Belov and Belova

Introduction

Belov and Belova are a brother and sister — aged 23 and 20 at sentencing, and living in Scotland since their family moved to the United Kingdom — who were convicted over incidents in Dundee on 23 August 2025 involving a group of female children aged twelve to fourteen. A sheriff found Belov had directed sexualised remarks at the children, followed them, and assaulted the youngest, a twelve-year-old; his sister pleaded guilty on the morning of trial to assaulting the girl’s thirteen-year-old sister to injury. The case became internationally notorious after mobile phone footage of one of the children — distressed, brandishing blades — spread online under the label “kid bashers,” a narrative the court expressly found to be false, and the sentencing statement records that the viral aftermath stripped the children of their anonymity and prolonged their trauma. Belov was additionally found to have a significant sexual aspect to his offending and must register as a sex offender for eighteen months; the first names of neither sibling are given in the published statement .

Background Information

The children encountered by Belov and Belova are anonymised in the published sentencing statement as XX, aged 12, her sister XY, aged 13, and their friends AB and BC, both 14. Belov was convicted after trial of charges 1 and 3: charge 1 covered the sustained sexualised conduct toward the group, with the principal focus on the youngest, and charge 3 the assault on XX. Belova pleaded guilty to charge 2 — the assault on the twelve-year-old’s thirteen-year-old sister — under deletion on the first morning of the trial, sparing three children who had been cited to give evidence by live link from a remote site the full length of contested testimony. The prosecution proceeded on a summary complaint, meaning the maximum sentence available to the court was twelve months’ imprisonment, a mode of prosecution the sheriff described as an entirely independent Crown decision taken with the likely disposal in view .

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation

Brother and sister convicted over sexualised harassment and assaults on schoolgirls in Dundee; the viral “kid bashers” footage the case spawned misrepresented the victims.

The sheriff found that Belov, then 22, came upon the group of girls by happenstance while walking with his father, said unsolicited to the twelve-year-old, “Come here sexy, I will show you how to have a good time” — repeated, on her account, three or four times — while her sister recalled him saying “Hi Sexy, I will show you a good time.” Having made the remarks, he stopped, turned and followed the children; the court found the conduct sustained, and that the remarks contained an implied threat viewed in the context of an adult man’s comments to a child unable to consent to anything he implied. His motivation, the court inferred from the factual matrix, was sexual gratification — the basis on which charge 1 was found to carry a significant sexual aspect under paragraph 60 of schedule 3 to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, making Belov subject to the notification requirements for eighteen months under section 82 of that Act .

Charge 3 was the assault on the twelve-year-old, who struck her head on a bannister during the attack — she had a sore head above her ear, no injury having been libelled. Belov filmed her in her extremely distressed condition as she “grabbed the blades” and presented them, and that footage — to which he held the proprietorial rights — emerged online, leaving the children’s images unpixellated and their names circulating on social media, costing them their statutory anonymity as child witnesses. The court recorded that some public figures commented erroneously upon what had happened, calling into question the victims’ truthfulness and prolonging their trauma, and made express findings of fact against that narrative: the weapons were not visible to Belov or others, were not removed from the girl’s clothing where they were hidden until after she was assaulted, and were presented, on her account, to stop the attack upon her and her sister. CCTV the court saw but the public never did captured events before the weapons appeared, providing “a wholly different narrative from that which you and others attempted to write into history” .

Belova, then 19, was summoned by her brother and arrived with, in the court’s finding, the intention of assaulting one or more of the girls — an attack the sheriff found premeditated, carried out without pause on the thirteen-year-old, who ran into the road screaming and was described by police as frantic and crying loudly, with a bump on her head noted at hospital. Belova expressed embarrassment and regret and did not victim-blame to her brother’s extent; the court noted her limited English, her naivety, and her deference to the brother she looks up to. Belov, by contrast, was found by the social worker to externalise responsibility onto the victims, and the court did not consider him genuinely contrite. Both received community payback orders as a direct alternative to custody: eighteen months’ supervision plus the maximum 300 hours of unpaid work for Belov, with a three-month review; 200 hours reduced to 180 for Belova’s plea .

Public Reaction and Consequences

The sentencing statement is itself an intervention in the public record: it documents that the worldwide commentary, predominantly on social media, cost Belov his employment, made securing work difficult for Belova, and placed the safety of the whole family at risk — while at the same time finding as fact that the footage that fuelled that commentary misrepresented the victims, whose de-anonymisation “has undoubtedly continued the psychological trauma for each of these young children and may haunt them into adulthood.” The court disregarded the social-media aftermath in assessing harm, since the uploading was not shown to be intended by the siblings and does not form part of the charges .

Current Status

Belov is subject to a community payback order of eighteen months’ supervision and 300 hours of unpaid work, with a review hearing three months after sentencing, and must comply with the sex offender notification requirements for eighteen months from the determination served on him. Belova is subject to a community payback order of 180 hours of unpaid work, with breach exposing her to fresh sentence including detention. Both sentences were imposed on 9 October 2026, the date of the published statement; the children’s identities remain anonymised in the court record .

Impact on Their Career/Life

The convictions place both siblings under court supervision for the year ahead and place Belov on the sex offenders register for the first time, over offending the court rated high in both culpability and harm. But the case’s wider legacy cuts both ways: the sentencing findings dismantle the viral account that made the family names known internationally, documenting instead a twenty-two-year-old’s sexualised harassment of children he had never met and a nineteen-year-old’s premeditated assault on a thirteen-year-old — and a victim population whose footage was watched worldwide while the full CCTV that contradicted it stayed in the court’s possession .

Sources

• “PF v Belov and Belova” — Judiciary of Scotland sentencing statement, 9 October 2026: source