The Hungarian National Police (Magyar Rendőrség), supported by Europol and other operational partners, identified a nursery school teacher and her partner to be behind the distribution of child sexual exploitation material on the dark net. The two victims have since been brought to safety and the case is now in the hands of prosecutors.
The 2019 investigation uncovered child abuse happening in the nursery school teacher’s home. Her partner is suspected of abusing the teacher’s niece and their own child. During the proceedings, the investigators also found evidence that the teacher took sexually explicit images of several children in the school. The couple disseminated the images of child sexual abuse on various paedophile forums on the dark net, where they used different identifiers in numerous forums over several years. During a search of the suspects’ residence, investigators seized IT equipment which contained additional images and videos of child sexual abuse.
Europol supported the operation by facilitating information exchange, providing analytical, victim identification and open source support. Several Europol Victim Identification Task Forces focused on this case, which is another example of the strong collaborative effort of investigators from around the world to identify these victims and their offenders. The International Child Sexual Exploitation database, hosted at INTERPOL is also an important tool for the success of this collaborative network.
Note to media:
Europol encourages you to use the term ‘child (sexual) abuse material’ and not ‘child pornography’ in your reporting.
The use of the term ‘child pornography’ helps child sex abusers as it indicates legitimacy and compliance on the part of the victim, and therefore legality on the part of the sex abuser. By using the phrase ‘child pornography’, it conjures up images of children posing in ‘provocative’ positions, rather than suffering horrific abuse. Every photograph or video captures an actual situation where a child has been abused. This is not pornography.
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