The sexual exploitation of children online is getting so rampant across Canada that police are not able to keep up with the number of cases due to a lack of resources to properly investigate the vast amount of cases.
Sgt. Christian Lowe of the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) told the Vancouver Sun that his internet child exploitation unit receives more complaints regarding online images of children being sexually abused than complaints about sexual assault.
The fact that much of this is done online makes it more difficult for authorities to track down the perpetrators.
“When it comes to child pornography, these kids don’t even know they’re being victimized. It’s just part of their life,” said Lowe. “These children are not only being sexually assaulted but they are being recorded and put on the internet for the rest of their lives.”
B.C. accounts for the bulk of incidents reported about making or distributing these images. Over half of the 7,141 reports across Canada in 2021 were made in B.C., according to Stats Can.
RCMP in the province dealt with 9,600 cases in 2022 alone.
Between 2014 and 2020, Stats Can recorded 7,743 children to be confirmed victims of online sexual violations.
Noel Sinclair, a Crown prosecutor in the Yukon, said that accessing these images is easy and that a predator only needs basic social media apps.
“It is one of the most disturbing aspects of my job as a criminal prosecutor, work in homicide and high-risk offenders, violent offenders, sexual assault, all of those things … and it’s not unusual for collections to include images and video recordings at those extreme levels of depravity,” said Sinclair.
While child sexual exploitation incidents are growing, many of them will not proceed to court, according to Janine Benedet, a law professor at U.B.C. Of the 4,201 cases reported in 2020, only 63 resulted in a charge.
“So, nothing,” said Benedet. “People think it is just possessing pictures, not actual child sexual abuse, but this is actual child sexual abuse,” she said.
Crown prosecutors are also faced with the problem of identifying who is behind the screen.
Cpl. Sharen Leung works in the B.C. RCMP internet child exploitation unit and she cites a lack of funding and resources as part of the difficulty in keeping up with the technology that is being applied by predators.
IP addresses change, and often by the time an arrest warrant can be issued, the person can easily move on.
“There are so many files, but there’s only so many of us in the unit to tackle one or a couple of files at a time,” said Leung. “I wish there were more people to know what it’s like. I think the biggest frustration is that we don’t have the resources, and we want to do more.”
VDP Sgt. Lowe said his force is facing the same issue, “My authorized strength is five detectives and one sergeant, and I don’t have that many people right now.”
The spike in cases in the last 10 years is mainly to do with the internet. Bruce Daley, a defence lawyer in Toronto, who defends those charged with these offences said that the immense growth of the internet “did what the machine-gun, land tank, or nuclear weapons did to warfare. It just geometrically exploded the danger,” he said. “The public does not get how f — king dangerous it is. It’s mind-blowing to me, and I’ve been at this for 44 years.”
Girls between the ages of 12 and 17 are most likely to be victims of non-consensual distribution of images and most overrepresented in cases of luring. Luring is where an adult arranges an in-person sexual encounter with a child via social media or a website.
A team of 50 agents, analysts and support staff in Alberta say that the number of cases in their province is growing exponentially as well.
“The volume of referrals that are coming in is still exponential. We can’t get to it all,” said Michael Tucker, director of communications for Alberta’s internet child exploitation unit. “So, we have to employ a triage process, which is very tough.”
“When I started, we had a case of a guy in Toronto mailing out child pornography DVDs. You never hear of that anymore,” he said. “The internet entirely enabled it.”
The public remains largely uninformed of this problem and that is partially due to the disturbing nature of child pornography. Media outlets are hard pressed to cover cases that don’t result in convictions.
“I don’t believe that the public has a very well-informed or clear idea about the very extreme nature of this pornography,” said Sinclair. “Some of these images and these recordings are unspeakably horrific. But, unfortunately, they’re not the kinds of things the media can report upon and show to the public because possessing them is illegal,” he said. “This is not, you know, we’re not talking about images of kids in sailor suits, posing. This stuff is unimaginably graphic, horrific and morally reprehensible.”
Another issue is that minimum sentencing guidelines are not strong enough, according to Conservative MP Frank Caputo, who spoke about one case where a woman was charged with sexually exploiting her own children only to receive house arrest following her guilty plea.
“In Canada, there are important fundamental freedoms in terms of privacy, and those rights, I think, need to be jealously protected. It’s a conflict between privacy protection and protecting children,” said Caputo.
Benedet believes limiting access to social media for minors would help reduce the problem as it is most often the starting point in offences. “It requires getting serious in regulating these various kinds of online platforms and putting obligations on them to prevent the distribution and screening of this material,” she said.
Even the most prominent social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat can host such images, it’s not only accessible on the dark web.
“Sometimes, we get ourselves very tied up in knots about privacy on the internet, about people’s right to sexually explicit material. And this is about none of that. This is about the sexual abuse of children and those who want to record and profit from it.” said Benedet.
