According to a Bureau Beke investigation, the Netherlands “plays a key role worldwide in the phenomenon of child pornography” due to its strong digital infrastructure.
This claim is best represented in a massive spike of child pornography over the past 10 years with the report claiming a tenfold increase over the past 5 years. These numbers put extra effort on police and law enforcement officials as less than half of the reported incidents get investigated. Of 30,000 (compared to 3,000 in 2014) reported incidents of child pornography, some 7,000 investigations were launched. Of those, only 300 entered the Public Prosecution Service. Bureau Beke has called this low number of prosecuted cases “undesirable” and sends the wrong message to potential perpetrators.
The high increase in reported cases of child pornography has been attributed, in part, to the major search engines and social networks of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft requirements to report such content.
