Locations
Merrieleas Drive, Chandler's Ford, Eastleigh, Hampshire, SO53
Description
A former youth theatre director has been jailed for six years after admitting non-recent sexual offences against four teenage boys.
Peter Harding, 75, of Merrieleas Drive, Chandler’s Ford, admitted three counts of sexual assault and two counts of sexual activity with a boy, at a hearing on Tuesday 11 March.
Today (Friday 16 May), at Southampton Crown Court, he was sentenced to a six-year jail term.
The offending took place between 2006 and 2012, when Harding was the director at the Centrestage Productions Youth Theatre in Chandler’s Ford.
The court was told that some of the assaults took place at the theatre when Harding was fitting costumes for boys.
Other assaults took place at Harding’s house.
The court heard that Harding was sacked from the theatre following an investigation into downloading indecent images of children, which resulted in a criminal conviction in 2015.
The sexual assaults were first reported to police in 2021, leading to an investigation by Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary’s specialist Operation Marmion team, which investigates allegations of non-recent sexual abuse perpetrated within institutions or by people of prominence.