Thank you for the opportunity to be here today.

My submission to you comes from 43 years of clinical practice and research and from chairing Connecting to Protect's global summit in 2022, which involved 23 countries addressing harms stemming from children accessing pornography online.

My experience links me directly to the consequences of childhood access to online pornography, which results in problematic sexual behaviour, including difficulties in conducting relationships, destruction of the family and, in more extreme cases, criminal behaviour. Access to pornography by children who are unable to process and understand the material is like a gateway drug, setting up future abuse and all the attendant consequences.

For the last 13 years, I've treated individuals with compulsive sexual behaviour disorder and individuals who've been accessing child sexual exploitation material online. We are facing a global epidemic of online child sexual abuse and exploitation as a result of unregulated access to the Internet. We're getting it wrong and we're missing the mark in protecting children.

My colleague and I have outlined in detail what we consider to be the proposed solution in our brief for Bill S-210. We simply advocate shifting the narrative from the focus on age verification to a broader consideration of age assurance options, in conjunction with device-level controls operating at the point of online access through Google, Apple or Microsoft. This approach is technologically possible and relatively quick to implement, with far greater reach and effectiveness. Device-level controls coupled with a multi-dimensional public health approach are needed, including the implementation of protective legislation and policy.

Sadly, sexual exploitation is happening right now in Canada, feeding the production of illegal sexually explicit material online. Cybertip.ca receives millions of reports of child sexual exploitation material yearly, while 39% of luring attempts reported to Cybertip.ca in the last several years involved victims under 13 years of age. Globally, from 2020 to 2022, WeProtect's global threat assessment—and I hope you're sitting down for this—found a 360% increase in self-generated sexual imagery of seven to 10-year-olds.

How does this happen? It is wrong on so many levels. There is not a child protection expert on the planet who agrees that this is okay. It's child sexual abuse via digital images.

The harms to children due to accessing legal and illegal sexually explicit material online include trauma, exploitation, self-produced sexual images, child-on-child abuse, objectification, violence, risky sexual behaviours, depression, difficulties in forming and maintaining close relationships, anxiety disorder, panic attacks, PTSD and complex PTSD symptoms, among others. Potential health issues and addiction carry on into adulthood, causing documented long-term mental health consequences that impact personal and family relationships and the very fabric of our society, unless there is early identification and treatment of the problem.

You might be wondering how certain individuals are vulnerable to developing a problem like this or a compulsive sexual behaviour disorder. It almost always involves access to legal sexually explicit material online at an early age. The average age of exposure is 12 years old.

I want to talk to you about the erototoxic implications of sexually explicit material online. We know we need to do something—