Criminal suspicions|A man convicted of sexual crimes stopped working in the church shortly after the actions that led to the conviction.
The church a youth worker and candidate for the municipal elections of the Christian Democrats was sentenced to conditional imprisonment for two counts of sexual abuse of a child in January at the Kymenlaakso district court.
The case will be dealt with by the Court of Appeal of Eastern Finland, where the prosecutor took the case.
The now 34-year-old man survived only with the probationary period of the suspended sentence, because he sat in pre-trial detention for almost the entire summer of 2021, from the end of May to the beginning of August, and after that was still under an enhanced travel ban. Therefore, the court considered the five-month suspended sentence fully served.
The trial period ends in the summer of next year.
The man’s victims were two 14-year-old children, with whom he was in contact online, on a discussion page in late 2020 and early 2021 in Kouvola. All identification information of the victims has been removed from the public part of the judgment.
The man appeared on the discussion board as a 14–15-year-old girl, talked with them in a sexual way, made them send pictures of their genitals and masturbate.
Man admitted the acts in court, but considered that the victims did not come to know during the messaging that the other party is an adult man, and that both were close to the legal age limit, i.e. sixteen years. According to him, this was not likely to harm their development.
The court saw otherwise. It familiarized itself with research in the field and stated that online-type sexual violence via the network is just as harmful as physically carried out in the same space.
It stated that online sexual violence also increases the risk of developing psychological damage and jeopardizing other well-being in the long term.
“The main concern of the victims is related to the actual or feared spread of self-presenting images on the internet. According to the statement, the very awareness that the material exists and can potentially be seen by numerous people is apt to be traumatizing,” it reasoned.
District court stated that the messaging was limited to one time and was quite short-lived anyway, and the victim was active in asking for pictures. However, it did not reduce the reprehensibility of the act, it pointed out. The victims said they were 14 years old.
According to the law, the author should have understood that the victims did not yet have the ability to make their own decisions in matters related to sexuality and that the procedure was apt to harm the development of the victims.
The man worked as the parish’s youth work supervisor and was employed in the parish until the summer of 2021. At the end of the same year, he asked to resign from the parish council and the group responsible for education due to personal reasons.
He was also the Christian Democrats’ municipal election candidate in the spring of 2021, i.e. a couple of months before he was imprisoned. He received a small number of votes and was not elected.
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