An 18-year-old teenager has been arrested on suspicion of committing crimes involving child sexual abuse and child pornography after allegedly coercing a 13-year-old minor to produce and send “videos of a sexual nature” in Vila Real.
The investigation commenced in April this year, prompted “by a report from a child protection institution where the minor was located”, detailed the Polícia Judiciária (PJ) in a statement sent to newsrooms on Monday.
The statement further noted that the teenager allegedly met the minor on a social network and subsequently coerced her into “producing and sending videos of a sexual nature”.
The suspect is now due to appear before the judicial authorities for questioning and the imposition of pre-trial measures.
According to the 2024 Annual Internal Security Report (RASI), juvenile delinquency has been on the rise since 2021, with last year seeing an increase of 12.5% compared to 2023. Additionally, group criminality continued to rise, recording a 7.7% increase.
Last year, there remained “a predominance of cases related to sexual crimes, notably child sexual abuse committed by offenders aged between 12 and 16,” while “crimes involving child pornography using applications such as Discord and WhatsApp, used to share sexually explicit and pornographic files, also deserve attention.”
Juvenile delinquency continued its upward trend last year since 2021, reveals the internal security report, highlighting “the predominance of cases related to sexual crimes” and the worsening of crimes among young people.
Despite some reduction in serious crimes against life and physical integrity by young people in groups last year, crimes “are increasingly severe and are committed by progressively younger individuals, where the value of human life holds no significance.”
The document also noted that youths aged between 12 and 16 produced intimate content for sale, shared in ‘WhatsApp’ groups created to distribute adult pornography and extreme violence content, including violence against children.
The RASI further stated that investigations identified children aged 10 to 13 as responsible for creating these groups where information is shared, with the act of sharing itself constituting a crime. These cases were, as noted in the document, forwarded to family and juvenile courts, as the identified children and youths are minors.
Last year, authorities identified a high prevalence of pornography distribution on networks such as ‘Instagram’, ‘YouTube’, ‘Facebook’, ‘WhatsApp’, ‘Telegram’, and ‘Google Drive’, as well as the sharing of child abuse and exploitation content through the ‘darknet’.
