Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone.
Mr. Chairperson and distinguished members of the committee, we thank you for giving us this opportunity to provide a presentation on Bill C-84.
My name is Lianna McDonald. I am the Executive Director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. Again, joining me is Monique St. Germain. She's our General Counsel.
We are here this morning to express our agency's strong support for the bill and to speak specifically about the offence of bestiality.
We have had the opportunity to listen to many of the proceedings so far. We will provide some different information for the committee to consider, coming from the unique lens that our organization has, tied to crimes against children. We will provide examples of what we have seen in real images and in case law.
Our organization is a national charitable organization dedicated to the personal safety of all children. We have been doing this important work for over 30 years.
Our agency operates cybertip.ca, which is Canada's national tip line to report the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children. The tip line is a central part of the Government of Canada's national strategy for the protection of children from sexual abuse and exploitation.
Cybertip launched 16 years ago. Its primary role is to receive and analyze reports on potentially illegal material or activities regarding online crimes against children. It is through this work that our agency witnesses first-hand the ways in which children are being sexually victimized. Since its inception, the tip line has processed over 400,000 reports, and the number of reports has increased steadily over the years. The tip line is now processing, on average, 10,000 reports a month.
To combat the growing online proliferation of child sexual abuse material, our organization developed a new tool called Project Arachnid. This automated crawler and platform helps reduce the online availability of child sexual abuse material, breaking the cycle of abuse. Through Project Arachnid, over 1.6 million notices have been sent to social media and content providers hosting this egregious material around the world.
The vast majority of the images seen through the tip line depict very young prepubescent children, many of whom are preverbal and cannot tell anyone about the abuse. We also know that most children who appear in the sexual abuse material have never been identified by law enforcement.
In 2016, we conducted an analysis of over 40,000 unique images and videos classified by the tip line as child pornography, and 50% of the images involved explicit sexual activity and extreme sexual assaults against children. Among the extreme acts were those involving bestiality. Over a five-year period, Cybertip assessed 192 different sex acts involving an animal and a child, and 80% of those acts did not involve penetration. Oral sex acts were the most commonly seen, in 55% of the bestiality images.
You have already heard from a prior witness that bestiality content along with sadistic material is considered the most harmful form of child sexual abuse material. The following two examples provide a lens into the stark reality of what bestiality looks like when children are involved. While these examples may be difficult to hear, they are harder to see and worse to endure.
In the first example a young girl around eight years old is sitting on a blanket beneath an animal. The image is focused on her and she's completely naked. The girl has one hand around the animal's penis and her mouth around the other end of the penis. In the second example yet another young girl is laying on a bed with her arms behind her head, her legs are spread open and a dog is appearing to lick her genital area.
To better understand the unique challenges faced by survivors of child sexual abuse material, our agency conducted an international online survey. The results were released in 2017 and were based on responses from 150 survivors from around the world. While we did not ask specifically about bestiality, a number of survivors told us their abuser threatened to harm pets or other animals in their life as part of the abuse. To quote from one survivor, “They killed my pets, which they gave to me as a present beforehand in order to make me compliant.” Another survivor said, “I was deeply ashamed. And I had also abused other children/animals myself and was afraid I'd go to prison if it were discovered.”
What was clear from the survey was that all survivors of child sexual abuse imagery face lifelong impacts from having their abuse recorded.
The sexual abuse is horrible in and of itself, but when the abuse includes forcing a child to participate in a sexual act with an animal, the trauma to the child is compounded.
Cybertip also receives reports on online luring. For example, last year the tip line received a report about a young teenager who had been communicating online with an individual. This individual not only asked the child for nude images but also directed the child to engage in digital penetration of the family pet. This is just one of the many examples of the ways in which technology is being used and misused to manipulate and coerce children.
People who seek to victimize children and animals do not limit themselves to acts of penetration, as defined in R. v. D.L.W. With the rate at which we are finding new child sexual abuse material, we know that this is a problem, one that is likely growing. Until the law is changed, children and animals are vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation.
Thank you.
My colleague Monique has a few comments to make.