Law will now punish internet pedophilia

On Tuesday, November 25, during the Third World Congress Against the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva approved the law arising from Bill 3773/08, which increases the penalties for crimes related to paedophilia. The House Floor approved the Bill - proposed by the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Pedophilia of the Senate - on Tuesday, November 11.

The law increases pedophilia penalty, better qualifies the internet crimes and classifies other crimes, such as the ones of acquiring photographs or videos containing scenes involving children.

Jail time will be increased from 2 to 6 years to 4 to 8 years for offenders who produce, reproduce, direct, photograph, film or record, by any means, pornographic or explicit-sex scenes involving children or teenagers.

The big news is that the penalty will be increased in one third, if the offender

-  takes advantage of household, cohabitation or hospitality relationships, 
-  is related to the victim in any way, until third degree of kindred; 
-  exerts any kind of authority on the victim; or
-  if the victim consents on the crime.

The penalty is also similarly increased for the sale or exhibition of photographs, videos or any other kind of record that contain explicit-sex or pornography scenes involving children or teenagers.

The Congress had already increased the penalties for these crimes in 2003; they were then from 1 to 4 years of confinement and their descriptions were less precise, which hampered their legal classification by the judge.
The changes are made at the Estatuto da Criança e do Adolescente - ECA (Law 8.069/90). (Child and Teenager Act)

 The approval of this law corrects an important omission in Brazilian legislation: the lack of measures to punish internet pedophilia crimes. "We had to suffer the humiliation of having to return the computers to pedophiles and to apologize, because a law was missing”, said Senator Magno Malta (PR-ES), the president of the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee (CPI) on Pedophilia in the Senate.

“World reference”
The acting president of the Mixed Parliamentary Front in Defense of the Rights of Children and Teenagers, Deputy Paulo Henrique Lustosa (PMDB-CE), considers that Brazil has become a world reference in the combat to pedophilia. He emphasizes that recently, for the first time in the world, Google has broken its users' confidentiality, as a result of a negotiation with the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Pedophilia (CPI), of the Senate. Thus, according to him, the congresspeople managed to map all participants of Orkut who offer material related to pedophilia. “This fact is a world reference, since we were the only to be able to do this, and thanks to the Legislative”, he affirms.

Related News:

Preventive detention of foreign pedophile

Report - Eduardo Piovesan
Editing - Newton Araújo Jr./Rejane Xavier