Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Thanks for the opportunity to share some information today that I hope is going to be helpful in your study of Bill C-54.
Over the past ten years, Canada Family Action has been working hard to ask for better protection of children from pedophiles. And we were highly involved in the age-of-consent lobby.
I'd like to commend the government, and that means all parties, for the work they're doing and for the recognition that the child pornography law in Canada, as it's called in the Criminal Code, must be updated and changed. However, I do have to say that we're disappointed with some of the things in Bill C-54. The first one, and my focus, is basically section 163.1 of the Criminal Code.
The first major issue is a concern about a total lack of the mention of or the dealing with the term “child pornography”. That term frames for us, for you as lawmakers, for courts, for judges, and for everybody else how we view the horrific crimes of child sex abuse against defenceless children.
Child pornography is an extremely meaningless and in fact misleading term in reference to this kind of crime. As one law enforcement officer said to me, these are not pornographic images we view; these are rape and abuse images that we view. They are images of sexual exploitation and sex abuse.
Research indicates that of those arrested with these materials in their possession, 39% had images of children from ages three to five. Eighty-three percent of these people had images of children age six to twelve. And perhaps the most horrific crime of all, 80% of the images possessed by the people charged, arrested, and convicted were of actual penetration of either a boy or a girl.
Let me quote from an article published by CIRCAMP, which is a European Commission funded network of law enforcement agencies across Europe, including Europol.
A sexual image of a child is “abuse” or “exploitation” and should never be described as “pornography”. Pornography is a term used for adults engaging in consensual sexual acts distributed legally to the general public for their sexual pleasure. Child abuse images are not. They involve children who cannot and would not consent and who are victims of a crime.
I've given the clerk a couple of documents--