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Pornography in Belgium is legal. Pornographic products, mainly magazines and DVDs, are typically imported into the country from France, Germany, the Netherlands, or from North America.[ citation needed ] Possession, production and distribution of child pornography is illegal in and is enforced by authorities. Possessing child pornography can result to up to 1 year in prison, and producing or distributing child pornography is punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The law permits the prosecution of residents who commit such crimes while abroad. [1]
In April 2020, four men were sentenced to prison – ranging between 5 and 16 years – for major child pornography cases. One of the individuals was caught hoarding over 9,000,000 images and 15 terabytes of child pornography. The investigation began about 5 years prior, when a Belgian man was taking pictures of children in bathing suits on a beach in Blankenberge, West Flanders which caught the attention of a Belgian police officer. Until recently, 110 victims including mostly male children and babies were identified, along with 90 suspects. According to federal police, this was "one of the biggest cases of sexual abuse of minors ever known" in Belgium. [2]
Marc Paul Alain Dutroux is a Belgian convicted serial killer, serial rapist, and child molester. Initially convicted for the abduction and rape of five young girls in 1989, Dutroux was released on parole after just three years' imprisonment. He was arrested again in 1996 on suspicion of having abducted, tortured, and sexually abused six girls aged between 8 and 19, four of whom were killed. Dutroux's widely publicized trial ended with his conviction on all charges in 2004; he was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.
Bernard Vincent Ward is an American former radio personality whose career ran from 1985 to 2007. Formerly a radio talk show host with KGO 810 AM in San Francisco, California, Ward, once billed by KGO as "The Lion of the Left" and "unabashedly liberal," was the host of the daily news talk program, The Bernie Ward Show, and the three-hour program, GodTalk, on Sunday mornings.
Jared Scott Fogle is an American former spokesman for Subway restaurants. Fogle appeared in Subway's advertising campaigns from 2000 to 2015 until an FBI investigation led to him being convicted of child sex tourism and possessing child pornography.
Operation Cathedral was a police operation that broke up a major international child pornography ring called The Wonderland Club operating over the Internet. It was led by the British National Crime Squad in cooperation with 1,500 officers from 13 other police forces around the world, who simultaneously arrested 104 suspects in 13 countries on 2 September 1998. The case received widespread international attention due to the highly organised nature of the ring, leading to public concerns of online child sexual abuse and legislative changes in the UK.
State v. Dalton, 153 Ohio App.3d 286 (2003), is a legal case in the U.S. state of Ohio involving the prosecution of a man for recording fictional tales of alleged child pornography in a diary. The case received wide publicity because of the private nature of a diary and a novel application of state child pornography laws.
Ian David Karslake Watkins is a Welsh former musician. He was the lead singer and frontman of the rock band Lostprophets, which he co-founded with Lee Gaze in 1997. His career ended after he was sentenced to 29 years' imprisonment in 2013 for multiple sex offences, including the sexual assault of young children and infants, a sentence later increased by ten months for having a mobile phone in prison. His bandmates disbanded Lostprophets shortly after his conviction and formed No Devotion with American singer Geoff Rickly.
This page documents Catholic Church sexual abuse cases by country.
Legal frameworks around fictional pornography depicting minors vary depending on country and nature of the material involved. Laws against production, distribution and consumption of child pornography generally separate images into three categories: real, pseudo, and virtual. Pseudo-photographic child pornography is produced by digitally manipulating non-sexual images of real minors to make pornographic material. Virtual child pornography depicts purely fictional characters. "Fictional pornography depicting minors", as covered in this article, includes these latter two categories, whose legalities vary by jurisdiction, and often differ with each other and with the legality of real child pornography.
The Catholic sexual abuse scandal in Europe has affected several dioceses in European nations. Italy is an exceptional case as the 1929 Lateran Treaty gave the Vatican legal autonomy from Italy, giving the clergy recourse to Vatican rather than Italian law.
The sexual abuse scandal in the Salesian Order is a major chapter in the series of Catholic sex abuse cases in various Western jurisdictions.
Operation Delego was a major international child pornography investigation, launched in 2009, which dismantled an international pedophile ring that operated an invitation-only Internet site named Dreamboard which featured incentives for images of the violent sexual abuse of young children under twelve, including infants. Only 72 charges were filed against the approximately 600 members of Dreamboard due to the extensive encryption involved. Members were required to upload new material at least every 50 days to maintain their access and remain in good standing.
The Federal Medical Center, Butner, is a United States federal prison opened in 1995 in North Carolina for male inmates of all security levels who have special health needs. It is part of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex and is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States Department of Justice. An adjacent satellite prison camp houses minimum-security male inmates.
Child sexual abuse in the United Kingdom has been reported in the country throughout its history. In about 90% of cases the abuser is a person known to the child. However, cases during the second half of the twentieth century, involving religious institutions, schools, popular entertainers, politicians, military personnel, and other officials, have been revealed and widely publicised since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Child sexual abuse rings in numerous towns and cities across the UK have also drawn considerable attention.
Peter Gerard Scully is an Australian sex offender and murderer imprisoned for life in the Philippines after being convicted of one count of human trafficking and five counts of rape by sexual assault of children. Scully was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 2018. In November 2022, he received a second conviction and was sentenced to an additional 129 years in prison.
Richard William Huckle was an English serial child sex offender. He was arrested by Britain's National Crime Agency in 2014 after a tip-off from the Australian Federal Police and convicted in 2016 of 71 charges of sexual offences against children, committed while he posed as a Christian teacher and a freelance photographer in Malaysia.
Childs Play [sic] was a child pornography website on the darknet that operated from April 2016 to September 2017, which at its peak was the largest of its class. The site was concealed by being run as a hidden service on the Tor network. After running the site for the first six months, owner Benjamin Faulkner of North Bay, Ontario, Canada, was captured by the United States Department of Homeland Security. For the remaining eleven months the website was owned and operated by the Australian Queensland Police Service's Task Force Argos, as part of Operation Artemis.
The "Nth Room" case is a criminal case involving blackmail, cybersex trafficking, and the spread of sexually exploitative videos via the Telegram app between 2018 and 2020 in South Korea. A man nicknamed god god sold sexual exploitation videos on Telegram channels and groups.
Pornography in Cyprus is legal with restrictions. Selling pornographic material to people under 18 years old is illegal. Child pornography is a crime and is strictly prohibited.
The Welcome to Video case involved the investigation and prosecution of a child pornography ring which traded videos through the South Korean website Welcome to Video, owned and operated by Son Jung-woo. Authorities estimated about 360,000 downloads had been made through the website, which had roughly 1.2 million members, 4,000 of which were paid members, from 38 countries. Through international cooperation and investigations, 337 people were arrested on charges of possessing child pornography.
The abuse of Kylie Freeman was a case of child sexual abuse perpetrated, recorded, and distributed by the victim's father, Kenneth Freeman.