Good morning, everyone.
Thank you very much to the committee for this opportunity.
My name is Lianna McDonald, and I am the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a registered charity that has been operating for nearly 40 years to protect Canadian children.
For the past 22 years, we have been operating Cybertip.ca, Canada's national tip line to report online crimes against children. In 2017, we launched Project Arachnid, an innovative online platform that targets the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale. It is through this critical work that we have witnessed first-hand and all too often the colossal injury and harm that happen every single day to children online. The unregulated Internet has basically destroyed childhood as we have historically known it, while children and families are paying a devastating price for the ongoing failure of government to regulate online spaces.
There has been a steady increase in the number and seriousness of online crimes against children since the rise of social media, which created a perfect storm of injury and harm to children. We saw another huge and significant jump after 2020 with COVID. These are key events that have exacerbated and intensified harm to our children.
We've handed children technology that has been weaponized against them by predators and technology services, and I'll underscore what I'm talking about. Every month, through Cybertip.ca, the tip line, we process over 2,500 reports, and these are reports by Canadians who know to come in to us. We've seen a 760% increase in luring reports since the start of COVID in 2020. We've managed more than 4,300 requests from youth and their caregivers in the last year alone. We receive approximately seven sextortion reports every single day at the tip line, and we've processed close to 4,000 sexually explicit deepfake images and videos of children. Finally, since 2017, we've issued over 40 million takedown notices to companies, to get them to take down child sexual abuse material.
There is no other entity in Canada that is doing the work we are doing. Regrettably and in a very difficult way, we are witnessing first-hand the scale of harm that is happening to our children and how it has evolved over the years. We are dealing with young people who are terrified about what an offender will force them to do next, youth who are frantically trying to get their child sexual material down, families who are dealing with situations that have escalated well beyond anything—anything—that they ever could have imagined.
We are supporting survivors of child sexual abuse material from all over the world. Abusive imagery of them is endlessly uploaded and re-uploaded on platforms available to anyone with an Internet connection. These victims and children have been stripped of their privacy and their dignity, and, in fact, they have no recourse. Their rights are repeatedly violated while the predators who obsess over them, the ones who stalk, harass and target them, are shielded by the cloak of anonymity that technology affords them.
To try to deal with this mess through Project Arachnid, we are issuing between 10,000 and 20,000 notices to companies every single day. These notices are overwhelmingly for known child sexual abuse material. By that, I mean imagery that has been circulating for years, tormenting survivors, yet still these platforms get to choose whether or not they take it down. They get to regulate themselves. They get to decide all on their own what is okay and what is not okay. It's outrageous, and it must change.
To put this all into perspective for you quickly as I close, I'll give you a sampling of the actual interventions that our organization deals with every day. Imagine—and this is happening—a young girl between the ages of 11 and 12 who is being tortured daily by a group of anonymous men. Every day, she is ordered to go into the school bathroom and is instructed to self-abuse and harm while recording the material. She is paralyzed by fear. She does as she's told. The requests get worse, more degrading, more harmful. Eventually, she reaches out for help.
Imagine that a teenage boy is tricked into sending a sexual image to a person he thought was a peer, but that person turns on him and threatens to send the image to all his friends and family. He is shocked. He is terrified. He believes with every bone in his body that they will do what they've said. He pays them. It's not enough. The threats keep coming. He is desperate to make it stop.
These are just a few of the examples that we hear. They are not hypotheticals—