Thank you, Mr. Chairperson and honourable committee members.
I'll keep my comments brief.
As my colleague mentioned, my name is Signy Arnason, and I'm the director of Cybertip.ca, under the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
I'll first start out by saying that we rely on the public to come in to the tip line and report to us. As was mentioned, we have received over 48,000 reports from Canadians.
We currently don't have either of the categories proposed under this new bill, as it relates to sending sexually explicit material to a child and using telecommunications to facilitate the commission of a sexual offence against a child. We take reports on child pornography, child abuse images, luring, child sex tourism, children exploited through prostitution, and child trafficking.
We absolutely are finding among Canadians that they're still finding ways to come in to us and report these types of incidents. We believe, certainly as it relates to the grooming process, that there is a significant underreporting of this type of crime and of sending sexually explicit content to a minor, not only from adults but from the children, the adolescents within a home—the parents' environment—who are uncomfortable with telling their parents that in fact something like this has happened to them, for fear of reprisal, such as by having the Internet taken away from them or some form of punishment.
I'm here today simply to provide you with a few examples of what we've seen over the course of the last year, most involving children under the age of 13.
In January of this year we had a 10-year-old girl. It was reported to us that she was on instant messaging and that a suspect who in fact indicated that he was 22 was sending sexually explicit images of himself to the child. In that same month, we had a 12-year-old girl who was exposed to an adult male masturbating when she opened up her Facebook account. In December 2010 we had a report involving an 11-year-old child who received an e-mail with images of an adult exposing his genitals in the image. And finally, we had a suspect contact a 12-year-old girl over MSN Messenger and expose himself to her on webcam while masturbating. This is simply a sample of what we've received over the last year as it relates to this.
Finally, in terms of communications facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against a child, we had a 21-year-old female in a networking site who was approached by an adult male asking her to find 13-year-old children and offering $300 if she could set him up with children in this age range.
That's simply a sampling of what we've seen come in to the tip line as the front door to the Canadian public.
I thank you for the opportunity.