Kinsa Blog | New Canadian legislation gets tougher on online exploitation

January 28, 2010

New Canadian legislation gets tougher on online exploitation

As 2009 drew to a close, we saw some important developments in Canadian legislation and sentencing around online child exploitation.

At times like these you realize that advocacy and awareness efforts do bear fruit, slowly but surely.

In November new legislation was proposed in Canada that would require Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to report any websites that contain, or are suspected to contain, images of child sexual abuse and exploitation to the appropriate authorities. According to a 2009 report from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, Canada is the world's second largest host of images of child sexual abuse. While this legislation is an important step towards combating online sexual exploitation in Canada, it only addresses the images that ISPs are aware of. There is such a large volume of abuse-related Internet traffic that it's simply impossible for ISPs to track down all of it. Considering the alarming number of sites hosting and selling illegal child abuse images in Canada, this may only be a token attempt at catching offenders. Legislation needs to be backed up by an increase in resources for law enforcement to conduct cyber investigations to stop the criminals who produce the images.

In December a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada removed any gray area around the term "Internet luring" when a 32-year old man in Alberta was charged with Internet luring, despite his claims that he had no intention of meeting the 12-year old girl he was chatting with online. While chats may appear innocent initially, they open the door for actual contact offences by reducing the child's inhibitions, and exploiting their naivety or curiosity. This new definition of Internet luring criminalizes the grooming process that offenders use to gain the child's trust, and in the words of Justice Morris Fish, it closes "the cyberspace door before the predator gets to the prey."

We still have a long way to go in the fight against online child exploitation. In 2010 we want to focus our advocacy efforts on two particular issues:

1. Improved accountability with mobile applications with legislation that requires ISPs to log IP addresses assigned to mobile devices, and share them with law enforcement when necessary for online investigations;

2. Improved accountability with wireless networks, with legislation that requires providers of free public Internet access to ask users for identification prior to connecting them to the Internet, so that this information could be logged and given to law enforcement when necessary for online investigations.

Click here for more information about how you can get involved with advocacy.

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January 28, 2010

New Canadian legislation gets tougher on online exploitation