Online child exploitation on the rise in Manitoba amid pandemic

Statistics obtained by CBC News show reports related to online child exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic are on the rise in Manitoba.

Between March and mid-July, Manitoba RCMPopened 113 new investigations a 20per cent increase compared to the same time period last year.

Sgt. Stephen Rear, director of the internet child exploitation (ICE) unit with the RCMP's D Divisionin Manitoba, said his team has gone from receiving a handful of cases per week to, in recent months, upwards of a dozen cases a week.

He attributes the spike to more peopleboth predators and childrenspending more time at home andonlinedue to COVID-19.

"Predators are taking advantage of those kids," said Rear."A lot of times those kids are not being properly supervised or if they are being supervised, not to the degree that they should be because parents think even though the kids arein the room with them, that that's enough."

WATCH | Why online child exploitation is on the rise in Manitoba:

Keeping kids safe online

4 years ago

Duration 1:12

Reports related to online child exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic are on the rise in Manitoba. Sgt. Stephen Rear, director of the Internet Child Exploitation unit says his team has received upwards of a dozen cases a week.

He said offenders are luring kids on just about any of the roughly 200 online platforms young people use to connectincluding popular appslikeFacebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Kik, Snapchat and TikTok.

Victims as young as 9

Victims in Manitoba have ranged in age from 9 to 17 years old, with the average age between 10 and 12, Rear said.

Boys and girls appear to be targeted equally, he added.

"We haven't had any files where [predators] actually want to meet,physically meet," he said. "They're looking for images and videos of the kids engaged in sexual acts."

No community in Manitoba is immune. His unit has investigated cases across the provincefrom the US border to Churchill to remote, fly-in First Nations, he said.

Once a complaint is received, the painstaking process begins totrack down the accused, their IP addressand eventually their location,which involves writing productionorders andexecuting search warrants. The process can take months.

The unitof four full-time staffestimates about 40arrests are made per yearand atleast half of all suspectsannually are traced to a foreign country, Rear said.

While Manitoba RCMP work in tandem with other police forces, the investigations generally do not include reports in Winnipeg and Brandon, which have their own ICE unit's.

The Winnipeg Police Service was not able to provide data on its caseload through the pandemic, but said the majority of reports are forwarded to them via Cybertip.ca, the RCMP's National Child Exploitation Crime Centre (NCECC) and the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in the United States.

Brandon Police Service has seen at least four reports related to online child exploitationsince March, which is in line with previous statistics, Sgt. Mike Tosh told CBC News.

Trend across Canada

Stephen Sauer, director of Cybertip.ca, a national tiplineto report the sexual exploitation of children, said Manitobais a microcosm of what's happening across Canada.

Over April, May and June, reports to Cybertip from youth who had been sexually exploitedand reports of people trying to sexually abuse childrenincreased by 81 per cent.

He agrees thatthe biggest factor is the unprecedented amount of time kids are spending online since school and other activities were largely shut down in response to the pandemic.

"Because of COVID-19 [young people] are seeking out different ways of having social interactions," he said. "Offenders are seeing this as an opportunity."

Sauer said predators are using a variety of tactics to target their victims, including platforms such as Omegle and Chatroulette which allows strangers to connectvia live video or text.

"These often allow for individuals with a sexual interest to quickly engage with youth on a level that they would have never been able to before," Sauer said.

Bait videos

Another technique predators will use, especially to target boys on video-streaming platforms, are what Sauerrefers to as "bait videos".

The offender will use a pre-recorded video of a similar-aged peer engaging in a sexual act and coerce the victim to participatewhile they record it, Sauer explained.

"Then they will either threaten to distribute it, threaten youth for money or for further imagery," he said. "Or they'll often share it amongst the offending community."

Girls tend to be groomed over longer periods of time before the initial request is made for sexual images or videos, he added.

Sauer said the onus does not just fall on parents to keep kids safecompaniesproviding messaging and live-videoservices have an important responsibility as well.

He said there needs to be proper age verification and stricter moderation of contentto ensure a safe space for kids to engage with each other online.

"They are advertising to these kids," he said. "So they need to make sure they're putting everything in place to make sure that they're safe on these platforms."

Keeping kids safe

Both Sauer and Rear say keepingcommunication lines open and talking to your kids aboutapps, privacy settings and risks earlyis key to keeping kids safe.

Parents also mustknow what their children are doing online, Rear said.

"Sometimes you can't be their friend, you have to be the parent," he said. "Look at their devices. Make sure the people they're communicating with are appropriate. Do they know who they are in real life?"

Rear said if a child is being offered money, gifts or gift cards, thatis an immediate red flag.

"If all of a sudden in their iTunes account has a large amount of money in it because someone's giving them money," Rear said. "It's the little things like that, that begins a child becoming a victim."

He also suggests parents review a device's Internet history and take note if there are large gaps of history missing, which may indicate a child may be trying to conceal online activity from a parent.

Parents can also take measures to turn off internetaccess to children's devices, especially at night, to prevent kids from logging onafter they go to bed, he said.

Internet providers can walk through the steps to limitconnectivity on any device in a home during certain times of day, he added.

Watching for signs of a change in behaviour or mental healthis also important in recognizing whether a child is being preyed on.

If kids are being threatened, or blackmailed by a predator for money or more images, they can become depressed and withdrawn, Rear said.

He hopes the rise in cases will be an anomaly, tied to the pandemic.

In the meantime, he encourages parents and youth to report any suspicious activity to police or Cybertip no matter how small it might seem.

"Sometimes it's little things that will lead to an arrest of somebody," he said. "If somebody is doing something to one child, they're probably doing it to multiple children."

Online child exploitation

4 years ago

Duration 2:32

Statistics obtained by CBC News show reports related to online child exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic are on the rise in Manitoba.