Tens of thousands of child pornography images found, four men charged

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This article was published 10/04/2024 (554 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Four men are facing child pornography charges after police searched properties in three different communities.

The Manitoba RCMP Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit made the arrests from March 18 to March 25 after obtaining five search warrants. Police removed three children under six years old “from situations where they were being sexually abused and exploited” and found tens of thousands of child pornography images, Mounties said in a news release Wednesday.

Mounties said they are not publicly naming the men arrested — ages 37, 40, 42 and 56 — and are not naming the southern Manitoba communities “to protect the identity of the victims.”

The four men are charged with distributing, possessing or accessing child pornography. One is also charged with making child pornography.

The RCMP’s National Child Exploitation Crime Centre helped the ICE unit find the suspects and execute some of the search warrants.

“This is four arrests and three children removed from traumatic situations in a span of only 10 days. I wish I could say that this is a success, and it absolutely is in terms of getting these kids to safety, but it is really a drop in the bucket when it comes to the material we seized,” Cpl. Gord Olson of the ICE unit said in the release.

“I know people will be surprised at how much child sexual abuse and exploitation material we encountered, but the truth is, this problem is prolific. It is in every community, and so many children are affected by it.”

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection agreed the amount of crimes against children being committed is abundant.

“If you look at it like a funnel, we have all of these people at the top who are perpetrating all of this harm, and what’s coming through the criminal justice system is a very much smaller amount of that,” said Monique St. Germain of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “And even then, we have a ton of it coming through the criminal justice system.”

She said legislation needs to come from the federal government, which has the authority to hold online companies that amplify these crimes to account. The provincial and municipal government also have a role to protect children through the child welfare system and educational programs.

“Unequivocally, this is not a parenting issue, this is not a safer internet issue. This is an issue that is far, far bigger than any of that,” she said. “And, quite honestly, many of the child sexual abuse material images and videos that are possessed by offenders around the world were made by parents, or by people in positions of trust over the child.”

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca