Tag: child abuse

Afghan man, 45, ‘marries girl aged SIX before Taliban intervene… and say he must wait until she is NINE’

A six-year-old girl has allegedly been forced to marry a 45-year-old man in Afghanistan after she was given away for money.

The haunting photo of an older man and a little girl standing together horrified even the Taliban, who intervened with the union.

The youngster had allegedly been exchanged by her father for money to a man who already has two wives, it was reported by Amu.tv.

The marriage was allegedly set to take place on Friday in Helmand province but the Taliban stepped in and arrested both men involved.

No charges were brought against them but they have forced the creep to wait until the girl is nine before he can take her home, local media said.

UN Women reported last year that there has been a 25 per cent rise in child marriages in Afghanistan after the Taliban banned girls’ education in 2021. They also said there has been a 45 per cent increase in child bearing across the country.

In the same year as the Taliban came to power, after the US’ heavily criticised exit, a nine-year-old girl who was sold by her father to a 55-year-old man as a child bride was rescued by a charity.

Parwana Malik was sold for the equivalent of £1,600 in land, sheep and cash to a stranger named Qorban so her father Abdul Malik could pay for food. 

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Paedophile jailed for 25 years complains prison guards have lost his teddy bear

A convicted paedophile has complained from behind bars that prison guards have ‘lost’ his teddy bear.

Shane Medhurst was jailed for 25 years last June after being found guilty of 14 counts of child sex abuse.

Among the charges included two counts of sexually assaulting a child under the age of 13.

Medhurst, 58, was jailed at Reading Crown Court, and is currently serving his sentence at the 1,100-capacity HMP High Down jail in Surrey.

The jail has two dedicated wings sex offenders, with around 400 inmates convicted of sex offences.

Writing in the latest edition of prisoner publication Inside Time, Medhurst said he was really ‘into arts and crafts’ and had started making his own teddy bears.

One in particular, which he called Mr Bear – a bright yellow bear with a blue and white striped outfit and a hat – was his ‘favourite’ and had taken him three weeks to make.

He said other teddies that he made had been sent to family and friends, and had loaned Mr Bear to the library inside the prison – but three weeks later he’d vanished.

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Pride group founder, 42, who raped a 12-year-old boy he met on dating app Grindr is jailed alongside his partner

The founder of a Pride group who raped an ‘extremely vulnerable’ boy who he met on Grindr has been jailed for 24 years.

Stephen Ireland, 42, who co-founded Pride in Surrey in 2018, raped the child at the flat he shared with his then partner and co-defendant David Sutton, 27, in Addlestone on April 19, 2024.

Ireland had arranged for the 12-year-old boy, referred to in court as Child A, to meet him at his flat after messaging on dating app Grindr, the court heard.

The boy, who had been reported missing at the time, told police they had sex in the flat.

The boy said they also smoked a bong which was later found to have contained methamphetamine, and that pornography was played on a laptop.

Judge Patricia Lees, sentencing at Guildford Crown Court on Monday, told the hearing Ireland ‘took advantage’ of a vulnerable child.

She said: ‘Stephen Ireland is a man who prided himself on being versed in and highly alive to the vulnerabilities of young people linked to the Surrey Pride organisation he was at the time pivotal to.

‘A was quite obviously to any adult an extremely vulnerable child who was highly sexualised.

The court heard the boy had initially told Ireland he was aged 17 – but when he later claimed to be aged 13, Ireland replied: ‘OK – we just have to keep it a secret.’

‘Your response was telling,’ Judge Lees told Ireland, who sat in the dock dressed in a large red T-shirt and showed no emotions throughout the hearing.

‘Far from finding that repugnant, you found that exciting, and sought to do it again.’

In a Telegram chat that took place after their encounter, Ireland sent Child A a message in which he described his age as ‘naughty and kinky’, the court heard.

On the same day, Ireland asked the boy if he would have a threesome and sent the child pictures of himself and Sutton.

Jurors heard that Ireland sent a picture of Child A to Sutton, describing him as a ’14-year-old baby’ who ‘wants to play with men’s bodies’, and the pair exchanged messages about the child.

Ireland along with Sutton, who was a volunteer for Surrey Pride, were found guilty of a string of sexual offences against children including voyeurism, arranging commission of a child sex offence, and possession of prohibited images of children, after a trial at Guildford Crown Court earlier this year.

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Preventing ‘Grooming Gangs’ Requires Honest Data 

We need to talk about the failure to collect and provide data about the offenders connected to the grooming gangs—or what is more accurately described as child sexual slavery and enforced child trafficking. 

Despite having signed and ratified the Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence (‘the Istanbul Convention’) which, in article 11, requires the UK authorities to collect and make public such data, we have an intelligence picture that is so bad it suggests the truth is being deliberately obscured to hide the true scale and nature of these horrors.

As highlighted by Baroness Casey’s report of 16 June 2025, ‘the system has consistently failed to … collect accurate data so it can be examined effectively… [i]nstead flawed data is used repeatedly to dismiss claims about “Asian grooming gangs” as sensationalised, biased or untrue.’

It should not have taken Baroness Casey’s review to highlight this. Any intelligence professional worth their salt will tell you it is fundamental to tactical and strategic doctrine to understand the threat before acting. Given estimates of 250,000-1,000,000 children may have been targeted over several decades, this scandal undeniably represents the greatest domestic intelligence failure in our nation’s history.

Every year the Ministry of Justice releases criminal justice statistics. Unfortunately, they are inherently misleading. In 2010, the ethnicity of offenders was recorded 94% of the time for potentially relevant offences. Each year this number was reduced and by, 2023 ethnicity was only recorded in 67% of cases. The result? The data is meaningless and no professional intelligencer would allow confident assessments to be made. Baroness Casey said as much.

This has not stopped organisations like The Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, incidentally funded by the Home Office, from producing glossy yearly reports—including the 2023 edition that stated 90% of offenders were white—which then do the rounds to obfuscate and deny the scale and scope of abuse: see former MP Lucy Allan’s comments about Baroness Saida Warsi’s orders to bury the scandal. 

There are two fundamental issues with using this data: The first is that the raft of relevant offences, e.g., rape of a child under 13, could apply to child sexual abuse in any setting, which prevents any understanding of how many instances of child sexual slavery and enforced child trafficking occur and which ethnicities, if any, are over-represented.

The second is that, even if there were relevant offences, there appears to have been a deliberate policy shift to not collect ethnicity data—if not outright manipulation— and, even in the event that a particular offence could be identified, no confident assessments could be made. It is suspected that this stems from misguided legal counsel interpreting Section 149 of the Equality Act 2010—the implementation of which coincided with the sharp decline in ethnicity data collection—which requires the public sector to ‘foster good relations’ between different races, including the need to ‘tackle prejudice’.

Even the Police’s new ‘Hydrant Programme’s’ approach to data is bizarrely inept. Any remotely professional operation tasked with tackling and understanding this behaviour would have put data collection at its core as part of its intelligence function. Yet on June 3rd, 2025, we found out that only 31% of suspects had their ethnicity recorded. Despite this, Deputy Chief Constable Becky Riggs, who is, we were told, the police lead on grooming in England and Wales, went on BBC Newsnight telling the nation that ‘we can only go with the data’ and that it was ‘not true’ that these crimes were being committed by predominantly British Pakistani men. Even though Pakistani men were massively over-represented in that data, it was wrong of her to make her statement. The correct thing for her to say was ‘We simply cannot know because we are not collecting enough data’ and then to promise on national television to collect the data.

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Pulitzer Winning Washington Post Journalist Busted For Child Porn

A Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post journalist was arrested and charged with possession of child porn, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced Friday.

Thomas Pham LeGro, 48, was arrested on Thursday after FBI agents discovered 11 videos of child sexual abuse material on his work laptop during a raid, Pirro’s office says, adding that they also found fractured pieces of a hard drive in his hallway, and seized several electronic devices.

After examining LeGro’s work laptop, the FBI says it found a “folder that contained 11 videos depicting child sexual abuse material.”

LeGro, a veteran journalist who worked at WaPo for 18 years, made his first appearance in District Court of Washington DC on Friday, and has a detention hearing scheduled for next Wednesday, the NY Post reports. He faces a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted.

A heavily redacted FBI affidavit against LeGro claims the reporter was linked to multiple E-Gold accounts in 2005 and 2006.  

E-Gold was a digital payment service that ceased operations after the feds accused the company in 2007 of laundering money for child pornographers.

The affidavit notes that the FBI received court approval to monitor LeGro’s internet account in May. -NY Post

LeGro worked for the Post‘s sports department between 2000-2006, left to work as a reporter and producer for “PBS NewsHour”, and then returned to WaPo in 2013. At WaPo, he was part of a team of reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for coverage of former Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore – who was the victim of a disinformation campaign funded by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman.

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UN report calls on countries to ban ‘gender transitions’ for children

A report presented on June 25 by the United Nations’ special rapporteur on violence against women warns of emerging forms of sex-based violence, including medical procedures related to “gender transitions” in minors.

“Allowing children access to such procedures not only violates their right to safety, security and freedom from violence, but also disregards their human right to the highest standards of health and goes against their best interests,” the report says.

Titled “Sex-based violence against women and girls: new frontiers and emerging issues,” the report acknowledges the “concerted international push to delink the definition of men and women from their biological sex,” which then essentially erases the legal definition of a woman.

According to the report, redefining legal categories of “man” and “woman” apart from biological sex may result in the erasure of women’s legal identity and protections.

“The erasure of sex as a distinct vector of analysis within law and policy obscures the unique vulnerabilities of females, increasing the risk of exploitation,” the report says.

The report associates this erasure with increased vulnerability to exploitation, particularly in the context of medical “transitions” among children.

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British man charged over mock Disneyland wedding to child had been investigated by BBC

The British paedophile charged in connection with organising a “mock wedding” to a child in Disneyland Paris is Jacky Jhaj, who was found guilty of sexual activity with two 15-year-olds in 2016, the BBC understands.

Jhaj, 39, has been charged in connection with organising the fake ceremony on Saturday, in which a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was due to feature as his bride.

He was arrested when police were called on Saturday morning by an actor who said he had been hired by Jhaj to play the father of the bride.

The BBC has previously investigated how Jhaj was able to hire hundreds of children to act as his fawning fans at a fake film premiere in London’s Leicester Square in 2023.

Some of the children, who had been hired from casting agencies, were as young as six.

Teenage girls told the BBC that they had been asked to scream for him and try to touch him, without being told his real identity by the agencies.

Then in June last year, Jhaj was seen giving gifts to children outside dance auditions for another production – he was recognised by a parent who had seen the BBC article.

Two months later, and following the BBC’s further investigation, Jhaj was filmed posing naked in front of a mocked-up BBC News lorry in London which had been set on fire.

For the mock wedding at Disneyland Paris, which was to be filmed by Jhaj’s team, around 100 French extras had been recruited to take part.

The BBC understands that he appeared in front of a judge in Meaux, north-east of Paris, on Monday and was charged with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and identity theft and placed in pretrial detention.

Preliminary findings also stated that he had allegedly been “made-up professionally so that his face appeared totally different from his own”, according to the French prosecutor.

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Slovakian paedophile who kidnapped and gang raped schoolgirl, 12, starred in rap video funded by British taxpayers

A Slovakian paedophile who kidnapped and repeatedly raped a 12-year-old schoolgirl previously appeared in a British taxpayer-funded rap video, MailOnline can reveal.

Ernest Gunar Jr, 27, lured his victim into a car with the promise of a cigarette at an Asda car park in Dover last August, alongside fellow Slovakians Kevin Horvath, 26, and 38-year-old Ivan Turtak.

The girl was raped in Horvath’s car, before being taken to Gunar’s squalid caravan on Arthur Street in Folkestone, Kent, where she was plied with illicit substances, subjected to further rapes and other degrading sexual acts.

The trio were last week convicted of all charges against them.

MailOnline can now reveal that, as a teenager, Gunar rapped about how a lack of ‘respect’ for different communities would result in ‘racism and crime‘ for a local project financed by the UK Government.

Showcased by ITV project Fixers, Gunar – who was 16 at the time – was funded by the Cabinet Office’s Youth Social Action Fund under then-Prime Minister David Cameron.

ITV’s Fixers worked with Gunar as part of the Cabinet Office’s ‘Step Up To Serve’ campaign – which was spearheaded by the then-Prince of Wales, King Charles III.

The sex offender said at the time: ‘It’s my view that young people can be quick to judge each other and don’t always show one another respect.

‘The result of this can be racism and crime and I believe that the barriers between different groups of young people need to be broken down.’

He created a rap song and video, accompanied by friends, many of whom also originally came from Eastern Europe, and said: ‘Some people will perhaps think they know one Slovak who is bad, so they consider us all to be the same.

‘But, we’re all humans and we shouldn’t judge others. We should respect them.’

The lyrics of the video focused on community and unity, with one line stating: ‘Magnify the world, different countries and religions. What we know and what we don’t, let’s mix-match our opinions’.

The music video showed Gunar and several other teenagers singing and rapping while having a barbeque.

King Charles was the royal patron of Step Up To Serve, an initiative which called on adults across the UK to volunteer to help double the level of participation of young people in helping others.

It was supported by the Prime Minister David Cameron, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Leader of the Opposition Ed Miliband.

Gunar was born in Košice, the second biggest city in Slovakia, but came to the UK with his parents when he was aged three or four.

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Former Baltimore Deputy Charged with Sexual Abuse of a Minor: Investigation Uncovers Disturbing Evidence

A former deputy of the Baltimore City Sheriff’s Office is now behind bars, facing charges of sexual abuse of a minor. According to WBAL-TV, Jonathan Koritzer, 35, was apprehended on Friday by the Baltimore County Police Department’s Crimes Against Children Unit following an investigation into allegations about his conduct.

Detectives launched an investigation after receiving tips about an inappropriate relationship between Koritzer and a minor, spanning from May 2022 until November 2024. During this period, the victim was between 14 and 17 years old. Evidence secured from Koritzer’s phone, which included photographs and text messages, corroborated the allegations.

In one of the more disturbing details to emerge, charging documents allege that photos found on Koritzer’s phone depicted the victim dressed in his police uniform, complete with duty gun. Currently, Koritzer is being held without bond at the Baltimore County Detention Center.

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Nicholls Police Chief arrested on child sex crime charges

The Nicholls Police Department’s (NPD) Chief was arrested June 19 on charges including enticing a child for indecent purposes and criminal attempt to commit child molestation, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) announced on June 20.

NPD Chief Ashley Wilson, a 40-year-old from Broxton, is in custody at the Coffee County Jail, the GBI said.

Through their investigation, the GBI said they found that Wilson sent messages to a 15-year-old girl telling her he wanted to have a sexual relationship with her. Many of the messages were sent while Wilson was on duty as Chief of Police, the GBI said.

Now, Wilson is charged with the following, officials said:

  • Three counts of enticing a child
  • One count of violation of oath of office
  • One count of conspiracy to commit child molestation

Investigators said that the girl’s mother discovered text messages between her daughter and Wilson, so she reported the incident to NPD.

Wilson’s arrest comes after the Coffee County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) got a report late June 18 alleging that an NPD officer was involved in an inappropriate relationship with a minor, according to the sheriff’s office. CCSO said they immediately dispatched a deputy to evaluate the situation, and they found that the allegations warranted a comprehensive investigation. CCSO then requested that the GBI investigate this case.

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