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Conclusions and recommendations
it is almost impossible to draft a policy. The minimal capacity available has also been designated as a
cause for the number of pending cases. This is the issue, however, as the backlog of cases should increase
if an additional 100 to 300 cases are received every year. This is not happening, though; although the
number of pending cases cannot be controlled, it is nevertheless relatively stable, and even decreases
now and then. An investigation of the inflow and outflow of the pending cases could provide an insight
into this situation. The existence of pending cases may potentially be the result of the low priority that
is assigned to child pornography cases, the working method being used, or the influx of investigations
from other countries. The assumption that a shortage in capacity is the cause of the backlog of cases is
partly unfounded. A potential solution could be to develop an international prioritisation model. To
this end, the possibilities for making international agreements in this regard could be explored further.
Two challenges that need to be dealt with, regardless of changes to the police structure, involve the effectiveness
of victim identification. For this purpose, parties could seek alignment with cases of sexual
abuse, in which data storage media must always be seized. After all, seeking to identify victims via the
Internet is not always effective and it frequently occurs by chance. The Implementation Provisions concerning
<strong>Child</strong> <strong>Pornography</strong> now state that when forms of sexual violence against children are reported,
the possibility that child abuse material may have been produced must be taken into account at all
stages of the investigation, and a search must be carried out, if possible. By emphasising the importance
of seizure of data storage media in both the Implementation Provisions concerning <strong>Child</strong> <strong>Pornography</strong>
and the Implementation Provisions concerning Public Decency Offences, the efficacy of detection can
be improved and the focus can actually be shifted to the abuse. Secondly, more information regarding
the effectiveness of detection needs to be collected. For example, the number of victims that were found
via the Internet is practically unknown. For that reason, details of victims must be recorded. As a result,
we will have greater insight into the effectiveness of detection, which may have implications for the
policy to be implemented.
4.2.3.5 Prosecution and trial
Article 240b of the Dutch Criminal Code encompasses various forms of conduct, ranging from gaining
access to and possession of child abuse material to its production and distribution. The formulation of
the section of the law does not, from the statistical material, lay out how prosecution and trial relate to
the various forms of conduct. A formulation consisting of various categories should be taken into consideration.
It is possible that the new forthcoming EU Directive provides occasion for a re-examination
of the formulation of the current provision of penalties.
The above distinction between various forms of conduct is also relevant for imposing sentences. In
practice, the court usually imposes a suspended custodial sentence in combination with a community
service order. From the figures, there appears to be a clear tendency towards imposing more severe
sentences: the proportion of non-suspended or partially suspended custodial sentences increased in
the period between 2006 and 2010 and in 2010, a community service order was imposed less often as
the main sentence. At present, it is still unclear if, and to what extent, the possibilities for imposing
community service orders will be limited in the future for cases involving a breach of Article 240b of
the Dutch Criminal Code. Limiting the possibilities to impose a community service order, particularly if
this would no longer be possible in combination with suspended sentences, would in any case, provide
courts with fewer opportunities to tailor the sentence to the individual case. In this context, possibilities
for influencing behaviour by means of supervision on the basis of conditions imposed for a suspended
sentence, for example, must also be taken into consideration.
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