Mr. Chairperson and distinguished members of this committee, thank you very much for giving our agency the opportunity to provide a presentation on Bill C-26.
My name is Monique St. Germain, and I am representing the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a registered charity providing national programs and services related to the personal safety of all children.
I am here today to provide support for Bill C-26. My testimony today is based on our role in operating our many programs and services aimed at reducing the sexual exploitation of children.
Our agency was founded in 1985 as Child Find Manitoba, and for the last 30 years we have been actively engaged in efforts to protect children from sexual exploitation and abuse. We operate MissingKids.ca, a national missing children's program. We also have two important prevention programs: Kids in the Know, which is an interactive safety education program delivered in schools, and Commit to Kids, a program to help organizations prevent sexual abuse before it occurs.
We also operate Cybertip.ca, Canada's tip line for reporting online sexual exploitation of children. Since launching nationally in 2004, we have received over 125,000 reports from the public, the majority of which pertain to online images that depict children being sexually abused. In the 2013-14 fiscal year alone our child protection analysts assessed and categorized over 6,000 images of child pornography. Of the images so categorized, 69% depicted children under the age of 12.
Through the operation of our programs and services, we have daily interactions with child welfare workers, educators, and child-serving organizations. We also regularly consult with experts on child development and offender behaviour and we pay very close attention to media reports related to court cases involving the sexual abuse of children. As well, over the last few years we have been monitoring reported case law involving child pornography offences.
We do all of this to help ensure that our public education, awareness, and prevention materials reflect current risks and trends, and also help us to better understand the criminal justice system as it relates to the protection of children.
Through our operations we have a unique lens into understanding the distinctiveness of child sexual abuse. We are acutely aware that the vast majority of victims do not disclose abuse and that abuse can go on for years without being detected. It is well established that children are most often sexually abused by those closest to them and that abuse occurs in secrecy.
Even if the abuse is disclosed by a child or uncovered by an adult, it may not be reported to police. We know that not all abuse that is reported results in charges, and that not all charges lead to prosecution, and a prosecution may not result in conviction.
For these reasons, we support Bill C-26. I would like to highlight and speak to some key components of the bill.
First, we believe that sentences need to reflect the seriousness of the offence and the severity of the conduct. They must be meaningful, not only to prevent the person from committing additional offences but also to address the risk that an offender poses to children, and to deter others from offending. We support sentences that more accurately reflect the trauma that is experienced by each individual child victim and that properly account for the culpability of the offender for each offence that has been committed.
A concurrent sentence tends to diminish the overall effect of the sentence, making it seem as though the experience of each victim is not relevant. Individualizing the sentencing analysis by victim and by offence will greatly increase the precedential value of individual cases since subsequent courts will more readily know what portion of the sentence applies to what offence.
Second, changes to the reporting requirements for sex offenders are targeted toward better protecting children in other countries from being exploited and abused by Canadians, an objective we support. We also believe that these provisions will strengthen the protection of Canadian children as they will assist in enabling authorities to more readily identify problematic travel and investigate breaches under the act.
Third, the creation of a publicly available high-risk sex offender database is an initiative that we support. The provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, Ontario, and Nova Scotia already perform public notifications in high-risk cases. It is our view that providing such information to the public can be of great assistance to families and communities that wish to better protect children.
In conclusion, our agency supports the changes being brought forward through Bill C-26. The crimes addressed by this bill are extremely serious and are perpetrated against society's most vulnerable people, our children.
It is our view that this bill helps to rebalance the scorecard and sends a clear message about the seriousness of sexual offences against children.
Thank you.