“He took her childhood away. She was only in primary school,” the public prosecutor said about the online sexual abuse of a 12-year-old girl by a 37-year-old man from Assen. The man has been sentenced to a prison sentence of 20 months, of which six months are conditional.
In February 2019, the girl thought she was chatting with a 14-year-old Ben. In reality, it was the then 32-year-old man from Assen who sent a photo of a young boy as proof. The man persuaded her to send nude images of himself and also sent back a photo of his genitals.
The mother noticed changes in her daughter’s behavior and decided to look at her phone. She came across sex conversations and images and went to the police. The girl was very sad about this action. She was in love with her new boyfriend. She was bullied at school and was very happy with this attention.
The shock was enormous when it turned out to be a man in his thirties. The man from Assen was arrested and interrogated in March 2019. In those six weeks he sent the girl 21,000 texts. They became increasingly forceful in tone. Phone records showed that the man also texted the child around midnight until early in the morning.
It often happened that the girl fell asleep at school. The man from Assen turned out to possess another 30,000 child pornography images. He had been collecting these since November 2012. The research took longer than expected. The police investigation was not completed until 2021. The public prosecutor took the passage of time into account to some extent.
In addition to the prison sentence, the prosecutor demanded that the man from Assen be treated. “Possibly a period of clinical care, if necessary.” The thirty-something indicated that he wanted to participate in everything. “I should never have done this,” he said of his own actions.
The court will make its ruling in two weeks.