Prosecutors take Dutch-hosted abuse site Motherless offline

The public prosecution service (OM) has taken the pornography site Motherless offline, after an investigation by broadcaster NOS and current affairs programme Nieuwsuur found it had been hosted on Dutch servers since 2024. The site ran various kinds of sexual abuse videos.

Motherless drew roughly 62 million visitors a month, according to the investigation.

An NOS analysis of 20,000 videos posted on the site’s front page in the first week of May found that “incest” was the third most popular user tag, after “teen” and “amateur”, covering more than 1,000 videos that together drew 60 million views in a week.

The single most-viewed clip in that period – 4.2 million views – carried tags including “rape”, “school girl” and “sister”. A criminal investigation has been opened by the OM.

Reports ignored

Online abuse expertise bureau Offlimits said it had received nearly 142 reports concerning roughly 12,000 videos on Motherless this year alone. In 25 of those reports the material involved children.

The site has been hosted since at least 2024 by Nforce, a provider based in the North Brabant town of Steenbergen. Speaking to NOS, Nforce director Simon Elimeleh said the volume of complaints meant that monitoring and removal were needed, not that the site was flawed.

International scrutiny intensified in March, when CNN, prompted by the trial of Gisèle Pelicot in France, found 20,000 videos on Motherless of women being filmed while drugged or asleep.

Slow institutional response

Neither public prosecutors nor the consumer and markets regulator ACM had moved against Motherless before this week. The ACM told NOS the situation was “concerning” but said it has no power to remove content itself, and was working with European counterparts to establish who was responsible for enforcement.

The OM had earlier told NOS that what it could do in such cases varied and that “sometimes the possibilities are unfortunately limited”.

The takedown is the latest sign that the Netherlands’ digital infrastructure has made the country a hub for online abuse content. Children’s rights charity Terre des Hommes said in October that 60% of child sexual abuse material in Europe is hosted on Dutch servers.

Victims of sexual violence in the Netherlands can contact the Centre for Sexual Violence (Centrum Seksueel Geweld) on 0800-0188. Online abuse content can be reported via offlimits.nl.