{"id":315139,"date":"2026-03-06T01:07:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T01:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/315139\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T01:07:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T01:07:11","slug":"dunedin-man-jailed-for-child-sexual-exploitation-material","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/315139\/","title":{"rendered":"Dunedin man jailed for child sexual exploitation material"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/national\/588749\/hamish-mitchell-wood-jailed-for-distributing-photos-videos-showing-sexual-exploitation-of-children\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">By\u00a0Adam Burns\u00a0of RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Warning: Contains content about sexual offending against children<\/p>\n<p>A man has been jailed for distributing photos and videos showing the sexual exploitation of young children.<\/p>\n<p>Hamish Mitchell-Wood was sentenced to two years and nine months&#8217; jail when he appeared in the Christchurch District Court on Thursday after earlier pleading guilty to possessing and distributing an objectionable publication.<\/p>\n<p>The Dunedin 30-year-old&#8217;s offending occurred over six weeks in March and April last year.<\/p>\n<p>Mitchell-Wood was arrested in May when police seized his phone and devices.<\/p>\n<p>Police learned he was operating multiple accounts on a digital platform on his computer and was in possession of more than 300 objectionable pictures and videos.<\/p>\n<p>Eleven of the 12 publications shared involved children under the age of 13.<\/p>\n<p>The court heard about half of the material in Mitchell-Wood&#8217;s possession involved young children of a similar age.<\/p>\n<p>Judge David Robinson said Mitchell-Wood was complicit in child sex abuse, like all consumers of such material.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This material both depicts and promotes child sexual abuse. The production of this material requires that real children be abused in the most violent ways,&#8221; Robinson said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That likely follows a period of exploitation and grooming of vulnerable and dependent children.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mitchell-Wood also had access to a &#8220;mega-link&#8221; where further objectionable material was stored on a separate server.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These children are often damaged in irrevocable ways. The fact that their abuse has been recorded and disseminated amplifies those traumas,&#8221; Robinson said.<\/p>\n<p>Most of the material Mitchell-Wood possessed was deleted but later recovered.<\/p>\n<p>The court heard Mitchell-Wood had accessed the material during a stressful period when he had resorted to gambling and substance abuse.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Today needs to be about holding you accountable for the harm that you have done to the community and the victims of your offending,&#8221; Robinson said.<\/p>\n<p>Mitchell-Wood&#8217;s was also added to the child sex offender register.<\/p>\n<p>Sexual Violence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By\u00a0Adam Burns\u00a0of RNZ Warning: Contains content about sexual offending against children A man has been jailed for distributing&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-315139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}