A 38-year-old sex offender has walked free from court despite assaulting two girls.

Anthony Lamb of Bretforton Road, Badsey, near Evesham, was given a “rigorous” three-year community order to help him deal with his problems by Judge Patrick Thomas.

Lamb, who had already spent eight months in jail during the case, previously admitted three offences of sexually touching two girls aged 14 and 12.

He had earlier pleaded guilty to nine charges of having sexually explicit movies of other children, some younger than 10 years old, on his laptop computer.

Sentencing at Worcester Crown Court, Judge Thomas gave Lamb credit for going to his GP for help after he realised that he had a problem.

“You expressed totally inappropriate sexual interest in two young girls where you were in a position of trust,” said Judge Lamb.

“You viewed sexually explicit images of children of a disgusting nature.

“Were it not for people like you, the abusers would have no need to submit children to this kind of extreme abuse.”

The judge accepted Lamb had been “clinically depressed” at the time of the assaults on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 2009, and February 2009.

He first assaulted a 14-year-old girl at a house party. Charles Hardy, prosecuting, told the court: “He sat next to her and stroked her leg. When she told him to stop he moved his hand to the top of her leg squeezing the inner and outer thigh.”

The next day he again assaulted the girl, this time in a bedroom, touching her breasts under her top.

Later that year, he assaulted a 12-year-old girl as she lay on a sofa watching television, “pushing his hand up her trouser leg” said Mr Hardy.

The girl raised the alarm a few days later when she was at school.

• Your Worcester News was the only member of the media to attend this hearing.