‘Happening in everyone’s neighbourhood’: Alberta police double their efforts to combat rise in online child sex assault and exploitation crimes

September 1, 2021

001 2 — Emmy Stuebing CEO of the Zebra Child Protection Centre and Sgt. Manuel Illner from the EPS Child Protection Section in Edmonton, May 20, 2021. PHOTO BY ED KAISER /Postmedia

Ava was 14 years old when an older boy she had met online convinced her to take part in an explicit Facetime call that was secretly recorded and plastered across the internet.

She was shocked and traumatized by the exploitation.

“It was posted on porn websites, I had men find out my Facebook and like, send me pictures of my house — and I was 14 during all of this,” said Ava. (Postmedia is identifying her by a pseudonym due to safety concerns.)

In the decade since, she has fought to have the images scrubbed from the Internet while dealing with the long-lasting impacts.

Online, men from around the world continued to message and threaten her everyday and she has had to keep her identity concealed on her social media pages. She has a hard time concentrating on life and school, worrying that she could run into her abuser on the street.

“I was so scared that somebody would recognize me and put the pieces together and then my life would be over. It was an every day thing,” she said.

Ava is one of hundreds of thousands of Canadians who have had explicit photos shared of them online. Many victims of this kind of exploitation are children. While child sexual abuse and exploitation has been on the rise for years, law enforcement groups and organizations supporting victims in the province say the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the issue to explode exponentially.

Increases across the board

Stephen Sauer is the director of Cybertip.ca, a national hotline ran by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP) to report the online sexual exploitation of children. He says they have seen about an 88 per cent increase in calls — including things like children receiving sexual messages or images from online — nationally since April 1, 2020.

“(Children are) Being coerced into sending sexual images or videos or engaging in some sort of sexual activity on a live stream, or reports where they reported having sexual images or videos of themselves being shared online by others,” said Sauer. “So that 88 per cent increase, it’s pretty significant.”

Nationally, recent data from Statistics Canada shows police-reported online victimization of children is rising when compared to pre‑pandemic levels. According to the data, making, or distribution of child pornography increased by 1,512 cases, from 4,242 cases in 2019 to 5,754 cases in 2020, representing a 35 per cent increase.

Possession of pornography cases rose by 387 cases from 1,133 cases in 2019 to 1,520 cases in 2020, a 34 per cent increase. Luring a child via a computer crimes rose 19 per cent, with 1,736 reported cases in 2020 compared to 1,461 cases in 2019, and incidents of non‑consensual distribution of intimate images rose 14 per cent, with 827 reported cases in 2020 compared to 726 cases in 2019.

In Alberta, recent statistics show cases here too have increased steadily over the past four years.

According to their 2020-21 annual report, the Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team’s (ALERT) Internet and Child Exploitation (ICE) team saw nearly a 41 per cent increase in the number of new case referrals compared to the previous year. ALERT arrested 145 people and laid 500 charges during this time, compared to 79 arrests and 270 charges laid in 2019-20; 100 arrests and 471 charges laid in 2018-19; and 102 arrests and 388 charges laid in 2017-2018.

Investigators seized a total of 2,006 computers, tablets, cell phones, gaming devices, and USBs representing roughly 400 terabytes of data, compared to 1,322 seized in 2019-2020, 1,457 seized in 2018-19; and 1,920 seized in 2017-2018.