Horrific details about the thousands of images found in a Plettenberg Bay computer engineer’s possession came to light as sentencing proceedings in the matter got under way in the Knysna Regional Court yesterday.
William Beale, 39, was arrested in January 2015 when international police swooped on his seaside home. He then became the first South African to have been arrested as part of Operation Cloud 9. The operation involved co-operation between South African and Belgian police responsible for cracking down on an international child pornography ring linked to a cyber meeting space for paedophiles whose main interest seems to be the sexual abuse of babies.
Some of the images found included the torture and murder of babies as young as only a few days old.
When Beale was arrested police found sections of files containing thousands of videos and violent assaults as well internet addresses of more than 300 alleged paedophiles.
More than two years later, in February this year, Beale pleaded guilty to just short of 1 900 charges of possession of child pornography.
As sentencing proceedings started yesterday Magistrate Eugenia Jacobs said that because of the sensitive nature of the images in question, these could not be shown in an open court. She therefore, with the relevant role-players, viewed a “sample” of the images in her chambers. She said these could be divided into various categories and included images of infants, toddlers and teenagers and varied in acts from the bondage and rape of babies to other deviant sexual acts being performed on children. Among the witnesses who took the witness stand as part of sentencing proceedings was clinical psychologist Tjaart van der Walt who was called in mitigation of sentence.
Van der Walt testified that Beale had suffered severe abuse - sexual, physical and psychological - as a child and that this was a contributing factor to developing deviant sexual interests. He added that after consulting with Beale, it became apparent that he suffered from several disorders, including paedophilia, and suffered from, among other things, strong anti-social behavioural traits.
Van der Walt said while there was no cure for paedophilia and no “best practice” treatment for it, research had shown that “hands-off online” offenders - who did not actually physically abuse children - had a low likelihood of re-offending or developing into “contact” criminals. He also testified that, to his knowledge, there was no evidence that Beale had groomed any child for abuse and that his viewing of child pornography was an addiction. “He admitted that he would often binge watch for up to eight hours at a time,” Van der Walt said.
Van der Walt added while there was no treatment available for someone like Beale, there were programmes that he could participate in to address the behaviou
r. He noted that if Beale would undergo the same treatment, the outcome would be the same whether he was imprisoned or placed under correctional supervision.
The matter was postponed to October 4, 2017 for the continuation of sentencing.
The state is expected to cross-examine Van der Walt and it also plans to call other expert witnesses.