A local *man will appear in the Gauteng High Court sitting in the Palm Ridge Magistrate’s Court on 1 September to be sentenced after being found guilty of possessing, creating and importing child pornography.

Some of the material he created involved family members. When he was arrested he was also found in possession of many images and videos of unknown children.

On Wednesday the 40-year-old man pleaded guilty on the vile charges, among them possession and distribution of child pornography, and admitted to sharing child pornography on social media platforms.

In a statement issued by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA), the man would shoot images and videos of the minors in his own home when he was alone with them.

Despite his guilty plea on Wednesday, 26 August, prosecutor Rolene Barnard submitted to the court that the state wanted nothing less than a minimum sentence for the sex pest.

It is my submission that the court should impose a sentence of between 15 to 20 years. The court needs to give a proper sentence. The punishment must fit the crime,” Barnard said.

She added that because he not only had the material in his possession, but created and distributed it, should be aggravating circumstances.

She explained that the procurement and creation of this content stretched far longer than the distribution, and the man also created his own content when the opportunity arose.

“It must be a cumulative sentence, there must be a harder sentence than just for possession,” Barnard told the court.

She added that because he involved his own family, his crime was much more morally reprehensible and disturbing.

The man was arrested in August 2019 after the arresting officer received information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States of America, about group chats where explicit child pornography had been shared. They had tracked the IP address back to the man. 

He confessed to police that he had shared the content with several people on social media platforms, one of them a man from Port Elizabeth. After obtaining a search warrant and with the help of die USA Homeland Security, police found several child pornography images on the PE man’s cellphone and laptop. The latter will be sentenced on 31 August.

Barnard told Judge Daniel Mogotsi that the exploited children would be emotionally scarred for life and might even come across the content he created of them later in life.

She added that the financial implications of his sentence on his children are just a “natural consequence” of his crimes, after the man’s lawyer, Vickus Visagie had urged the court to consider that imprisonment would not only affect the man’s children mentally but emotionally too.

Visagie added that in the past three years the children have suffered a great deal emotionally due to the absence of their father from their lives.

Among the man’s bail conditions was that he was to have no contact with his family. Visagie said this was already a form of punishment and should be considered when the sentence is passed.

The man left the court a free man as his bail was extended until Judge Mogotsi sentences him.

*The Krugersdorp News has decided not to publish the man’s name to protect the identities of those innocent minors whom he had violated.