found by officers in his room.

Davies hid the grooming and abuse from his wife and children – pretending to travel for work. His wife began to suspect he was cheating.

Davies’s wife caught the first of his aliases having contact with the teenage girl and confronted him, but he made excuses and it did not deter him.

Over time, the prosecution said, the aliases became “rather more sinister” threatening the girl and saying they would contact her father if she did not do as Davies asked.

She finally called a number she had found and a child picked up.

He was arrested after his victim told her stepmother of the abuse, and a video of Davies sexually abusing the girl was found on her phone by police.

Despite admitting the charges, Davies told probation services he was not sexually interested in children, even though he abused the girl in her school uniform and told her she had a “good body for a 14-year-old”, the court heard.

One of the offences for which Davies has been jailed – assisting or encouraging another person to commit serious self-harm – is a new offence created by the 2023 Online Safety Act.

There has been one case so far where the victim was an adult, but Davies is the first person convicted of committing the offence against a child.