Accused of abuse of 361 children begins to be tried in Finland

Athe main charges are aggravated sexual abuse of minors, sexual abuse of minors and aggravated distribution of sexually explicit images of minors, the attorney general advanced before the start of the trial.

The trial began with a public presentation at the Pirkanmaa District Court in Tampere (northwest Helsinki), in which the defendant participated remotely from the prison of Hameenlinna, where he has served, since 2023, a three-year sentence for a previous case of aggravated child sexual abuse, committed while working as a substitute teacher in a primary school.

The court case will continue, on Tuesday, behind closed doors at the request of the victims' families, to protect their identities.

The 28-year-old man is accused of committing various sexual crimes between 2019 and 2022 against, according to Finnish public television Yle, boys from across the Nordic country.

In December 2025, the Finnish police announced that they were investigating a man suspected of 364 child sex crimes, but the prosecution decided not to press charges in three of the cases.

Thousands of videos and images of children were found on the man’s phone in 2022, when police seized the device in another criminal case, the police explained at the time.

The man will have contacted the children through social networks, especially Snapchat, asking them to take and send pictures or make videos of them naked or with little clothes.

In addition, he also asked them to engage in sexual acts, told the police, adding that the man partially confessed to the crimes during the investigation.

Hundreds of minors who appeared in the collected material remain unidentified.

The Finnish court has scheduled 45 hearings to prosecute the accused, so the trial is expected to continue at least until the end of this year.

According to a study carried out by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) together with the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) and released last Thursday, about 20 million children in 21 countries around the world, including Europe, were sexually abused via the Internet in 2025.

According to the study, one in five children between the ages of 12 and 17 who use the internet were attracted and explored on digital platforms by people who already knew or knew ‘online’, and only 1% of the cases were reported to the authorities.

Most abuse situations (60%) occurred on social networks, especially Facebook (50%), WhatsApp (29%), Instagram (24%), Snapchat (13%) and TikTok (12%), although an important part (14%) also happened on online gaming platforms.