Thank you, Mr. Chairperson and distinguished members of this committee. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this study.

My name is Monique St. Germain, and I am general counsel for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which is a global leader in combatting the proliferation of child sexual abuse material on the Internet. We are a national charity, and we have been providing programs and services to victims of crime for over 37 years.

For the last 20 years, we have operated Cybertip.ca, Canada's national tip line to report the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children. The tip line is a central part of the Government of Canada's national strategy for the protection of children from sexual exploitation on the Internet. Our role through Cybertip is to triage reports to the appropriate police and child welfare agencies where necessary, raise awareness through education and provide support services to assist Canadian families and children directly. The tip line has never been busier, and my goal here today is to be a voice for the victims and families we help.

In 2015, our agency believed that the Victims Bill of Rights was a vital step towards a fairer system for victims. We still do, but since 2015, the extent of online child sexual exploitation has exploded. According to Statistics Canada, the overall rate of police-reported incidents of online sexual exploitation and abuse have increased from 50 incidents per 100,000 population in 2014 to 131 in 2020. These numbers signal that we have a tremendous problem on our hands, especially considering that the numbers would be the tip of the iceberg.

Child sexual abuse crimes are grossly under-reported. Many cases involve perpetrators who are a member of the child's immediate family or household or a person known to the victim's family, making the need for supports for both the child and the non-offending family members critical, yet many victim services programs do not cover services for the victim's family.

Perpetrators of online crime such as luring or sextortion may be committed by anyone, anywhere and on any platform. There are jurisdictional and other complications that make investigations difficult, leaving many victims without justice. Today, reports of sextortion are through the roof. Multiple policing agencies as well as Cybertip.ca have been issuing public alerts to try to warn parents and their children of the highly organized and ruthless nature of these crimes.

If you don't work in this space, you don't know how bad it can get. Our agency has become connected with families of children who have died by suicide after being the victim of sextortion. We've worked with survivors of child sexual abuse material who have essentially become secret public figures to those in the offending community. Their images are widely distributed, creating an online and ongoing cycle of abuse and an endless stream of offenders. Survivors responding to our international survivors survey told us that these crimes have a significant lifelong impact on them.

The power of their stories led us to create Project Arachnid, an innovative global tool that can detect where this material is being made publicly available online and issue takedown notices. So far, over six million images and videos of child sexual exploitation have been removed from the Internet following a Project Arachnid notice. These images and videos were detected across more than 1,000 electronic service providers spanning nearly 100 countries. The problem is immense.

I will close with a few recommendations. First, as a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canada agreed to “take all appropriate measures to promote physical and psychological recovery and social reintegration of a child victim of: any form of neglect, exploitation, or abuse”. Online crime victims need ongoing safety planning, therapy and financial support. Their non-offending caregivers need the same things. These services and supports must be consistent across provinces.

Then there's restitution. Adding it as a specific right seemed like it would help; however, as an organization that closely monitors case law on all online child sexual exploitation offences, we can tell you unequivocally that restitution is not being ordered or even considered in most cases.

[Technical difficulty—Editor] is found in the collection of a subsequent offender. This means that victims of child sexual abuse material are rarely recognized as victims, so their rights under the Victims Bill of Rights are not being fulfilled.

In closing, we know that there are families out there doing their own investigations to unmask and protect themselves from an anonymous online perpetrator. Victims are self-policing to find their own content online to request its removal, and non-offending caregivers are struggling to hold it all together while being told by systems that are supposed to help them that they are not victims. It is not right, and it is not sustainable.

We urge the government to play a leadership role in better supporting victims of crime, not just through the criminal justice process but beyond.

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