Court sends preschool teacher to prison for sharing video of child being abused

A regional court has sentenced Yevgenia Chudnovets – a preschool teacher from Ekaterinburg – to five months in prison for the distribution of child pornography, said human rights activist Pavel Chikov.

This sentence was one month shorter than that which was issued by another court earlier. During the appellation process, the prosecution requested that Chudovets be forced to perform remedial labor, while the defense requested that she be pardoned.

• In November 2016, Chudnovets was sentenced to six months in prison for “distributing child pornography.” The preschool teacher had posted a video of a naked child being bullied by camp counselors. Chudnovets herself had no connection to the video, but had simply shared it on a group in social network VKontakte.
• The video showed counselors at a children’s camp in Kataysk mocking one of the wards. After the video’s publication, a counselor and the camp head were sentenced to terms of three and six years in prison respectively.
• Earlier, the prosecutor’s office asked that Chudnovets’ sentence be lessened, as she has a three-year-old son. The sentence also angered Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner Anna Kuznetsova.