A Tasmanian man who secretly photographed children at a Hobart beach and built up a stash of more than 11,000 child abuse material files over more than a decade has been jailed for four and a half years.
Scott Vita Ramanauskas, 57, was sentenced in the Supreme Court of Tasmania this month after pleading guilty to multiple charges over child abuse imagery found across 129 devices.
The aquaculture worker’s offending ran from 2005 to 2022, involving both the production of child exploitation material and the systematic hoarding of some of the most serious categories of abuse imagery available online.
Australian Federal Police uncovered the collection during a raid on Ramanauskas’s home in March 2022, seizing devices containing a total of 20 terabytes of files.
Justice Kate Cuthbertson said the offending sat “at the moderate end” for such crimes, but noted the sheer scale and serious nature of the material.
“By accessing and possessing it, you have assisted in creating a market for such material,” Justice Cuthbertson told the court.
“These are not victimless crimes. Real children have been subjected to horrible abuse for the purposes of producing this material.”
The court heard that in the early 2000s, Ramanauskas would ride his bike to Sandy Bay Beach to secretly photograph children, aiming his Nikon Coolpix 990 camera at their genitals and buttocks.
“You told the AFP you felt guilty taking the photos. You advised you never took the pictures to share,” Justice Cuthbertson said.
When police executed their first search warrant, they found his computer actively downloading 14 child abuse files from the internet.
Ramanauskas handed over passwords and encryption keys and admitted to viewing such material weekly for sexual gratification.
With no prior convictions, Ramanauskas must serve at least two years before being eligible for parole. He will remain on the sex offender register for 10 years after his release.
