A FORMER safeguarding administrator at Bradford Council accused of grooming young boys on the internet has told a jury he was just chatting to other adults in a “fantastical roleplay environment”.

Heathcliffe Bowen, 50, is on trial at Bradford Crown Court charged with a series of sexual offences alleged to have taken place from 2013 to 2015.

Prosecutor Christopher Rose has told the jury that some allegations involved attempting to engage “young teenage men” in sexual activity.

The court has heard details of a number of online conversations that Bowen, who is a former chairman of Ilkley Parish Council, was involved with on Skype, including with one person later identified as a 15-year-old boy.

One of the exchanges involved Bowen inviting someone who told him he was a boy in Year 8 at school to have unprotected sex if he ever visited Leeds, with another discussion including an offer to take the virginity of a user who said he was a 12-year-old boy.

Addressing the jury yesterday, Bowen said he had never engaged in any form of sexual activity with a child, stating that all the online conversations had started in adult chatrooms.

Referring to his “first foray” into gay chatrooms in May 2013, he said: “My intention was to meet like-minded people. Unfortunately most chat does degenerate into quite sexual things.”

Asked by his barrister David McGonigal why he had got involved in sexual chat, Bowen said: “You get into this kind of bravado, you’re almost trying to get one up on other people. That can very quickly get out of hand. You can begin to lose all sense of reality that you are actually talking to real people.”

Asked about the ages of the people he was chatting to, Bowen said: “I believed they were all adults. I met all of them on adult sites. My assumption was they were all over 18.”

On his response when people told him they were younger, he said: “You never entirely believe what people are saying. I was playing a role online. I thought they were making up an age as part of the roleplay.”

Asked again about the interactions, Bowen said: “It was about having that contact. It sounds a bizarre thing but for me, it was serving a need at that time. It was a fantastical roleplay environment. You’re playing a game and making up stories. It was never going to leave the page or go anywhere else.”

The jury was told by Mr Rose that one set of conversations with a 15-year-old boy in 2014 made it “absolutely apparent” that the two had met and regularly had sex.

Bowen, who worked for the council from 1995 to 2014, denied ever meeting the boy and when asked about the chats, said: “Once again, it was a bizarre form of roleplay. We were acting out these scenes and pretending to do various things.”

Bowen, of Woodlands Rise, Ilkley, has admitted sending “highly sexually explicit” pictures to internet users, but said of those included in the images: “My view is that they were at least 18.”

Bowen denies four charges of attempting to cause or incite a child to engage in sexual activity, one of arranging or facilitating the commission of a child sexual offence, one of attempting to meet a child for sexual activity, one of attempting to cause a child to look at an image of sexual activity, and three charges of distributing indecent images of children.

He has pleaded guilty to three charges of possessing indecent images of children.

The trial continues.