Online child abuse in Canada up dramatically in pandemic
National tip line has seen 88 per cent increase in reports since last spring
In dark corners of the internet, child abusers are talking about how the pandemic is giving them new opportunities to blackmail, coerce and sexually manipulate children, according to the director of Canada’s national tip line.
As average screen time increased in the last year due to virtual learning and social isolation, authorities across the country say instances of children being sexually exploited online reached an unprecedented frequency.
Stephen Sauer, director of Cybertip.ca, which is operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P), said the site is getting approximately 300 reports of youth sexual exploitation on the internet a month, up 88 per cent since last spring.
Alberta law enforcement said its Internet Child Exploitation Unit undertook a record number of investigations in 2020, over 2,100, an increase of more than 50 per cent from the previous year.
And although the Toronto police Child Exploitation Section declined to provide specific numbers, acting Det. Sgt. Susan Burke said the increase in files received in the last year is “very large.”
As children are engaging with more online platforms now that in-person connection is infrequent or impossible, they’re ending up at sites with weak moderation standards regarding conversations between children and adults, and this creates opportunity for predators, Sauer said.
“We’ve seen conversations from offenders on the dark web talking about how the pandemic is letting them intersect with more youth,” he added.
He cited the website Omegle, which allows users to be paired with a random, anonymous video chat partner. One type of internet predator — called a “capper” — will stalk sites like it for children, then coerce them into performing sexual acts on camera, sharing the footage with the “offender community,” Sauer said.
Omegle is among the 1,000 most visited sites on the internet. At any given time, the chat site has around 50,000 active users.
Omegle does not provide means for direct contact with site administrators. Gandi SAS, the company under which the site’s domain is registered, provided the Star with contact information for the site’s owner, who did not return a request for comment.
This community isn’t just on the dark web.
A content moderator who removes rule-violating videos from a large porn site told the Star he’s had to delete “plenty” of illegally recorded “capper” videos and, despite recent efforts to purge non-professionally shot content, these videos remain on the site under verified accounts.
The moderator, who said a nondisclosure agreement prevents him from speaking on the record, estimated that capper videos made up 10 to 15 per cent of content flagged for removal by the porn site. “That’s thousands of videos per week,” he said.
“There needs to be more regulation in terms of the type of apps and tools and software that are available to children,” Sauer said. Anonymous chat sides can be “wide open, there’s no age restriction, no age verification, youth and adults are able to communicate. There needs to be more done to ensure children are safe in these spaces.”
Omegle does provide a monitored video section, but notes its moderation is not perfect and “You may still encounter people who misbehave.” To access an unmonitored video chat, a user only has to affirm they are at least 18 years old by clicking a button.
In addition to forwarding reports of abuse to the police through Cybertip, C3P also takes proactive steps to curb online exploitation, such as Project Arachnid, a web-crawling bot that looks for child sexual abuse material online and attempts to have it deleted.
C3P also runs the Canadian side of Safer Internet Day, an annual international educational event, which took place Feb. 9. Sauer said this year the organization wanted to highlight the growing issue of children being extorted for or with sexual images of themselves online.
“There’s not enough education and prevention around ‘sextortion,’” Sauer said, adding that C3P receives about 40 reports a month related to cases in which children are being extorted for sexual pictures, for money, or as a threat or retaliation over a failed relationship.
Wanda Polzin Holman, clinical director of the Little Warriors Be Brave Ranch, a treatment centre in Sherwood Park, Alta., for children who have been sexually abused, said it’s paramount for parents to take a closer look at how their children are interacting online.
“Through the pandemic, children and teens are having a lot more access to the internet,” she said. “With parents having to work and children staying home now, there are a lot of issues surrounding supervision. That’s why they need to teach their children to check in with them about what they’re seeing online, starting at a younger age.”
Polzin Holman said the best way for youth to get help when dealing with an exploitative situation on or offline is to find a trusted adult to confide in. She and Sauer agree that, for parents, protecting their children means having regular, open and honest conversations about the internet.
“For youth, it’s important to become aware of red flags online,” Sauer said. “This can be attention and flattery that seems out of the norm and makes you uncomfortable, or conversations that quickly become personal and sexual in nature. You want to cut those off right away.”
He also emphasized that “when you send a nude image of yourself to someone else, you lose control of it and what happens to it after the fact. We want youth to understand that these images can be used to harm them. Maybe not now, but in the future.”
Ainslie Heasman, a clinical psychologist at CAMH who works to treat problematic sexual behaviours, said too much of the onus to prevent sexual abuse is placed on the victims and not enough on the perpetrators.
She said if stigma surrounding them getting help was reduced, there would be fewer instances of child abuse.
“These individuals with sexual attraction to children exist in our community,” she said. “We can’t bury our heads in the sand. We have to acknowledge they exist and need a public health response. They need an environment where they can access treatment without fear of significant reprisal for outing themselves.”
“With parents having to work and children staying home now, there are a lot of issues surrounding supervision. That’s why they need to teach their children to check in with them about what they’re seeing online, starting at a younger age.”
WANDA POLZIN HOLMAN CLINICAL DIRECTOR OF THE LITTLE WARRIORS BE BRAVE RANCH