Child pornography laws in the Netherlands

Child pornography laws in the Netherlands are among the measures in that country against commercial sexual exploitation of children.

1984 police raids
In 1984, a major police raid against child pornography occurred in the Netherlands. During the late 1970s, there had been a few media reports about the illicit trade, but there were little if any criminal investigations on the topic.

Legal definitions of child and pornography
In the Netherlands and in Sweden, the legal definitions of the words child and pornography are somewhat different than the legal definitions employed by American legal teams. This is because of the legal debate of what the age of consent should be and whether simulated pornography should have the same legal recognition as explicit pornography.

2002 legislation
On October 1, 2002, the Netherlands introduced legislation (Bulletin of Acts and Decrees 470) which deemed "virtual child pornography" as illegal. An attempt to test the law came in 2007, when the public prosecutor opened investigations into Second Life (the US based virtual world). A number of Second Life users engage in sexual ageplay where their online avatars dress, act and look like underage children while engaging in virtual sexual acts. Although there is no Dutch law that legislates against under age depictions of sexual acts for computer generated images, the public prosecutor is investigating this on the basis that these virtual actions may incite child abuse in the real world. So far this has not led to any successful prosecutions.

Significant rise in illegal websites
Press reports in 2008 described a large rise in the number of child pornography websites hosted in the Netherlands, increasing from 100 reports of sites in 2006 to 700 in 2007.

2008 court case
In March 2008, a 52 year old male was convicted for abusing a 5 year old. He has been convicted to a two-year suspended jail sentence, with a ten-year probation period. The police also found a CGI clip depicting sexual acts between a man and an eight year old girl on his computer. Prosecution claims that this animation could have been used to entice young children into sexual acts with grown-ups, due to the title and the contents of the animation.