Primary school caretaker sentenced to 7 years in prison for sexual abuse of six children
The court in The Hague sentenced Oskar van der V. to seven years in prison and institutionalized psychiatric treatment (TBS) for sexually assaulting six children while working as a caretaker at a primary school in Zoetermeer. He also secretly filmed children, creating child sexual abuse images which he distributed. According to the Public Prosecution Service (OM), the 58-year-old man victimised 18 children, RTL Nieuws reports.
Van der V. worked at the Zoetermeer primary school between 2019 and 2025. During his work, he filmed children in the toilets, in the classroom, and while they were changing clothes. The victims were aged 4 and older.
He took the young children to a storage room to change, saying that that was where the clean clothes were kept. He filmed the children undressing and dressing, also touching their naked bodies. “Just checking if everything has been cleaned properly,” he’d say, among other things.
When the man started working at the primary school in 2019, he was already undergoing treatment for his pedophilia - a sexual preference for children. Van der V. said in court that applying for jobs was a condition for his social assistance benefits, and he could therefore not refuse the position at the school.
His therapist was aware of the position and urged Van der V. not to take the job, warning that it could result in a dangerous situation. But as Van der V. was not suspected of a crime at the time and held a Certificate of Good Conduct, the therapist could not stop his appointment.
The man was arrested in September 2025, two years after a mother first reported that he had inappropriately touched her daughter. She expressed her outrage in a victim statement in court. "That grown man, who lied about the contents of the report, who turned it into a claim that my child was seeking him out too much, and who said he felt sorry for my daughter because she doesn't have a father, was believed without any hesitation. Meanwhile, my daughter's account was not taken seriously," the mother said.
"Of course, I always believed my daughter's story, but it proved nearly impossible to persuade the school management to conduct even the slightest further investigation into his behavior," she said. "The battle over the truth that followed was inhumane for me as a mother."
The sentence is equal to what the OM recommended.
