Media Release
27 April 2004

Child, Youth and Family welcomes sentence for ‘abhorent’ crime

Child, Youth and Family has welcomed the prison sentence handed down today to a Tauranga man who emailed pictures of a naked child whom he said was offering for sex.

Ross Alexander Mundy, who had also collected 1300 images of children being raped, was sentenced to imprisonment on 41 child pornography charges.

“This abhorrent case highlights the close link between the trading of child sex abuse images and child abuse. This is not a victimless crime,” Acting General Manager of Social Work Operations Shannon Pakura said today.

“This conviction is about more than pictures on a computer. It is about protecting a vulnerable child – and hundreds of other young boys and girls – from intolerable abuse.”

“For every child sex abuse image that is traded on the internet, a child is abused - it’s that simple - and it must be stopped.”

The case highlighted the importance of the Department of Internal Affairs and Child, Youth and Family working closely on cases involving child sex abuse images, she said.

The two Departments have in the past liaised on specific cases and are now starting work to develop a formal protocol to establish how they can best work together and share information in future.

“The work the Department of Internal Affairs does to identify and prosecute these offenders is incredibly important and we want to take every opportunity to work with them to help protect children from this form of abuse,” Ms Pakura said.

“New Zealand and British research indicates that there is a clear association between adults looking at child sex abuse images and committing assaults on children and this is a serious concern to both Departments.”

Child, Youth and Family has similar protocols with Police for reporting cases involving serious and sexual abuse.

ends

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Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>