According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, online sexual abuse of children has become a worsening problem in Canada, with a startling growth in sexually violent images of very young children on illegal pay websites.
According to the Canadian publication CTV News, RCMP Supt. Earla Kim McColl, who runs Canada’s National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre, says the volume of new images is alarming, and so is the violent trend in the content. The NCECC is an integral part of Canada’s National Police Services and was created to help protect children from online sexual exploitation.
"Probably 80 percent of the images involve some kind of penetration—oral, anal, or vaginal—and a significant number, about 20 percent, also involving torture and bondage,” says McColl.
Authorities believe another disturbing fact is that the abuse usually stems from someone related to the victim.
“It’s almost always somebody within the family,” Internet safety expert Paul Gillespie told Canada AM this week.
Since ISPs claim they can’t monitor the colossal amount of online information, Gillespie stresses that it is up to parents to be vigilant and use “good common sense.”
According to an article in CTV News, Internet child pornography has turned into a $2.6 billion industry with 20,000 new child porn websites every month. At any given time, there are 50,000 pedophiles online around the world. Most of them access websites based in Third World countries where laws are more lax.
Canadian pedophiles, however, are contributing to the problem.
“There are rising numbers every year of new Canadians we find are using these sites,” David Janes, an RCMP database analyst, told CTV News.
McColl put the number of Canadian men paying for online child pornography in the hundreds.
Since the NCECC was set up in 2002, the Mounties have rescued 100 children from predators.
In March, Canadian and U.S. investigators cracked an international child pornography ring with the help of open-source computer software created by Microsoft Canada. The Child Exploitation Tracking System, which contains data gathered from international sources, helped police correlate such information as credit card purchases, messages from chat rooms, and arrest records.
Of the alleged ring, nine of the 27 accused are from Canada, 13 from the U.S., three from Australia, and two from Britain.
