It's a complex question, in addition to the legislation being complex.
One of the things that people constantly use as an example when we're having this discourse is, do we think it's okay for a 50-year-old man to be having sex with a 15-year-old girl? I think most of us would agree that, in all likelihood, that's probably not a good and healthy situation for that 15-year-old girl.
But there are a number of cases, certainly in the community where my health centre is located, where it's common for a 15-year-old girl to have sex with a 21-year-old, and that 21-year-old may still go to her high school and may be a part of her community and a friend of the family, and her parents may think that's an okay relationship as well. So there are these complexities to this.
When we read the legislation—and we're not lawyers, so maybe this is a good perspective to have—it didn't appear to focus on exploitation. It focused on an age. Age is not an indicator of whether a young person is being exploited or not, and my understanding of the previous legislation is that it took individual factors into account.
Perhaps those individual factors need to be strengthened. Perhaps we need to put more resources into trying to go after predators and trying to have young people come forward, because Internet luring comes up consistently. Certainly when the legislation was first broached, parents were concerned that their kids were going to be lured over the Internet. I have a child at home and I'm concerned about that too.
What I think will probably protect my child most is having a trusting relationship with an adult to be able to tell about things, the feeling of empowerment to make decisions about whether to say no, about what's right and wrong. That's done in the context of their own family values and their family situation. Those are the things that protect kids from exploitation; it's not having a blunt age.
That's my first reaction to those comments.