Status of Women committee  Thank you for the invitation to speak in front of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women in relation to violence against young girls and women. My name is Carol Todd. I am an educator in British Columbia, but I am best known as the mother of Amanda Todd. Amanda has becom

Status of Women committee  I have three more pages, but I won't read them all. I'll only read the titles that I thought about because I've been thinking about solutions and ways that we can work on this as a society. It's building awareness and capacity through education, curriculum, social empathy, and h

Status of Women committee  We definitely have to go younger, and I also have gone into classrooms to speak to 7-year-olds and 8-year-olds. We are even seeing 2-year-olds and 3-year-olds in shopping carts with their parents' devices and tools. So these kids know their way around technology way better than a

Status of Women committee  I think it depends on the province you live in. We're talking about the education aspect and how important it might be in the curriculum. I know that in British Columbia, where technology is now embedded into our curriculum, it's our responsibility to talk about digital responsib

Status of Women committee  We are continuing to work on support systems, but there is never enough. There comes a point when you listen to the stories of families. They now know how to report. Kids and young people are now learning how to share that information with a trusting adult in order to report, but

Status of Women committee  I talk about this all the time. It's bringing that trust and communication into the family setting, and talking at a young age and having children talk to parents in a way that they know that their parents are not going to judge them and get angry at them. Vice versa, when parent

Status of Women committee  I think so. Some people actually go after Leah and me and say we're only doing this for fame. I would give this all up in a heartbeat. On my plane ride here, I was in tears. I really shouldn't have to be on that plane to come and sit in front of this committee and talk about my

Status of Women committee  I think we have different silos. I have always said that we work in three different silos. We work on prevention, intervention, and reaction. Many times, when it comes to law enforcement, that is the reactionary side. We, as Canadians, educators, parents, and communities, need to

Status of Women committee  Our new curriculum just started this year. Digital responsibility has been talked about, but it's in separate zones. A school can decide to do it or not to do it. They could do it at 150%, or they could do it at 25%. We need to get telecommunication companies, who disperse cell

Status of Women committee  When we told our personal story to the law enforcement agency, I too initially felt that we were dismissed. The week after the image was reported and we went in to talk to the RCMP, we were made to feel that they were looking at Amanda as a dysfunctional child who had issues of h

Status of Women committee  No. No, there aren't enough resources. There isn't enough compensation. There aren't enough supports out there for people who have been victimized, not only through cyber-violence but also through sexual assaults and with rape. The story goes on and on, and we're not just talking

Status of Women committee  I would certainly agree with what Leah is saying, that in every province and every jurisdiction it is different. If you go to cybercrime teams and ICE teams, they of course have more information on how to handle certain cases than on how to handle others. We can't deflect any cas

Status of Women committee  There are a few cellphone providers in our country. Each one of them seems to have a different platform. One has mental health. Another one has e-health and social media safety. They all need to be working on the same page and the same issue, because they all distribute the same

Status of Women committee  I think that nothing is ever enough, but there are campaigns out there by different organizations and companies that focus on girls. We don't talk enough to our boys about how they need to respect females and how they need to behave to be “proper gentlemen”. We need to focus on h

Status of Women committee  Leah and I are often met with roadblocks when we are speaking out to schools or organizations only because no one wants to hear the words suicide and mental health. But our daughters' stories go far deeper than that, and there are life lessons to be learned. For us as parents, it