As well as admitting two charges of sending the messages, Jessica Garnham-Burton, 18, pleaded guilty to six counts of making indecent images of children and two of distributing indecent images.
The court was told that the defendant had set up multiple profiles on Snapchat, including two which she used to contact the girls. While one account used her real name, the other used a friend’s name.
During conversations with the girls, who were known to each other, she would often refer to the other Snapchat account, pretending that it was a different person.
Each girl claimed to be older than she was, although one did eventually tell Garnham-Burton her real age.
The defendant replied that this would make it harder for them to meet up.
Both girls sent Garnham-Burton photos of themselves which, argued prosecuting Advocate Jenny McVeigh, would have been enough for her to realise that the girls were younger than they had said.
It was only when the mother of one of the girls checked the phone that the indecent messages were found and the police contacted.
After arresting the defendant, police seized several devices from her home on which they found indecent images hidden inside passcode-protected galleries.
Images are grouped into categories A to C by the Child Abuse Image Database, where A is the most serious.
A total of 11 category A images and 40 category C were recovered.
There was also a category A video, which Garnham-Burton had sent to one of the girls.
The older of the two children had sent the defendant an intimate picture of herself, too, the court was told, but while included in the charges for ‘making’ images, it was not distributed to anyone else.
Advocate Sam Maindonald, defending, said that her client had difficulty making friends and so had taken to social networks. Given that the minimum age for Snapchat was 13, she had not expected to meet such young children on the platform.
She was neuro-divergent and had gender dysphoria. The advocate said that her neurological condition could have meant that she did not easily recognise the girls’ young age when she saw their photos.
She wanted to apologise to the girls and their families, she said.
Garnham-Burton had been in custody since a breach of bail last September and accepted that she was likely to return to prison.
She wanted to engage with professionals there to get help and support and did not want to find herself in this situation again.
‘The offences you have committed are revolting, there’s no other word for it,’ said Judge Catherine Fooks, passing sentence.
The judge described the messaging of such young girls as ‘really worrying’ and said it was hard to understand how the defendant had come to be messaging children so much younger than she was.
For the offences involving the making of indecent images, the defendant was sentenced to a total of two years, with eight months on each of the two offences of sending indecent messages, concurrent to each other, but consecutive to the two years.
The remainder of the charges attracted concurrent terms of imprisonment of two years and under.
The sentence has been back-dated to when she was taken into custody last September.
Garnham-Burton was also handed a five-year notification order and will forfeit all the seized devices.
