After new rules were passed by the state parliament, child sex abusers in South Australia will now face harsher prison terms.
The maximum sentence for gross indecency has been changed from five to fifteen years in prison.
A decade or more in prison might be imposed on those found in possession of a child sex doll, but even if their victims’ ages are unknown, cyber predators who download, share, or make child abuse content will not be shown any mercy.
South Australia now has some of the strictest legislation in the nation for safeguarding children and punishing perpetrators, according to Attorney-General Kyam Maher.
According to him, “the punishments meted out to predators now better reflect the lifelong effects inflicted on their victims.”
“Our government has listened to the survivors of child sex abuse and their families, and we are happy to deliver harsh new laws that will properly punish perpetrators,” said the government.
Following a Royal Australian Air Force intelligence officer’s admission of guilt to 230 child sex-related crimes involving victims from all around the world, modifications have been made.
On Tuesday, Sergeant Jacob Donald Walsh entered a guilty plea in Adelaide Magistrates Court to one of the most serious allegations of child abuse brought against a single person in Australian history.
While employed by the Defence Science and Technology Group at RAAF Base Edinburgh, roughly 25 kilometers north of Adelaide, Walsh engaged in criminal activity.
The offenses included online grooming, child sexual exploitation, and abuse, as well as Walsh’s use of young victims’ photos as leverage to extract sexually explicit images from them.
According to The Advertiser, the Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team (JACET) of South Australia produced 88,000 pages of evidence against Walsh.
In May 2021, Walsh was first accused of two offenses and released on bail.
In August of that same year, he was detained once more and charged with 45 offenses.
The South Australian Supreme Court was informed that Walsh had used social media apps for eight months to both solicit child abuse material and groom his young victims for sex.
Walsh acquiesced to work with the police and provide them the passwords to the accounts he had used to harm children when confronted with the weight of the forensic evidence.
Later, the prosecution disclosed that it had located 25 victims and spoken to national and international law enforcement agencies.
A prosecutor at the time stated, “More than 1,000 conversations, consisting of between 10,000 and 60,000 lines of chat apiece, directly pertain to grooming adolescents for specific sexual behaviors.”
“We will claim that Sergeant Walsh has been using that information against the youngsters to make them susceptible to more serious offenses,” the statement reads.