Swedish group reports Amazon over childlike sex doll sales

STOCKHOLM: A Swedish child rights organisation said on Monday (Nov 10) it had filed a police report against Amazon and two other e-commerce platforms over the sale of sex dolls with a childlike appearance.

Controversy has swirled over the sale of childlike sex dolls, with Chinese digital platform Shein recently banning them from sale after France threatened to ban the retailer from the country over them.

The Swedish organisation ChildX said it had filed a police report against Amazon, including all of its various national sites, as well as two other sites selling the dolls in Sweden.

ChildX told AFP it did not want to name the two smaller sites publicly so as not to direct traffic there, but one was based in Sweden and the other in China.

Swedish legislation prohibits material that portrays children in a sexualised manner, and ChildX said the sale of the dolls could fall foul of child sexual exploitation laws.

It said the sale of such products on global marketplaces risks normalising sexual abuse of children and increasing demand for exploitative material.

"We don't want these sites to be allowed to exist in Sweden because they normalise abuse of children, and that can lead to more actual abuse of children," ChildX secretary general Ida Ostensson told AFP.

She urged the Swedish government to review how police can be tasked with updating and expanding a blacklist of child porn websites "to include more types of websites that promote or enable abuse against children."

Ostensson also urged the government to consider adopting legislation that would enable it to suspend or ban such websites, as the Swedish blacklist is currently voluntary for telecom operators.

Finally, she said child sexual exploitation laws should be expanded to include the sale of products that sexualise children.

Currently the distribution and possession of child sex images is illegal, as is possession of childlike sex dolls.

The sale of such dolls should also be illegal, according to ChildX, but has never been tested in court.

The police complaint against the three e-commerce sites concerned therefore both the pictures on the sites and the sale of the products, Ostensson said.

ChildX cited statistics showing that one in four children in Sweden under the age of 15 has been targeted by grooming attempts, and almost one in 10 teenage girls have been victims of commercial sexual exploitation.