10 Disturbing Details Surrounding The German Couple Who Sold Their Son To Pedophiles On The Dark Web

6 /10 Can I Kill Him?

Not content with filming the abuse for their future views and performing all sorts of depraved acts on the boy, one of the participants directly asked the mother if he was allowed to kill him.

Unable to go this far or, more likely, unwilling to lose a disgustingly profitable business, the mother denied.

However, copies of the abuse videos were distributed online, sold, and resold among the pedophile circles of the Dark Web.

5 /10 Business Model

Their sales usually proceeded in the same way, posting the boy’s announcement online alongside his photograph and starting a bid.

Sometimes, as with the Swiss man, the offers came to be very low: fifty to sixty euros. On other occasions, the parents are believed to have extracted up to ten thousand euros at a time to abuse the woman’s son.

The court would later order them to pay €42,500 to the boy after their arrest to make sure that this money at the very least served to give him a semi-normal life.

4 /10 Some Weeks Of Relief

A semi-normal life is what he experienced during a few weeks in March of 2017 when a local detective informed the social services that the boy was living alongside a convicted sex offender and pedophile.

He was then taken away and put under the custody of the social services, only for his mother to sue in court and regain his control, in a decision that still confuses the case’s chroniclers.

The court ordered that the boy didn’t have any further contact with Christian, but he and his mother ignored this legal resolution.

3 /10 Threats Of Foster Care

The boy himself didn’t speak of his abuse (as is frequent of abuse victims) because he was under threats of being sent away to live in foster care (probably described to him under horrifying terms), or perhaps of suffering even worse abuse if he spoke to the social services or law officers.

Being under years of abuse from those who are supposed to protect him, it’s very likely that in his mind, nobody else was going ever to be able to defend him either.

2 /10 Guilt And Fear

How does the mind of a mother like this work? Well: Berrin, the mother, would later say that she lived simultaneously under the power of Christian and that she was terrified of him leaving her.

But the German newspaper Der Spiegel would later report that a case psychiatrist, Hartmut Pleines, identified this as a typical shield behavior and denied her claims of being psychologically too weak to have stopped the abuse.

In a very fair move from the German criminal justice system, she wasn’t spared jail because of her lies.

1 /10 Officials Under Criticism

But officials from the German social services and police have nevertheless come into question and severe criticism for their behavior during the whole process.

The local court, authority, and youth welfare officers all perceived different facets of a sordid abuse case that could have been identified and detained much earlier if they had communicated and traded information correctly.

Calls for the resignations of some of the leading officials in these branches were made.

Still, no one seems to have been made responsible, in the end, for the failure of the institutions to protect the boy in one of the saddest and most horrible cases of abuse ever witnessed in both Germany and the world.