Child Sexual Abuse Is Illegal In Finland

There are numerous laws that say sex with children is not permitted in Finland, which is evidence that directly refutes the claims originally posted by RT and re-circulated by Sean Adl-Tabatabai. A translation of Finland’s criminal code says an offender will be charged with sexual abuse if they perform “a sexual act on a child below the age of sixteen years.”

In his aggregation, Adl-Tabatabai referenced a real court ruling from 2018 and linked out to a Finnish news site. The URL, however, takes readers to a broken link whose contents cannot be verified. But a Finnish article from 2018 says that the court did rule that the man who raped the 10-year-old girl to be charged with aggravated sexual abuse of a child. The court also ruled to uphold his prison sentence of three years. 

According to dates on social media posts sharing the claim, Adl-Tabatabai wrote the piece between May and September 2018. The precise date is unclear. 

Both RT and YourNewsWire are widely regarded as non-credible sources of information. According to Poynter, a nonprofit organization focused on media development and journalism, YourNewsWire has been debunked dozens of times. And Adl-Tabatabai has a track record of disseminating fake news. 

The Columbia Journalism Review, a well-regarded magazine targeted toward professional journalists, calls RT a “Kremlin propaganda outlet.”