Young people and online offences are governed in the Netherlands by ordinary criminal law with a separate sentencing regime. Nobody can be prosecuted for anything done before the age of twelve. From twelve up to and including seventeen, the juvenile criminal law of articles 77a and following of the Dutch Criminal Code applies, which uses different sanctions from adult law and is aimed at correction rather than retribution. Posting, sharing or forwarding material can amount to an offence in exactly the same way as saying or doing the same thing offline.
How online behaviour becomes a criminal matter
Dutch criminal law does not have a separate chapter for social media. It applies its existing offences to whatever medium was used, and most of the provisions that matter here were written long before the platforms existed. That is why an account, a group chat or a comment section is treated as a place where an offence can be committed, and why the question is never whether something happened online but whether the elements of a criminal provision are met.
Two features of online conduct make that easier to establish than young people expect. The first is publicity. Several offences require that a statement was made publicly or was intended to reach a wider audience, and a post or a group chat with dozens of members satisfies that requirement without effort. The second is permanence. A message is a document; a video is a recording; both remain retrievable long after the person who made them has moved on. Deleting content afterwards does not undo the offence and, once an investigation is under way, can create a separate problem of its own.
None of this means that ordinary online life is criminal. Criticism, satire, a blunt opinion and an unflattering review are protected by freedom of expression, and the courts weigh that freedom seriously. The line is crossed where a statement imputes a specific untrue allegation, incites an offence, threatens someone, or distributes material that should never have been distributed. Our article on what people often forget about social media consequences looks at that boundary from the civil side as well.
Which online conduct is an offence under Dutch law
The offences below are the ones that come up most often in cases involving young people. The Dutch terms matter, because the English words do not map onto them.
Insult (belediging) is the least serious of the reputation offences: an expression that is demeaning in itself, without any factual allegation. Defamation is split into two provisions. Smaad is committed by intentionally attacking someone’s honour or reputation by imputing a specific fact, with the intention of giving that allegation publicity; where the allegation is made in writing or in images, the offence is smaadschrift, which is what a post, a caption or a video amounts to. Laster is the aggravated form: smaad committed by someone who knows the allegation is untrue. Insult, smaad and laster are complaint offences, which means the Public Prosecution Service will normally only prosecute if the person concerned has filed a formal complaint. Truth is not a general defence, but a person who acted in good faith in the public interest may escape liability.
Incitement (opruiing) is committed by publicly, orally or in writing or images, inciting others to commit a criminal offence. A video daring followers to break into a building, damage property or attack someone falls squarely within it, and the fact that the person posting had no intention of joining in is irrelevant. Threatening (bedreiging) covers a serious threat of specified crimes, including violence and arson, made in such a way that the person threatened could reasonably take it seriously; a threat sent as a joke to a group chat is judged on how it reads, not on what was meant.
Stalking (belaging) covers a systematic pattern of intrusion into someone’s private life, which online typically means repeated messages, fake accounts and persistent contact after being asked to stop. It is a complaint offence. Doxing has been a separate offence since 1 January 2024: obtaining, disseminating or otherwise making available another person’s identifying data with the intent to frighten or seriously inconvenience that person, or to hinder them in their work, carries a maximum of two years’ imprisonment, with an increase where the target holds a public-facing role such as a journalist, police officer or politician.
Discriminatory expression is dealt with separately. Insulting a group on grounds such as race, religion, sexual orientation or disability is an offence in itself, as is inciting hatred, discrimination or violence against such a group, and as is distributing material with that content. These provisions do not require a complaint, and a repost can constitute distribution.
Finally there are the computer offences. Logging into someone else’s account, even with a password that was shared voluntarily at some earlier point, is computervredebreuk. Deliberately deleting or altering another person’s data, or making a service unusable, are separate offences. Using someone else’s identifying data to pass yourself off as them, which is what a convincing fake account does, is identity fraud. Deception for financial gain, from a fake sales advertisement to a fake ticket, is fraud (oplichting). Our article on cybercrime and hacking in the Netherlands sets out these provisions in more detail.
Common online actions and the offence they may amount to
| Online action | Possible offence under Dutch law | What has to be established |
|---|---|---|
| Posting a specific untrue allegation about a classmate on a public account. | Smaadschrift, or laster if the poster knew it was untrue. | A specific imputed fact, intent to give it publicity, and a complaint by the person concerned. |
| Calling someone names in a comment, without any factual allegation. | Belediging. | An expression that is demeaning in itself, and a complaint. |
| Daring followers to break into a building or damage property. | Opruiing. | A public incitement to a criminal offence; success is not required. |
| Sending a message threatening serious violence. | Bedreiging. | A threat of a listed serious offence that could reasonably instil fear. |
| Publishing someone’s address or school with the aim of frightening them. | Doxing. | Making identifying data available with intent to frighten, harass or hinder. |
| Logging into another person’s account using a shared password. | Computervredebreuk. | Intentional and unlawful access to an automated system. |
| Forwarding an intimate image of someone else. | Distribution of sexual images without consent; child abuse material where the person is a minor. | Dissemination without consent, or the depicted person being under eighteen. |
The right-hand column matters as much as the left. Most of these offences require intent, and several require a formal complaint before a prosecution can begin. A finding that conduct was thoughtless, hurtful or stupid is not the same as a finding that it was criminal, and a defence lawyer’s first task is usually to test whether the elements are actually made out.
Intimate images, sexting and why this category is different
Sharing an intimate image of another person without their consent is a criminal offence in the Netherlands, and it is the category in which young people most often underestimate their position. There are two separate problems.
The first concerns adults and minors alike: distributing a sexual image of someone, knowing that the disclosure will damage them, is punishable, and so, in defined circumstances, is possessing or acquiring such material for that purpose. The person who received the image first and passed it on is committing the offence in their own right; being the second or the tenth person in the chain is not a defence.
The second concerns minors specifically and is far more serious than most people realise. Sexual images of a person under eighteen count as child abuse material under Dutch criminal law, and the offences of producing, possessing and distributing that material do not contain an exception for images made consensually between young people of the same age. A sixteen-year-old who keeps an intimate photograph of a girlfriend or boyfriend of the same age is, on the face of the statute, in possession of prohibited material. In practice the Public Prosecution Service applies its own policy to consensual sexting between peers and does not treat it in the same way as exploitation, but that is prosecutorial policy rather than a right, and it disappears entirely the moment an image is forwarded, used to pressure someone, or shared after a relationship ends.
The practical message for young people is short and worth saying plainly. Do not ask for such images, do not keep them, and never forward them. If an image of you is circulating, tell an adult and report it; the platform can be required to take it down, a civil court can order removal and the criminal route remains available. If you have received such an image, delete it and say nothing further about it; passing it on to show someone how bad it is makes you part of the distribution.
How online material becomes evidence
Dutch criminal procedure works with free evidence: there is no closed list of permitted evidence, and a screenshot, a chat export or a video can all be used, provided the court is satisfied that the material is reliable and that it was obtained lawfully. A screenshot on its own is weak evidence, because it is easy to fabricate; it becomes strong when it is corroborated, for example by data obtained from the platform, by the same message on another participant’s device, or by the account holder’s own admission.
Investigating officers have real powers here. A telephone or computer can be seized and examined, and material that the user believed was deleted can often still be recovered from the device or from backups. Data can be requested from a provider on the basis of the statutory powers in the Code of Criminal Procedure. Metadata attached to a file can show when and on what device it was created. Direct messages have no special protection: they are not privileged, and the other participant in the conversation is free to hand them over.
Two consequences follow for anyone who fears they may be under investigation. Do not delete anything, because destroying material that is relevant to an investigation can itself be an offence and, at the very least, damages credibility. And do not discuss the matter online, because every further message is potential evidence in the same file. Our article on criminal liability for statements made on social media deals with how the courts assess the content of such messages.
The scrutiny is not limited to individual users. Platforms themselves are subject to European data protection and platform regulation, and Dutch foundations have used the collective action regime that has applied since 2020 to bring claims against social media companies over the processing of children’s data. Those proceedings concern the platform’s obligations, not the user’s, but they are a reminder that the online environment young people use is a regulated one rather than a lawless one.
The juvenile criminal law regime
A child under twelve cannot be prosecuted at all. That does not mean nothing happens: the police may still speak to the child and the parents, the school and youth services may become involved, and the civil liability of the parents is unaffected. But there is no criminal case.
From twelve up to and including seventeen, juvenile criminal law applies. It is set out in articles 77a and following of the Criminal Code, and it replaces most of the adult sanctions with its own set. The proceedings are also different: cases are heard by a specialised juvenile judge, the hearing is in principle not public, and the parents are summoned and expected to attend. A minor suspect has the right to a lawyer before and during police questioning, and for minors that right is treated as one they cannot simply sign away; legal assistance should be arranged before any interview takes place.
Halt as an alternative to prosecution
For a defined category of less serious offences, a young person between twelve and eighteen can be referred to Halt instead of being prosecuted. The referral is made by the police or the prosecutor and requires the young person to acknowledge the offence and to agree to take part. A Halt settlement typically involves conversations about what happened, an apology to the person affected, making good the damage, and an assignment aimed at the specific behaviour, which for online cases usually addresses the consequences of what was posted.
If the assignment is completed successfully the case ends there and no prosecution follows, so no conviction is recorded in the judicial documentation register that a criminal record is drawn from. The referral is registered by the police for a period, and it is sensible to ask what is recorded rather than to assume nothing is. If the young person does not complete the Halt assignment, the file returns to the prosecutor.
Sanctions the juvenile court can impose
Where a case does go before the juvenile court, the principal penalties are a task penalty, a fine and juvenile detention. The task penalty (taakstraf) can consist of unpaid work, a training assignment or a combination of the two, up to a statutory maximum of two hundred hours in total. Juvenile detention (jeugddetentie) has a maximum of twelve months for a young person who was under sixteen at the time of the offence and twenty-four months for a young person of sixteen or seventeen; it is a last resort and is frequently imposed in suspended form.
Alongside the penalties there are measures, which are not punishment but intervention. The behaviour-influencing measure imposes a programme of treatment or training. Placement in an institution for juveniles, the PIJ measure, is reserved for serious offences committed by a young person with a developmental disorder or mental condition where the safety of others requires it; it runs for years and is reviewed periodically. Compensation to the person affected can be ordered as part of the criminal case, which spares that person a separate civil claim.
Adolescents between sixteen and twenty-three
Dutch law does not treat the eighteenth birthday as a hard boundary. For a suspect who was sixteen or seventeen at the time of the offence, the court may apply adult criminal law where the seriousness of the offence, the personality of the offender or the circumstances in which it was committed give reason to do so. For a suspect who had turned eighteen but was under twenty-three, the court may do the reverse and apply juvenile criminal law where the personality of the offender or the circumstances warrant it. This is what practitioners call adolescentenstrafrecht, and it means that the applicable regime is a matter for argument in the individual case, supported by reports from the probation service or a behavioural expert.
Civil liability, damages and the position of parents
A criminal case is not the only consequence, and often not the most expensive one. The person harmed by a post can bring a civil claim for an unlawful act, asking the court to order removal and rectification of the material and to award damages for the loss suffered, which in reputation cases includes non-material loss. That claim stands on its own: it can succeed where a prosecution never starts, because the civil standard and the criminal standard are different. In urgent cases the claim is brought in summary proceedings, and an order to take material offline can be obtained within weeks.
Where the person responsible is a child, the Civil Code allocates that liability by age. For a child under fourteen, the parents who hold parental authority are liable for the damage caused as if it were their own act, and they cannot escape by showing they did everything they could. For a child of fourteen or fifteen, the parents are liable unless they prove that they cannot be blamed for failing to prevent the conduct. From sixteen, the young person is liable in their own right, and the parents only if they were themselves at fault, for example by allowing a situation they knew about to continue.
Liability insurance matters here. Many family liability policies cover damage caused by children, but insurers commonly exclude damage caused intentionally, and posting a defamatory video is by definition intentional conduct. Check the policy before assuming there is cover, and notify the insurer promptly if a claim is made. Our article on cyberbullying and online reputation damage sets out the civil routes available to the person on the receiving end.
Consequences that outlast the case
A conviction as a minor is recorded in the judicial documentation register and can affect an application for a certificate of good conduct (VOG), which many employers, internships and courses require. The assessment is not automatic: the screening authority looks at what the offence was, how long ago it happened and what the certificate is needed for, and a shorter look-back period applies to offences committed as a minor. A refusal can be objected to and appealed, and a well-prepared application explaining the context often succeeds where a bare one does not. Our article on the criminal record and the VOG explains that assessment.
There are further consequences that are easy to overlook. A conviction can affect a residence permit for a young person who is not a Dutch national, and it can affect entry to countries that ask about criminal history. Material that remains online continues to be found by anyone who searches the name, which is a separate problem with its own remedies, including a removal request to the search engine.
What to do if the police make contact
An invitation to attend a police interview is a serious moment and should be treated as one, however informal the phone call sounds. Four things matter, in this order.
Contact a lawyer before the interview. A suspect has the right to consult a lawyer beforehand and to have a lawyer present during questioning, and for a minor that assistance is the norm rather than an option. Legal aid is available and for juveniles the assistance at the first interview is provided without cost to the family. The lawyer will find out what the allegation actually is, which is information the family usually does not have.
Say nothing about the substance until you have taken that advice. The right to remain silent applies from the start of the interview and exercising it is not evidence of guilt; the court may not draw an adverse inference from silence alone. An explanation given without preparation, intended to be helpful, is the single most common way a weak case becomes a strong one.
Preserve everything, and delete nothing. Secure the account, the chat history and the device as they are. If material is deleted after contact with the police, that fact will be established and it will be held against the person who deleted it.
Stop discussing the matter online and offline with everyone except the lawyer. That includes group chats, stories, and messages to the person who made the complaint; contact with that person after a report is made frequently produces a second allegation. Our guide on your rights during police questioning in the Netherlands sets out what happens in the interview room.
What parents and schools can usefully do
Prevention here is mostly a matter of information rather than supervision. Young people do not generally set out to commit offences; they act on the assumption that the online environment is a separate space with its own rules. Correcting that assumption is more effective than restricting access.
The conversation works better when it is specific. Talking in general terms about being careful online rarely lands; talking about what actually happens when a video about a classmate is posted, who can file a complaint, what a complaint sets in motion and who ends up paying for the damage tends to land immediately. The same applies to intimate images: young people respond to a clear explanation of why the law treats images of minors differently, and why the person who forwards an image is in the same position as the person who first shared it.
Practical measures still help. Going through the privacy settings of the applications together, agreeing what is and is not shared about other people, and agreeing that the young person can come to an adult without an argument when something goes wrong are all worth the time. Watch for the signals that something already has gone wrong: withdrawal, secrecy about the phone, a sudden change in mood after using it, or reluctance to go to school. These are as often signs of being a victim as of being a suspect, and both need an adult response.
Schools have a role that goes beyond internet safety lessons. A school that knows the legal framework can act quickly when material about a pupil starts circulating, can require its removal, can involve the police proportionately rather than reflexively, and can keep a proportionate incident from turning into a criminal file. Schools also process personal data when they investigate an incident, and doing that carefully is part of the same responsibility.
If your child is the one who has been targeted
The steps are different but equally concrete. Secure the evidence first: take screenshots that show the account, the date and the content, and note the addresses of the posts before they are removed. Report the material to the platform, which is obliged under European rules to have a notification procedure and to act on illegal content. Consider a police report, and remember that insult, defamation and stalking require a formal complaint from the person concerned if there is to be a prosecution. Alongside or instead of that, a civil claim for removal and damages is available, and the article on online defamation and reputation management sets out how that works. Where the material is a manipulated image or video, the same offences apply and the analysis is set out in our piece on deepfakes under Dutch law.
Finally, a word about proportion. Most online incidents involving young people are resolved without a courtroom: through a conversation at school, a removal request, an apology, a Halt referral or a settled civil claim. The value of understanding the framework of Dutch criminal law is not that every mistake becomes a case, but that it allows the people involved to keep a bad afternoon from becoming a file that follows a young person into adult life.
Young people and online offences
Can I get in trouble for just liking or sharing a post?
It depends on what you did. Sharing or reposting an offensive post isn't a passive move. It can be viewed as a form of publication or distribution, which means you're actively helping to spread harmful content. If the original post is defamatory, incites hatred, or is illegal in some other way, you could be held partly responsible for giving it a bigger audience. Dutch courts will look at the context and your intent, of course, but actively boosting harmful content is almost never seen as a neutral action. The smartest and safest choice is always to refuse to engage with posts that could be illegal.
What is the difference between a Civil and a criminal case?
A single online mistake can sometimes trigger two very different types of legal cases, and it's crucial to understand how they differ. A criminal case is brought by the state (through the Public Prosecution Service) when a law has been broken. The consequences are designed to be punitive and can include fines, community service, or even youth detention.; A civil case is brought by one individual against another for causing them harm, like damaging their reputation with false statements. The result here is usually a court order to stop the behaviour and pay financial compensation to the victim.. So, a defamatory TikTok video could lead to both a criminal charge for smaad and a separate civil claim by the person who was targeted.
Are my direct Messages private and safe from Court?
No, your direct messages (DMs) have no special legal protection that would prevent them from being used as evidence. There's no absolute privacy shield for messages that contain proof of an online offence. You should always assume that anything you write online—even in what you think is a private chat—could one day be read by others. If the person you're messaging shares screenshots, or if a device is legally seized by the police during an investigation, your DMs can be accessed and shown in a courtroom.
Can my parents be held responsible for my online actions?
Yes, under Dutch law, parents can be held legally responsible. For children under the age of 14, parents are generally held financially liable for the damages their child causes. For teenagers aged 14 and 15, parents can still be held liable unless they can prove they did everything reasonably possible to prevent the harmful behaviour. This legal responsibility really highlights why active parental guidance is so critical in preventing a journey from TikTok to the courtroom.
Can sharing gossip about peers online actually be a criminal offence?
Yes. Creating channels or sharing private conversations that feel like typical school drama can amount to smaad, or to laster where the person spreading it knows the allegation is untrue.
Are viral challenges that involve trespassing or dangerous acts just harmless fun legally?
No. Viral challenges that encourage trespassing or performing dangerous acts in public are not only risky, they can be criminal, even if participants see it simply as joining in a trend.
Why do young people often not realise their online activity could lead to legal trouble?
There is a disconnect between what feels like online fun and what constitutes a genuine legal problem, and because the digital world can feel separate from real life, the line between a joke and a legal issue is often blurry until the consequences are already unfolding.
Does deleting a post remove the legal risk?
Not really. Every post, share and comment creates a digital footprint that is much harder to erase than people often think, so the underlying conduct can still carry legal consequences.
Law and More acts for young people and their parents in criminal investigations arising from online conduct, and for people whose reputation or privacy has been damaged online. That work covers assistance at the police interview, the juvenile court hearing, negotiations with the Public Prosecution Service about a Halt referral or a conditional disposal, applications and appeals concerning a certificate of good conduct, and civil proceedings for the removal of material and compensation. If you have been contacted by the police, or material about your child is circulating, please contact us before taking any further step.
