On 12 June last, David Starr (45) from Iowa was sentenced to up to 60 years in jail after being convicted of sexual exploitation and childpornography charges. He was accused of tricking youngsters into sending him nude pictures. The judge called him a "predator in the truest sense of the word". Last week Matthew John Duhamel (33) was jailed for five years after pleading guilty to one count of possessing child pornography. He ran an internet modelling site specialising in young girls which "went way across the line" and exploited children. On 6 June last, Ernest Tatum (57) was sentenced to 50 months' imprisonment on one count of possessing child pornography. He is not entitled to parole. One of the most severe sentences ever imposed was in 2005 when Gregory John Mitchell, of Dublin, Virginia, was given 150 years when convicted of the production, sale, distribution and possession of child pornography.

UK: Sentencing in Britain is less clearcut than most other countries, with the emphasis based on rehabilitating offenders, much like the Irish system. People convicted of child pornography are often freed if prisons get overcrowded.

Timothy Cox (PICTURED, 28) was jailed for an "indeterminable" amount of time after the most high-profile crackdown on child pornography in British history. Officers discovered Cox, or the 'Son of God' as he called himself, had in his possession 75,960 indecent images and dozens of videos showing horrific abuse, including young babies being raped.

Across the world, 700 people, including four in Ireland, were found to have logged on to the site in just a 10-day period. As part of the police operation 35 children, 15 of them from the UK, were rescued. Last week a former senior official at Stirling Council was jailed for nine months after being arrested with more than 1,000 images of child pornography. Timothy Dixon (60) pleaded guilty to having images of more than 500 individual victims. The court heard his collection included images of children ranging from babies to teenagers. Seven were under 12 months old.

Germany: Distribution of child pornography in Germany carries a jail term of between three months and five years, while possession of illegal material can lead to a fine or one-year sentence and most convicted offenders go to jail. German police have launched a number of high-profile operations against illegal child porn and last January, in an unprecedented move, all 14 German credit-card companies handed over customer transaction details to the police in an effort to identify childpornography users. Five specialists in the police department in southwestern Germany have been scouring the internet since 2005 to uncover sex offenders and paedophiles. Around 800 cases involving child pornography passed through the state district attorney's office in Stuttgart last year. Only one-third of cases that go to court in Germany result in convictions.

Australia: The Australian version of the DPP is currently appealing a suspended sentence handed down to a former senior official in the government's overseas aid department. John Dunbar Fowler(60) received a suspended sentence even though he possessed around 200,000 pornographic images, mostly of children engaging in sexual acts. Sentencing for having child pornography is quite rare and an offender is more likely to go to jail for stealing a car than for viewing pornography.

Earlier this month, a man who downloaded child pornography in work was given a fourmonth suspended term, while in February a 33year-old Tasmanian father who download 3,500 images was given a three-month suspended sentence. In 2004, over 700 Australian citizens were arrested following a tip-off from the FBI which was investigating a US pornographic site.