In the area of online child pornography, the number of cases at the Bavarian special prosecutor’s office for cybercrime remains high. The trend reversal has not yet been achieved, said senior public prosecutor Thomas Goger of the German Press Agency. He is deputy head of the Cybercrime Central Office. In 2023, the area of “Facebook hacking” played a major role: “Social media accounts are taken over by third parties and misused to spread child pornography. We are now also seeing cases here on other platforms such as Instagram.” Investigators have not yet been able to locate the perpetrators in this area.
However, citizens are massively inconvenienced by this phenomenon, explained Goger. “The social media account may be blocked and there is a risk of contact with the criminal police if the provider’s report has arrived in Germany. If the user still has the image, that is: still owns child pornography or, in the worst case, even forwards it he may have also committed an offense himself.”
In 2022, the special public prosecutor’s office conducted 6,591 cases in the area of child pornography against known and unknown perpetrators, and as of mid-December there were already more than 7,800 for 2023. Goger emphasized that there was not a pedophile perpetrator behind every case. “The vast majority is material that is shared without any sexual motivation, for example placed in WhatsApp groups for misunderstood fun. Children and young people are also often found to be accused, for example when self-made nude photos are shared.”
It is therefore the task of the central office to identify cases with genuine pedophile and sexual motives. The special public prosecutor’s office would like to focus more on the area of victim identification. “Over the past few months, we have examined our processes to see whether we are really doing everything in our power to work with the police to actually identify the children pictured and free them from the abusive situations,” said Goger.