A North Carolina woman was sentenced to 50 years in prison on Monday for using kids to make child porn when she worked at a daycare facility, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.
25-year-old Alyson Brooke Saunders used “five minor victims in her care to create sexually explicit images and videos, including some in which she also engaged in hands-on sexual abuse of some of the children,” sometime between January and February of 2019 while working at a daycare facility, according to the DOJ.
Saunders then sent the images and videos online to another individual, knowing he intended to post them on the internet, the DOJ stated.
“The defendant in this case exploited her position as a caregiver to produce sexually explicit images of vulnerable young children with the purpose of providing the images to a co-conspirator,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas L. McQuaid of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said.
Saunders pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography and one count of distribution of child pornography on Nov. 5, according to the DOJ.
“When people in positions of trust and responsibility exploit children it not only steals the child’s innocence, it can also teach them not to trust any more, which can cause lifelong trauma,” Special Agent in Charge Ronnie Martinez of Homeland Security Investigations North Carolina said.
It is estimated that every nine minutes, child protective services detects or finds evidence of a claim of child sexual abuse, according to the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN. A Statista study found that in 2019, there were 656,243 cases of child abuse reported in the U.S.
