Australian mother sexually abused own kids, shared footage with child porn ring

GlobalPost

An Australia woman who sexually abused her two children and broadcast the sex acts on the Internet has been sentenced to a minimum of 13 years in jail.

According to the Australian Broadcasting Authority, she was part of an international network of parents who carried out sex acts on their own children and often posted them on the Internet.

The woman, 31, carried out the sex acts against her son, 12, and daughter, 11, during a span of more than six months in 2010 in the Central Coast, an urban region in New South Wales north of Sydney, the Newcastle Herald reported.

Her husband, 51, and another man were also charged over the sexual abuse of the couple's children.

Live streams of the abuse were distributed to people in the United States, England, the Netherlands, Germany and France, the Herald wrote.

In one email, the woman encouraged a British man to have sex with his stepson, 10, and stepdaughter, 4, saying it was ‘‘so cool’’ that her own children were involved in sexual acts.

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The trio was arrested in November 2010. The woman's husband was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in jail last week.

The other man, Bruce Ford, of New South Wales, was jailed Friday for a maximum of 21 years.

The court heard the woman had been sexually abused as a child by members of her family, and she began her relationship with her husband when she was 15 or 16.

Gosford District Judge Roy Ellis said she showed "an unfathomable level of depravity" that is "impossible to grasp."

In March, Australian police busted a child pornography network that had originated in Germany, arresting at least 14 men — including fathers — nationwide.

Computer hardware containing hundreds of thousands of child exploitation images and videos — some featuring toddlers — was seized, according to Agence France-Presse.

The crackdown in Australia came after a tip from Interpol.

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