Online child sex abuse ‘a problem everywhere’

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This article was published 14/05/2022 (1365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MANITOBA recorded the second-highest rate of online child sexual exploitation and abuse charges among the provinces, second only to Quebec, from 2018 to 2020.

Seven out of every 100,000 Manitobans were charged during that time. Quebec’s rate was eight people per 100,000 population. The national average was five per 100,000. The territories had the highest rates overall: Yukon and Nunavut at 12; and Northwest Territories at 11. The numbers were contained in a recent Statistics Canada report.

Signy Arnason of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection cautioned against reading too closely into the high figure in Manitoba.

“The figures you’re looking at are based on charges laid — that correlates to policing resources and priorities, so it’s really hard to say why Manitoba might be positioned second in this list, but I think the point is we have a problem everywhere… this isn’t going to change, the story’s only going to get worse if we don’t step in and intervene,” she said.

In Manitoba, there were 313 incidents of online sex offences against kids, and police had identified 226 accused.

Nationally, the overall rate of police-reported incidents has been on an upward trend, increasing to 131 per 100,000 in 2020, from 50 incidents per 100,000 population in 2014, when cybercrime data were first collected, the report said.

“We’ve been operating the national (cyber abuse) tipline for 20 years and this issue just continues to grow every single year,” Arnason said.

“We’ve created an environment where adults get to interact freely with children with no regulations in place — every other space, every other business has to face some form of regulation, some form of requirement in how they operate, and that just doesn’t exist online.”

Arnason called for governmental regulation, as opposed to self-regulation by social media sites and other companies that operate online.

“Kids are online at a mass rate, adults are as well. You intermix those two, you’re going to end up with those who have a sexual interest in children trying to harm them. We need controls, guardrails placed around the internet,” she said.

In the time period studied by the report, across Canada there were 5,761 incidents of online child sexual offences where a victim had been identified and the incident was reported to police. Approximately 4,800 people were identified as accused.

In all provinces and territories, child luring offences accounted for the majority of the online sexual violations where a child was identified, the Statistics Canada’s report said.

That means the accused communicated with the youngsters in a given province online to exploit them, whether convincing them to create child pornography or assault them, among other potential offences.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @erik_pindera