标签： Europe

A shocking case of child neglect has emerged in eastern France, where a 43-year-old man has been formally charged after holding his nine-year-old son captive in a parked van for more than 12 months. The disturbing discovery was made on Monday in the residential town of Hagenbach, located in the Alsace region, after attentive neighbors alerted authorities to suspicious sounds of a young child coming from the vehicle, which was parked in a shared communal space of a local apartment block.

Local state prosecutors have released harrowing details of the boy’s condition when first responders entered the van. The child was found lying naked beneath a thin blanket, resting on a heap of garbage piled beside human waste. He was severely malnourished, and long-term confinement to a fixed position left him unable to walk upon discovery.

Under official questioning, the father—who has not been publicly identified to protect the identity of the minor victim—claimed he locked his son in the vehicle starting in November 2024. He told investigators he took this extreme step to block his 37-year-old partner, who he said intended to place the boy in psychiatric care. The father also maintains that his partner was unaware the child was being held in the van.

At the time of the discovery, the couple resided in the apartment block alongside the boy’s two siblings: a 12-year-old full sister and a 10-year-old half-sister. All three children have since been moved into temporary protective care, where they will remain while a children’s court judge deliberates on long-term placement arrangements.

French newspaper Le Parisien has published the child’s firsthand account of his year-long confinement. According to the boy, his father brought him food two times each day and left bottles of water for him to drink. With no access to bathroom facilities, he was forced to urinate into empty plastic bottles and defecate in plastic bin bags. The child also told investigators he had not taken a shower since the end of 2024.

Neighbors told law enforcement that the nine-year-old had seemingly vanished from the community abruptly around the end of 2024. When residents asked about his absence, the couple told neighbors the child had been placed in formal foster care. Some residents reported hearing faint, irregular noises coming from the parked van over the months that followed, but when they raised questions, the pair told them the sounds were coming from a stray cat, discouraging further investigation.

Following the investigation, the father faces multiple serious charges including sequestration and arbitrary detention of a minor, as well as deliberate deprivation of adequate nutrition and necessary medical care. He has been ordered to remain in pre-trial custody. His partner has also been charged on two counts: failure to provide assistance to an endangered minor, and failure to report known child mistreatment to authorities. She has been released from custody on conditional bail as the case moves through the French judicial system.

A high-profile criminal trial got underway on Friday at a district court in Härnösand, a quiet coastal town in eastern Sweden, where a 61-year-old local man faces severe charges including multiple counts of rape, assault, and coercion for allegedly forcing his ex-wife to provide paid sexual services to more than 120 men over three years.

Prosecutors lay out a disturbing account of systematic abuse that exploited the isolation of the couple’s remote farm near Kramfors, in northern Sweden, to maintain control over the victim. According to official charging documents, the abuse began in 2022, when the defendant first coerced his then-wife into engaging in sexual encounters with men he sourced and communicated with online, who traveled to the couple’s property from across Sweden to pay for the services. The violence and coercion only ended in October 2025, when the victim gathered the courage to file an official report with police. She has since divorced her abuser, and both she and the defendant have had their full identities withheld from public records to protect the victim’s privacy.

Prosecutors allege the defendant used multiple tools to break his wife’s resistance and maintain his control: he plied her with drugs to lower her ability to resist, installed surveillance cameras throughout the family home to monitor her every move (including recording the non-consensual sexual encounters, footage that will be entered as evidence in the trial), and exploited her limited social network to cut her off from outside support. He also carried out repeated violent threats against her, including threats to kill her, burn her with petrol, and sever her fingers, according to the indictment cited by Swedish public broadcaster SVT.

Lead prosecutor Ida Annerstedt told Swedish national daily Expressen ahead of the opening of the trial that the defendant intentionally “exploited her particularly vulnerable situation” and her deep-seated fear of him to gradually normalize his pattern of coercive abuse.

The defendant has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. He claims all sexual encounters were consensual, and argues he only acted as an organizer to facilitate arrangements between his ex-wife and the men who contacted her. His defense lawyer, Martina Michaelsdotter Olsson, confirmed to SVT on the first day of the trial that her client rejects the entire narrative presented by prosecutors, saying he does not recognize the version of events outlined in the indictment.

Swedish law enforcement has to date identified 120 men who are alleged to have participated in the encounters at the farm. However, only 28 of these men have so far been formally charged in connection with the case. Most of the co-accused have denied the allegations against them, claiming either they never engaged in sexual activity with the victim or that no payment was exchanged. Prosecutors plan to corroborate their case with a range of evidence including online chat logs between the defendant and the accused men, financial transaction records of payments, and calendar entries the defendant kept to schedule encounters.

The case has drawn widespread international attention, with many observers drawing comparisons to the high-profile 2024 Pelicot trial in France, where Dominique Pelicot was convicted of drugging his own wife and allowing dozens of men to rape her over a nine-year period. To protect the victim’s privacy, the Swedish trial moved into a closed session immediately after the charges were read in court. The entire proceeding is scheduled to run for 14 days, with a verdict expected at the conclusion of proceedings.

Dutch law enforcement has taken to social media to urge unreported victims of a brutal, transnational sextortion ring to come forward, after a 22-year-old local man went on trial this week for orchestrating a campaign that left dozens of women and girls coerced into committing degrading, violent sexual acts on camera.

The suspect, identified only as Damian A. in line with Dutch privacy regulations, crafted a deceptive online persona posing as a teenage girl to lure targets on widely used social and messaging platforms. His MO followed a chilling pattern: he first convinced victims to share explicit personal photos, then leveraged that material as blackmail. Under threat to distribute the private images to the victims’ friends, family members, and classmates, he forced them to create increasingly graphic, sadistic content—including forced self-directed sexual abuse and orders to lick public toilet seats. Some victims were even coerced into writing or holding signs reading “Owned by Turpien”, the suspect’s reported online alias, effectively branding themselves in the imagery that would later be exploited for profit.

Damian A. was first taken into custody in January 2025, and his trial opened this week in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Court documents confirm the suspect has confessed to the charges, which include counts of online sexual assault and online rape. Prosecutors have formally requested a nine-year prison sentence alongside court-mandated psychological treatment. In remarks reported by local Dutch media, Damian A. told the court, “I didn’t think about the consequences. That you can hurt people.” A final verdict from the court is expected within the coming weeks.

The international scale of the abuse only came to light after a group of young women in the United States reported their exploitation to authorities, sparking a cross-border investigation that led investigators to Damian A. One high-profile case in the Netherlands involved a schoolgirl who was ordered to skip class and send a nude photo to the suspect within 10 minutes, or face having her existing explicit images sent to all her classmates. Rotterdam Police’s Sexual Crimes Team has described the harm inflicted as catastrophic, with the suspect turning his victims’ daily lives into “a living hell.”

Beyond blackmail, Damian A. is alleged to have sold the abusive, explicit content on third-party platforms, extending the harm far beyond the initial coercion, and even shared the victims’ private personal data with other bad actors. To date, investigators have positively identified more than 50 victims across six countries: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, and Montenegro. But law enforcement stressed that this number is almost certainly a fraction of the true total, as many victims remain too afraid or ashamed to come forward.

Milou van der Kolk, a member of the Rotterdam Police Sexual Crimes Team, emphasized the urgency of the public appeal. “We are very worried because what these girls have had to endure is so extreme and so intense, and we know that there are more girls but we don’t know who they are,” she said.

The ongoing social media campaign by Dutch police serves three core goals: to identify additional unreported victims, to reassure existing survivors that the suspect is in custody and cannot contact them, and to encourage caregivers and parents to have open conversations with young people about the dangers of sharing intimate imagery online. All police posts include direct links and contact information for free, confidential victim support services.

Authorities explained that many victims of this type of online abuse grapple with overwhelming isolation, chronic stress, and feelings of hopelessness. Because the shame, fear, and despair caused by sextortion can be so debilitating, professional support is not just helpful—it can be life-saving. The case also highlights a growing, underrecognized threat: how a single offender with just a smartphone can exert total, terrifying control over young victims in the privacy of their own homes, turning everyday social media platforms into tools of intimidation, abuse, and exploitation while the adults in their lives remain completely unaware of the harm taking place.

Police have also issued a separate warning to any individual who purchased or shared the abusive content: all such material must be deleted immediately, as investigators have confirmed that a permanent digital trail exists to trace activity. The suspect’s actions are part of a sharply rising global trend of sextortion: in the Netherlands alone, police recorded roughly 3,000 sextortion cases in 2025, marking a 46% jump from the previous year.

Any individuals who have experienced online sexual abuse can access confidential support resources through the BBC Action Line.