About Online Child Sexual Exploitation
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What is Online Child Sexual Exploitation
Online child sexual exploitation (OCSE) is one of the most disturbing public safety issues facing society today. It continues to harm past and present generations of children in Canada and abroad. Online child sexual exploitation includes:
- Child sexual abuse material - Actual, but also fictitious, written depictions of child sexual abuse, audio, video, and images, also known as child pornography
- Self-generated materials and sexting – Youth-generated explicit images/videos on the Internet, which are often further distributed without consent
- Sexual extortion – Use of coercion and threats to extort child sexual exploitation images/videos from youth (either by other youth or adult offenders), or "financial" sexual extortion where offenders threaten to release the compromising material unless the victim sends payment
- Grooming and luring – Use of applications and platforms to connect with children and youth for the purpose of sexually exploiting them
- Live child sexual abuse streaming – Viewing of child sexual abuse in real-time, often involves the offender directing the abuse; and
- Made-to-order content – Ordering videos/images to suit offenders' preferences
Statistics
Online child sexual exploitation and abuse is on the rise in Canada.
In 2023, there were 19,516 police-reported incidents, a 59% increase from 2022.
2014 to 2023 highlights
- In 2023, most incidents (87%) involved making or distributing child pornography. Incidents of online sexual offences against children made up the remaining 13% of incidents. Of these offences, luring made up the majority (65%)
- Between 2014 and 2022, seven in ten victims were girls between 12 to 17 years old
- Between 2014 and 2022, nine in ten people accused were men and boys. They were generally much older than the victims, except in cases of non-consensual distribution of intimate images. In these instances, victims and the accused were 15 years old on average
Only a fraction of incidents are reported to police and the courts. This means the problem is bigger than official data suggests.
- In 2024-25, Cybertip.ca, Canada's national tipline for reporting the online sexual abuse and exploitation of children, received 28,453 reports from the public
- In 2024-25, approximately 13 million takedown notices were issued to electronic service providers (ESPs) through Project Arachnid, a tool operated by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection that crawls the web in search of images of child sexual abuse and flagges them for removal
- In 2023-24, there were 2,600 reports of sexual extortion
References
- Online child sexual exploitation: A statistical profile of police-reported incidents in Canada, 2014 to 2022
- Online child sexual exploitation: Criminal justice outcomes of police-reported incidents in Canada, 2014 to 2021
- Reports of online sexual luring to Cybertip.ca
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