Orders for pedophile videos: the number of files on the rise

A phenomenon that has been on the rise since the Covid-19 epidemic. According to information from BFMTV, the number of live-streaming child rape orders has exploded in the past three years, with the number of cases handled by law enforcement increasing from 6 to 27.

If this sordid process has existed since the beginning of the 2000s, and the first file was set up in France in 2011, it seems to have been accelerated by “the months of Covid and confinement”, explains the continuous news channel.

This criminal practice consists of buying online the video of a live rape of a child, from France to abroad.

In the columns of Le Figaro, Laure Beccuau, Paris prosecutor, explains the concept: “The offender orders the type of minors and acts he wishes and receives, to date, either filmed content or a connection link which allows him to follow the abuse live and even to be able to order the type of acts committed”.

By the end of the year, the prosecutor estimates that a hundred investigations should be opened by the end of 2022.

These pedocriminal videos cost 30 to 70 euros according to BFMTV, “a fairly large sum in the countries of the victims, but derisory for French pedocriminals”. While many of these orders are done on the dark web, there are also legal sites that offer them, such as in Eastern European countries, South America or the Philippines.

In 2020, a pedophile was sentenced to five years in prison for watching a live-stream of sexual assaults on little girls in the Philippines. The man was not only sentenced for possession of child pornography, but also for complicity in sexual assault on minors under 15 years old.