'Depraved and brazen': sentence for child abuse material

A 21-year-old man has been sentenced after pleading guilty to possessing almost 2000 videos and images of child sexual abuse with children as young as toddlers.

The West Australian man filmed sexually graphic videos of himself while children were in the room and distributed the footage to other offenders, the court heard.

The man was sentenced on May 1 after pleading guilty to 10 counts of producing, possessing and transmitting child abuse material. He was sentenced to three years in prison with a non-parole period of two years.

Australian police were notified about the man's criminal behaviour after the United States' National Center for Missing and Exploited Children flagged his activity on social media platforms in May 2023.

AFP detective inspector Andrea Coleman said the offending was "depraved and brazen".

"Some of the children in those images and videos were barely toddlers, it is sickening to think that anyone could derive sexual gratification from seeing young children being abused," she said.

"This result is further evidence that child predators have nowhere to hide."

This comes as the Australian Institute of Criminology found that 2.8 per cent of respondents to a survey had been asked to facilitate child sexual exploitation in the past 12 months.

The study pinpointed three types of parental child sexual abuse material producers. Those were male offenders who exploit their own children, male offenders who form a relationship with a woman to exploit her children and biological mothers who produce material of their own children at the request of a man she knows in person or online.

The survey found that 60 respondents out of 4011 people said they were asked questions of a sexual nature about children they knew, 44 people were offered payment for sexual images of children they knew and 38 people were pressured for sexual images of kids.

The research found that requests for facilitated child sexual exploitation were significantly higher among those who had shared a photo of or information about children publicly online.

Among the survey respondents who had shared images of children publicly, requests for child abuse material were significantly higher for men, young people, linguistically diverse people, people with a disability and those who had experienced other sexual or violent harms online.

"The results highlight the need for increased awareness of the potential harms of posting photos of and information about children publicly online, and place onus on platforms to warn users of these potential harms," the study said.

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