Canada launched a national Internet child porn-reporting tip line January 24.
Growing out of a Child Find Manitoba online service built in 2002, the new tip line, known as cybertip.ca, will gather complaints and incident reports about child porn, child sex exploitation, or child luring in cyberspace and send the most serious to law enforcement agencies.
Prime Minister Paul Martin gave an extra $42 million boost of funding over five years last June to fight online child exploitation, most of which went to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police but some of which went to cybertip.ca, according to published reports which said that portion helped cybertip.ca fatten its annual budget to near $1 million. That money, the reports said, would market the Website across Canada.
Canada underwent a near-flood of calls for stronger federal law against child porn and child sexual exploitation after the harrowing case of Holly Jones, when software programmer Michael Briere pleaded guilty to abducting, raping, murdering, and dismembering the ten-year-old girl in Toronto in 2003.
Briere was sentenced to life imprisonment last June. His videotaped confession—in which he admitted watching child porn on his computer before going out to find such a young girl, to satisfy a lifelong fantasy about such sex—included comments that obtaining child porn was only too easy.
"The simplicity of getting [it... is] close to mind-boggling," his confession said. "I have never understood how come the whole thing wasn't shut down, just because the nature of it. You search for the word 'baby' and it will find stuff there."
