COPENHAGEN – Danish police have charged more than 1,000 children and young people for spreading pornography content through Facebook.
According to the police, two videos and a sexually explicit image involving two 15-year-olds were originally posted to Facebook Messenger.
The video was then shared hundreds of times across the platform, and now, a total of 1,004 young people have been charged and about 800 are male, reports Bloomberg.
While the content was posted by someone within Denmark, it’s unclear if everyone accused of sharing it are from the country.
The case, which reached Denmark via the European Union’s law enforcement agency Europol, involves around 800 boys and 200 girls, most of them between the ages of 15 and 20.
The police are in the process of charging them.
“This is a very large and complex case, which has taken a long time to investigate, especially because of the large number (of people) being charged,” police investigator Lau Thygesen from the northern Danish region of Nordsjaelland said in a statement.
Although the age of consent in Denmark is 15, Danish law stipulates that distributing sexual material involving people under the age of 18 constitutes distribution of child pornography, which has a maximum six-year prison sentence.
If found guilty, the suspects will likely receive a fine or a 20-day suspended sentence, both of which would give them a criminal record lasting up to 10 years, police said.
This could hinder the offenders from a future career within social work or from working with children.
“We take this case very seriously as it has serious consequences for those involved when this kind of material is spread,” Thygesen added.
In neighboring Sweden, three men were accused of gang raping a woman and live streaming the attack on Facebook last year.
