Thank you for inviting me here. I'm looking forward to seeing what I can contribute to this committee.
My take is a bit different from Dr. Fisher's. I am a professor in child psychology from Wilfrid Laurier University, in Waterloo. My main area of expertise is in children's memory and learning. I apply that research in forensic arenas and also in educational arenas.
Prosecution rates of those who have abused children are exceptionally low. I've heard estimates in Canada in the range of about 2% for successful prosecutions. There are several reasons for this. Child sexual abuse is not as high profile a prosecution as, let's say, homicide. Unlike other crimes, child sexual abuse usually has no evidence associated with it. There's usually very little physical evidence. There's no other medical evidence, unless it's something like a child has contracted a similar strain of a sexually transmitted disease as the alleged perpetrator. There are no other witnesses usually, and the alleged perpetrator will almost always deny the allegation. The evidence that the police are left with is what the child says, the child's testimony.
Many young children don't understand what's happened to them, so young children could not distinguish a case of fondling from a case of being touched while they're being bathed, for example. Also, the quality of investigation is unfortunately quite poor. I've just conducted a study funded by the ministry of the Attorney General in which we surveyed the entire country—every territory, every province—to look at the state of training that investigators get. How much do they know about child development and how much of what they've learned do they put into practice? It turns out that they're very knowledgeable. They know what they should be doing to get the right descriptions from children about what happened, but in practice nothing changes. I put that down to a lack of resources, essentially. There's no follow-up training.
Many of these children do not see any justice. That obviously has a psychological effect on them and the way that they can deal with what's happened to them for their rest of their lives. It's even worse when you take into account that the most vulnerable group for child sexual abuse is the children with disabilities, thus children who are non-verbal and children who have other intellectual disabilities. Most often the crown prosectors will say there's no point in taking the case any further as there's very little chance of prosecution.
I want to mention next that I've worked with police. I taught for eight years at the Ontario Police College. I worked at the National Institutes of Health, on the NICHD protocol of interviewing children, a protocol that is based from developmental knowledge. It's used throughout the entire Province of Quebec for investigators to interview children. So I've seen literally thousands of cases of children's descriptions of what may or may not have happened and, obviously, I understand the psychological effects, which I'm sure I don't need to explain are quite severe for a lot of these children.
When you bring the discussion to the digital era, things get much more complex and much more serious. You may have had a child who has been abused and for several years there may or may not have been some sort of legal involvement. Either way, there must have been some sense of their either having been able to have therapy or having worked through it themselves, or their trying to negotiate the whole family situation—who lives there, who does not live there anymore, and that kind of thing. But let's say you're abused as a child, and you're now a teenager, a young person, an adult, and maybe you have children of your own, and someone says to you, “You look familiar. Have I seen you somewhere before?” Can you imagine what goes through their mind when someone says that to them, knowing that embarrassing, nude pictures of them, pictures of them in sexually compromising positions, have been passed around the Internet who knows how many times?
This is the result of an underground network where these pictures are passed along, and the idea is that the people involved in that network can receive materials from other people only if they upload their own materials.
This is why you have cases with fathers, uncles, and grandparents videotaping sexual acts with children in their care, giving demonstrations of how to penetrate an eight-year-old, for example. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this because I understand what it's like when someone puts an image like that in your head. I can go into detail, if you wish me to do so, later.
These are really quite serious crimes. Because that child may have already gone through the process of trying to get themselves back to a psychologically healthy place, which in itself is a challenge, once this starts again, either when photographs come to light, or when there's a prosecution of someone who is using those photographs, the victim has to be notified and this starts all over for them.
My main point here is that any trauma that children might feel from being abused is not just a one-time thing. It's not just when they remember the abuse that things are bad. This is a lifelong thing for them. It affects their self-esteem, the way they try to develop their self-identity in their teenage years, and the way their attachment relationships have been completely disrupted, because they're usually abused by somebody they know. It's often a family member, or a step-parent, for example. For that to go on through their adult life, the costs to Canada are going to be enormous.
We don't yet have all of the research, because there hasn't been enough time for us to see the actual consequences. In terms of things like depression, long waiting lists to get access to health care, there being no money for private care, and years spent in the legal system and lost days in the workplace, and the increased number of unskilled workers—because some of these women cannot concentrate on an education or a job—all of these things cost our society a lot of money.
What I'll end on is that this is a lifelong issue with lifelong consequences.