Western Cape father jailed for raping his children, selling pornographic images of them

9 Jun 2025

The man – who faced 629 counts of possession of child porn – said in his plea explanation that he ‘decided to create child pornography for financial gain, as the conversion rate at the time was $18 to the rand’.

A 27-year-old Cape Town father who shared child pornographic images and videos of his biological minor children and sold an unknown number of them to unknown users for between $5 and $10, has been handed 35 years’ direct imprisonment for digital trafficking in persons and the rape of his minor children.

His name will also be entered into the National Register for Sexual Offenders and the National Child Protection Register.

The father was convicted of two counts of trafficking in persons for online exploitation, four counts of rape of two minor children, three counts of using children for or benefiting from child pornography, 629 counts of possession of child pornography, three counts of unlawful and intentional distribution of child pornography and three counts of child abuse.

He was sentenced to a total of 195 years but the court ordered most of the sentences to run concurrently.

On Monday, 9 June, National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) Western Cape spokesperson Eric Ntabazalila said the court ordered the father to serve two-thirds of his sentence before he can be eligible for parole.

The State did not name the accused because his children are minors – two girls aged six and four years and a one-year-old son.

The sentence handed to the disgraced father in the Paarl Regional Court comes just days after National Child Protection Week, during which Daily Maverick ran a series of articles that painted a grim picture of the crimes committed against helpless children.

While the number of reported sexual offences committed against children in South Africa dropped by 1,542 between 2021/22 and 2023/24, from 23,379 to 21,837, Luke Lamprecht, head of advocacy at the Gauteng nonprofit Women and Men Against Child Abuse, noted that in cases such as sexual violence against children, the number of incidents reported to police was a fraction of those shown to be occurring through research.

For ‘financial gain’

According to Ntabazalila, the State and the accused reached a plea and sentencing agreement to protect the children from secondary victimisation.

In his plea explanation, the father indicated that he married the mother of his children on 4 March 2018, and at one stage he was unemployed and stayed home to take care of the minor children.

“I subscribed to a social media application with instant messaging, where one can transmit and receive messages, photos and videos. Users can communicate privately with other users or in groups,” he stated.

“The social media platform users can send photographs taken within the application, which indicates to other users that a picture was taken in real time and not imported from a camera roll.”

He went on to explain: “I decided to create child pornography for financial gain, as the conversion rate at the time was $18 to the rand. I connected with the group after the administrative user approved my access to the group, and I started to communicate with the administrative user.

“I admitted that I started making child pornographic content of my biological children that I intended to share with random people online in exchange for a monetary reward.”

The father claims to have made an unknown number of child pornography images and videos depicting his three children.

“I confessed that in the chats with the administrative user, I shared child pornographic images and videos of his biological minor children and sold an unknown amount of child pornography to unknown users for $5 to $10,” the court heard.

Read more: Childhood in crisis

The father was arrested after an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officer assigned to the Washington Field Office as part of the FBI Child Exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force posed as the administrative user of the group and forwarded information about his activities to the South African Police Service for further investigation on 22 December 2022.

The accused was arrested on 30 May 2023 and police seized his cellphone, which he used to commit the crimes.

State advocate Evadne Kortje, who finalised the plea and sentencing agreement, said the accused contributed to the sexualisation of children, whose innocence should have been protected and preserved at all costs.

“He communicated and joined the social media application to connect with individuals interested in child pornography. He downloaded child pornography from other unknown collectors and other hands-on child sexual abuse offenders. He abused his parental privilege and the trust relationship that he had towards his three small children,” Kortje said.

Read more: Inside the mind of a monster — understanding the psychology of child abusers

Advocate Nicolette Bell, the Western Cape director of public prosecutions, commended the sentence and emphasised the need to make every day a child protection day to protect the most vulnerable members of society.

The fight against the scourge of sexual violence, particularly against minors, and internet trafficking in children, must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, she said, adding that the NPA has dedicated prosecutors who deal with these crimes.

She commended the collaborative working relationship between international law enforcement agencies and the SAPS, the Family Violence, Child Protection and Sexual Offences unit and the Serial and Electronic Crime Investigation Unit. DM

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For ‘financial gain’