Media Release
27 April 2004

Child, Youth and Family welcomes sentence for ‘abhorent’ crime

Child, Youth and Family has welcomed the prison sentence handed down today to a Tauranga man who emailed pictures of a naked child whom he said was offering for sex.

Ross Alexander Mundy, who had also collected 1300 images of children being raped, was sentenced to imprisonment on 41 child pornography charges.

“This abhorrent case highlights the close link between the trading of child sex abuse images and child abuse. This is not a victimless crime,” Acting General Manager of Social Work Operations Shannon Pakura said today.

“This conviction is about more than pictures on a computer. It is about protecting a vulnerable child – and hundreds of other young boys and girls – from intolerable abuse.”

“For every child sex abuse image that is traded on the internet, a child is abused - it’s that simple - and it must be stopped.”

The case highlighted the importance of the Department of Internal Affairs and Child, Youth and Family working closely on cases involving child sex abuse images, she said.

The two Departments have in the past liaised on specific cases and are now starting work to develop a formal protocol to establish how they can best work together and share information in future.

“The work the Department of Internal Affairs does to identify and prosecute these offenders is incredibly important and we want to take every opportunity to work with them to help protect children from this form of abuse,” Ms Pakura said.

“New Zealand and British research indicates that there is a clear association between adults looking at child sex abuse images and committing assaults on children and this is a serious concern to both Departments.”

Child, Youth and Family has similar protocols with Police for reporting cases involving serious and sexual abuse.

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