Good afternoon. My name is Signy Arnason. I'm the associate executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection as well as the director of Cybertip.ca.
As Lianna mentioned, we're a national charity dedicated to the personal safety of children. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection provides programs and services to the Canadian public, one of which includes Cybertip.ca, which is Canada's tip line for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children.
During its 14 years of operation, the tip line has processed over 200,000 reports from the public. Over 90% of those pertain to concerns regarding child sexual abuse images and videos, what is otherwise known as child pornography.
Child pornography involves the recording of a child being sexually exploited or abused. The image or video becomes a permanent record of the child's abuse and can propagate indefinitely. In order to produce the image, a child has to be assaulted or posed deliberately in a sexualized way.
We release studies every few years. In January 2016 we released a report that was an overview of reports to the tip line over the last eight years, and we had a particular focus on child sexual abuse images. The report examined close to 44,000 unique images and videos classified by the tip line as child pornography.
This report provides important insight about child sexual abuse and the abusive acts these offenders are perpetrating against children. The harsh reality is that young girls are disproportionately represented in these images, since 80% of the children in the imagery are female. Of that number, 79% of them appear to be prepubescent—under the age of 12—and of that number, about 65% are under the age of 8.
The abuse depicted in the images is severe. Fifty per cent of the images assessed by analysts involve either sexual assaults or extreme sexual assaults. Additionally, there is alarming concern that as the age of the child decreases, analysts are more likely to see sexual assaults being committed against the child. When babies and toddlers are seen in imagery, 60% of the abuse perpetrated against that child involves either a sexual assault or an extreme sexual assault.
There are also a disproportionate number of men who appear in the images depicting child sexual abuse. As assessed by analysts, 83% had a male visible in the image. When only an adult male is visible with the child in the child sexual abuse content, 97% of the content involves either a sexual assault or extreme sexual assault.
Cybertip.ca also receives reports from Canadians on sexualized child modelling. Sexualized child modelling occurs on sites that portray images of children who are fully or partially clothed, have been deliberately posed in a highly sexualized way, and who are not marketing any specific product or service other than the child herself or himself. The tip line started classifying this category of websites and images in 2006. While the current definition of child pornography in Canada is broad enough to capture the most egregious of sexualized child modelling pictures under the Criminal Code definition, the majority would fall outside of it.
In the last three years, the tip line has analyzed close to 50,000 sexualized child modelling images. In the past year, analysts assessed 20,000 such images, with 92% of them involving girls. The majority of children in these images are prepubescent—76% of them—and they are deliberately posed in a sexual manner 40% of the time. Thong underwear, high heels, and knee-high stockings are some of the most popular garments observed on the children in these images. Ten per cent of the time, sexualized child modelling images are found on adult pornography sites, which sends the message that children, particularly girls, are sexual commodities. These sites negatively impact societal beliefs and attitudes towards children by showcasing them as sexual objects and normalizing a sexual interest in children.
In addition, as identified through various tip lines around the world that do work similar to what Cybertip.ca does, there have been numerous cases in which children identified in child sexual abuse imagery first appeared in sexualized child modelling images. These images arguably assist in fuelling the demand for illegal images among adults who have a sexual interest in children. In short, the hypersexualization of young girls in the form of sexualized child modelling poses a serious risk to children's personal safety and security.
When it comes to cyberviolence, we know that women and girls are particularly vulnerable. In some cases, the violence comes at the hands of an adult, and in other cases it comes at the hands of peers. When cyberviolence is perpetrated by adults, it often manifests itself online as luring or sextortion.
Cybertip.ca has seen a worrying rise in teenagers reporting cases of sextortion surrounding live streaming with adults posing as teenagers. Within platforms that allow users to communicate by video, offenders often secretly record teenagers. They typically deceive the children about their identity and then manipulate them into sharing further sexual images or videos.
The tip line is now receiving at least 15 reports a month dealing with online extortion, where the youth either has paid money to have the threats stop or has been asked to produce more sexual images to send to the offender and in some capacity has complied. While that number may not seem significant, we know it's the tip of the iceberg. The majority of these reports, 70%, involve girls.
When cyberviolence is perpetrated by peers, it often takes the form of sexting and cyberbullying. Developmentally, youth seek independence, place peer relationships over parents, exhibit attention-seeking behaviour, and crave acceptance, all of which are normal developmental milestones. They are also willing to take on more risk in exploring their sexuality, without realizing the long-term consequences of their behaviour.
When these typical adolescent attributes are combined with the ever-present availability of technology and the permanent nature of digital images, it is easy to see that there is a perfect storm for sexual harm, especially for teen girls.
Girls also face the additional layer of harm that comes from shaming when sexual images and videos circulate among peers. There still exists the social stigma that women and girls are somehow acting inappropriately if they go against traditional expectations tied to sexual behaviour. We need to challenge attitudes and beliefs that relate to victim blaming and degrading sexual labels if we are to change the damage being done to youth—something that the tip line intersects with on a daily basis.
In closing, our organization witnesses, day in and day out, the prevalence of violence and abuse being perpetrated against children, particularly girls. Cybertip.ca currently receives an average of 3,300 reports per month, and we only see that number rising in the future. The evolving advantage of technology, combined with the shield of anonymity, has resulted in the offending community having an enormous advantage in exploiting the innocence and vulnerability of children, and our statistics reflect that reality.
My colleague will speak to our recommendations for action at the end of her speech.
I thank the committee members for their time and attention.