Thank you for the opportunity today.

My name is Monique St. Germain, and I am general counsel for the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, which is a national charity with the goal of reducing the incidence of missing and sexually exploited children.

We operate cybertip.ca, Canada's national tip line for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children. Cybertip.ca receives and analyzes tips from the public and refers relevant information to police and child welfare as needed. Cybertip averages over 2,500 reports a month. Since inception, over 400,000 reports have been processed.

When cybertip.ca launched in 2002, the Internet was pretty basic, and the rise of social media was still to come. Over the years, technology has rapidly evolved without guardrails and without meaningful government intervention. The faulty construction of the Internet has enabled online predators to not only meet and abuse children online but to do so under the cover of anonymity. It has also enabled the proliferation of child sexual abuse material, CSAM, at a rate not seen before. Victims are caught in an endless cycle of abuse.

Things are getting worse. We have communities of offenders operating openly on the Tor network, also known as the dark web. They share tips and tricks about how to abuse children and how to avoid getting caught. They share deeply personal information about victims. CSAM is openly shared, not only in the dark recesses of the Internet but on websites, file-sharing platforms, forums and chats accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.

Countries have prioritized the arrest and conviction of individual offenders. While that absolutely has to happen, we've not tackled a crucial player: the companies themselves whose products facilitate and amplify the harm. For example, Canada has only one known conviction and sentencing of a company making CSAM available on the Internet. That prosecution took eight years and thousands of dollars to prosecute. Criminal law cannot be the only tool; the problem is just too big.

Recognizing how rapidly CSAM was proliferating on the Internet, in 2017, we launched Project Arachnid. This innovative tool detects where CSAM is being made available publicly on the Internet and then sends a notice to request its removal. Operating at scale, it issues roughly 10,000 requests for removal each day and some days over 20,000. To date, over 40 million notices have been issued to over 1,000 service providers.

Through operating Project Arachnid, we've learned a lot about CSAM distribution, and, through cybertip.ca, we know how children are being targeted, victimized and sextorted on the platforms they use every day. The scale of harm is enormous.

Over the years, the CSAM circulating online has become increasingly disturbing, including elements of sadism, bondage, torture and bestiality. Victims are getting younger, and the abuse is more graphic. CSAM of adolescents is ending up on pornography sites, where it is difficult to remove unless the child comes forward and proves their age. The barriers to removal are endless, yet the upload of this material can happen in a flash, and children are paying the price.

It's no surprise that sexually explicit content harms children. For years, our laws in the off-line world protected them, but we abandoned that with the Internet. We know that everyone is harmed when exposed to CSAM. It can normalize harmful sexual acts, lead to distorted beliefs about the sexual availability of children and increase aggressive behaviour. CSAM fuels fantasies and can result in harm to other children.

In our review of Canadian case law regarding the production of CSAM in this country, 61% of offenders who produced CSAM also collected it.

CSAM is also used to groom children. Nearly half of the victims who responded to our survivor survey of victims of CSAM identified this tactic. Children are unknowingly being recorded by predators during an online interaction, and many are being sextorted thereafter. More sexual violence is occurring among children, and more children are mimicking adult predatory behaviour, bringing them into the criminal justice system.

CSAM is a record of a crime against a child, and its continued availability is ruining lives. Survivors tell us time and time again that the endless trading in their CSAM is a barrier to moving forward. They are living in constant fear of recognition and harassment. This is not right.

The burden of managing Internet harms has fallen largely to parents. This is unrealistic and unfair. We are thrilled to see legislative proposals like Bill C-63 to finally hold industry to account.

Prioritizing the removal of CSAM and intimate imagery is critical to protecting citizens. We welcome measures to mandate safety by design and tools like age verification or assurance technology to keep pornography away from children. We would also like to see increased use of tools like Project Arachnid to enhance removal and prevent the reuploading of CSAM. Also, as others have said, public education is critical. We need all the tools in the tool box.

Thank you.