Commit to protecting kids online

Opinion

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This article was published 05/03/2024 (586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sexual exploitation of children and youth is deemed an international crisis and the subject of movies set in far-off places like Colombia and Thailand, but one only needs to look in our own backyard to find evidence of this heinous crime.

Approximately 400 Manitoba kids are exploited into the sex trade each year, and experts — including the Children’s Advocate and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (3CP) — say the actual number is much higher.

Four hundred is just the number of kids in the “visible” sex trade. It doesn’t include “underground” instances where exploitation flies under the radar in basement dwellings, homeless encampments, or vacant buildings. Nor does it count the innumerable kids exploited online.

The Joy Smith Foundation launched an awareness campaign last year to help everyone spot the signs of exploitation and trafficking.

This nationwide campaign teaches that, for example, if a teenager suddenly starts wearing new clothing, receiving gifts of jewelry, or carrying two cellphones, it could be a sign they are being wooed by a malicious predator. The foundation works with dozens of families each year who are devastated by this reality. Vulnerable youth involved with the foster system are often particularly unsafe and in need of greater advocacy and protection measures.

Last year, Manitoba passed an integral piece of legislation that offers some of these measures. Bill 40, the Child Sexual Exploitation and Human Trafficking Act, includes a duty to report by taxi and ride-sharing drivers who often have a front-row seat to the exploitation of kids, and compels hotels and Airbnbs to hold a registry of clients to stop predators from using rooms anonymously for exploitation.

The bill also provides a way for caregivers, guardians and parents of vulnerable youth to get a no-contact order against a harmful individual before exploitation occurs. Prior to this, parents and caregivers would often watch helplessly as a predator lures and preys upon a vulnerable kid without being able to intervene in a meaningful way.

Now, by getting a no-contact order before anything illegal happens, it can get a kid out of harm’s way — even when the kid is unco-operative because they’ve fallen under the spell of a sweet-talking predator who’s offered them something desirable, like attention, love, self-worth or a sense of belonging, to name a few. Predators like this will often run the other way if they sense any heat.

Yet even so, Bill 40 only scratches the surface.

Online exploitation has exploded in recent years, with a 150 per cent increase in reports of sextortion, and police-reported online child sexual exploitation increased by 162 per cent between 2014 and 2020, according to 3CP and Statistics Canada.

Experts at 3CP, who have worked tirelessly to remove millions of images of child sexual abuse from the internet, expressed unequivocal support for the Online Harms Bill tabled in Ottawa last week. They called the bill critical for the protection of children online because it requires social media companies to meet safety standards designed to protect its users.

Opponents of the bill decry infringement on the freedom of expression, and opposition Conservatives have stated a preferred route of stricter punishment for offenders instead of the upfront protections afforded in the legislation. Yet the problem with any tough-on-crime approach is that it requires harm to occur before solid action is taken. Personally, I would trade my freedom to spew unfettered nonsense onto the internet any day just to prevent the online exploitation of even one kid.

Especially when you see reports that children as young as five in Manitoba are sharing nude videos of themselves on social media.

According to a recent Free Press story on self-exploitation, a jaw-dropping number of kids are recording images thought to be silly but in all actuality are exploitive. Once uploaded to social media, these videos and images can be downright impossible to swiftly remove and are often then used for exploitive purposes.

While social media companies are legally obligated to report child sexual abuse images detected on their apps or websites and take them down, a majority of them have not made even minimal efforts to combat child sexual exploitation on their platforms, according to the U.S.-based National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. The Online Harms Act would hold these platforms accountable.

Next week is Manitoba’s Stop Child Sexual Exploitation Awareness Week.

Instead of watching the number of exploited kids continue to skyrocket, wouldn’t it be better if we all got behind these measures and committed to reversing the trend?

Rochelle Squires is a recovering politician after serving 7 1/2 years in the Manitoba legislature. She is a political and social commentator whose column appears Tuesdays.

rochelle@rochellesquires.ca