Philippines hands down 129-year prison sentence to Australian child sex abuser Peter Gerard Scully
- Some of Scully’s victims were as young as 18 months, a prosecutor said. Scully’s girlfriend, Lovely Margallo, was sentenced to 126 years in jail
- The pair and two others took a plea bargaining arrangement. They had been charged with 60 offences, including trafficking, child abuse and rape
.png?itok=arIb17P0)
“I hope this sends a very strong message to all abusers, all human traffickers, that crime really does not pay,” said Merlynn Barola-Uy, a regional prosecutor in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro.
It was the second conviction for Peter Gerard Scully, who is already serving a life sentence for rape and trafficking of girls.
In Philippines, online child sex abuse cases triple during lockdown
The Cagayan de Oro court handed down the sentence on November 3 after Scully and his three co-accused entered into a plea bargaining agreement.
They had been charged with 60 offences, including trafficking, child pornography, child abuse and rape.
Scully’s girlfriend, Lovely Margallo, was sentenced to 126 years in jail. Two others were given sentences of more than nine years.
This is a big victory for the victim-survivors
Victims and their families have accepted the terms of the agreement and consider it a “sweet victory”, according to a statement posted on the regional prosecution office’s Facebook page.
“They all want to put closure to this dark phase of their lives and move on,” the statement reads.
Victims included an 18-month-old baby girl and a child whose body was found buried under the floor of a house rented by Scully, Barola-Uy said.
“This is a big victory, not only for us prosecutors in the Department of Justice, but more importantly this is a big victory for the victim-survivors,” she said.
US man who live-streamed sex abuse of Filipino children receives record prison sentence
Scully was arrested in 2015 in Malaybalay, another southern Philippine city, after fleeing from Australia in 2011.
He had come to the Philippines to escape fraud charges in his home country.
He then set up a cybersex business, filming teenage girls from impoverished families as he had sex with them or used sex toys, investigators said previously.
Online child sex abuse soars in Thailand as predators exploit Covid-19
The videos were allegedly sold to customers in Germany, the United States and Brazil.
Most of the people who pay to view these types of sex videos are abroad, with potentially thousands of children being abused, often with their parents’ consent, authorities say.
The United Nations Children’s Fund said in 2021 that the Philippines is one of the top global sources of child sex abuse materials.
