Yes, it is like putting on the dunce cap and standing in the corner for a minute and having someone say “I hope you won't do it again”. There is no teeth in it. There is no message in it, and this is the important thing, for abusers of children. Often the victims spend a lifetime ruined. Often they are generationally ruined and become abusers themselves. It is a horrendous cycle. There is no thought given to that. The abuser is just given a little smack on the hand and told not to do it again, to go home and think about it. It is just inadequate. The message it sends is really inadequate, hopelessly inadequate, because it sends the message that we do not take it very seriously, that we wish they would not do it but there are no consequences.
We also have said that one of the first steps we should take is to raise the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16. I want to quickly relate a story that was on BCTV news approximately two or three years ago. There was a 14 year old girl, and who knows what kind of problems she was having, who got into a situation with an exploitive, middle-aged guy who was 45 to 50 years old. He moved that 14 year old girl, and a 14 year old is in grade 8, into his home. The mom and dad finally found out where their 14 year old girl was. They tried to intercede and change the situation, in which this little girl was not even grown, not only not sexually mature but not even grown up yet, and the 50 year old pervert had her in a house. The police told the mom and dad they could not even go in there and talk to their daughter to see if she was safe. Why? Because the law says 14 years old and it is free game for the perverts.
So the police were not even allowed to let the parents in to talk to their 14 year old girl to see if she was okay, to see if she would have liked to come home, to ask if she was plied with drugs or abused in any way. They could not talk to that young girl. That young girl was a victim and who knows where that victim cycle ended. Who knows where the victim cycle ends?
Let us do some constructive things here. We have been talking about this. Let us get a sex offender registry that works. Let us get that done. Let us get child pornography, the vile child pornography, off the streets. Let us not just talk about banning spam from the Internet like the industry department is doing, but let us actually ban the Internet transmission of pornography.
Let us deal with changing the age of consent from 14 to 16 and make real changes possible, quickly, to help police. Let us then put the tools in the hands of the police and the judges, with firm sentences and with the assets and tools that are needed by police forces from coast to coast.
If we do all of that, and we can do it quickly, then we will have a handle on actually providing the protection for children that this bill does not address.