Yvonne van Hertum

Criminal vigilante, van Hertum at a protest

Yvonne van Hertum (b. 1954) is a notorious "pedojaagster" (pedophile hunter) and criminal vigilante who operates an aggressive hate campaign out of the Netherlands. She first became politically active in 2002, against the consumption of dogs in South Korea.

SCA-SKS

Van Hertum's "pedophile hunting" career began with stopnvd.org shortly after the PNVD was formed and was followed by stopkindersex.nl and then stopkindersexnu.nl.

Van Hertum now uses the name Stop Kindersex (SKS), stopkindersex.com and a freely-hosted website to publish frequent updates on her pedophile war. Much of her activity focuses on attacking those who she identifies as pedophiles within the Netherlands, especially those associated with the two organisations Martijn and PNVD, for whom she reserves her most vitriolic condemnation.

According to our Dutch contact:

"the SCA SKS forum is a world with its own logic"

Much of her activity since 2006 has attracted far-right sympathisers. Whilst this would appear to de-value her campaign, many ex-hunters have distanced themselves from Van Hertum, especially after her organisation was implicated in unethical behaviour concerning chat stings.

Criminality

Trials and conviction

In March 2009, van Hertum was prosecuted in Rotterdam after SKS published a link to the "US based" Dutchpredators website, which at the time accused a "Martijn V" of sexually assaulting three 13 and 14-year-old girls. She was forced to remove the link to this "unrelated" website, which was set up to circumvent Dutch laws on information sharing.[1]

In May of the same year, she was sent to jail for two months after publishing defamatory information about the sexual conduct of one of her targets.[2]

Murder

On February 4, 2009, Paul Schaap (52) was found dead at his home. He had been targeted by SKS and named on a number of websites. [3] Before a suspect had been identified, van Hertum publicly claimed that she knew the murderer's identity.

Denial of service attacks

In late 2008 and early 2009, Yvonne van Hertum and her organisation directed or at the very least, incited a series of debilitating denial of service attacks on the Vereniging Martijn and PNVD websites. The later attacks followed SCA-SCS's announcement that an "unrelated" website exposing Dutch "pedophiles" would be started in the US, where such activity is legal. The revelation was covered in the mainstream media, and broadcast on TV. Despite SCA-SCS's claims, the site, now available at dutchpredators.org also posted SCA-SCS's phone number. However, these incidents did not endear the public to Van Hertum, and SCA-SKS did itself eventually fall victim to a denial of service attack.

"Habitual", "slanderous" liar

Van Hertum is often accused by her opponents of lying - not in isolation, but as part of a systematic pattern of allegations. Our contact notes that ""tendentious" is still a very mild term". In 2008, Marthijn Uittenbogaard was even summoned to a police station for upholding similar accusations towards Van Hertum, who has in the past been accused of lying in her autobiography, and was even forced to remove defamatory information from her website by a court.

External URL

• stopkindersex.com, stopchildabuse.wordpress.com - SKS (may contain malicious code).

External link

• List of objections - in Dutch.