Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Legal and Constitutional Affairs
Issue 17 - Evidence for June 23, 2005
OTTAWA, Thursday, June 23, 2005
The Standing Senate Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, to which was referred Bill C-2, to amend the Criminal Code (protection of children and other vulnerable persons) and the Canada Evidence Act, met this day at 10:51 a.m. to give consideration to the bill.
Senator Lise Bacon (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we are dealing today with Bill C-2. Our witnesses are from the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. We have Chief Vince Bevan, Vice-President of the CACP and Chief of the Ottawa Police Service; Mr. Vincent Westwick, Co-Chair of the CACP Law Amendments Committee CACP; and Detective Inspector Angie Howe, Child Pornography Section, Ontario Provincial Police.
We have followed your presentation in the House of Commons and are eager to hear from you today.
[Translation]
Mr. Vince Westwick, Co-Chair, Law Amendments Committee, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police: Madam Chair, members of the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs, my name is Vince Westwick and I am one of the co-chairs of the Law Amendments Committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. I am accompanied by Chief Vince Bevan, Vice-President of the association and Chief of the Ottawa Police Service, as well as Detective Inspector Angie Howe, who is the officer responsible for the Child Pornography Section of the Ontario Provincial Police.
We are pleased to be here in the context of your in-depth study of the provisions and application of Bill C-2.
[English]
Before we begin our formal presentation, we have brought with us this morning some samples of child pornography should members of the committee wish to view the materials. These are matters that would be covered and are subject to the bill.
For members who wish to see the materials, they can be distributed by Inspector Howe. We make this offer to you because we did so at the House of Commons committee. As a courtesy to this committee, we want to make the same offer to senators if they wish. These materials are very graphic and disturbing, and we also take the position that they are not submissions to the committee. They are not public documents and would under any circumstance remain the property of the Ontario Provincial Police.
The Chairman: I think it is for the senators to decide if they wish to see the samples you have brought with you, but personally, I believe you. Thank you for the offer.
Mr. Westwick: I would now turn the presentation over to Chief Bevan.
[Translation]
Chief Vince Bevan, Vice-President CACP and Chief of the Ottawa Police Service: Madam Chair, I would like to begin by saying that the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police supports the goal of Parliament and the government to protect our children through Bill C-2.
Our association has drafted a number of resolutions in this regard over the years.
[English]
The advent of the Internet with all of its benefits has also significantly increased the availability of child pornography and other forms of exploitation, a fact recognized in the preamble of this bill. In a moment you will hear more about the dangers facing our children in the information age, but first permit me to make a few submissions about the specifics of this bill.
The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police supports the following elements of Bill C-2: the broadening of the definition of child pornography; the new prohibition against advertising child pornography; the provision that would make the intent to profit in the commission of any child pornography offence an aggravating factor for sentencing purposes; the creation of voyeurism as an offence; the elimination of defences for material having artistic merit or an educational, scientific or medical purpose — while our association would prefer that there be no exceptions whatsoever, the proposed response to the Sharpe decision is workable; the provisions facilitating the evidence of children in court proceedings; and, finally, the changes to section 153 of the Criminal Code which have been proposed.
We are sensitive to the concerns expressed by Senator Nolin during the second reading debate of this bill, but the association is pleased to see amendments to the bill requiring mandatory minimum sentences for some of the offences outlined in Bill C-2. The policing community has long been concerned that the courts are not making full use of the sentencing latitude provided to them by Parliament. Too often we are seeing non-custodial sentences for very serious offences against children. Unfortunately in the presentation this morning, Detective Inspector Howe will bring another situation to this committee's attention.
While crimes dealing with the child pornography issue may be despicable, the offenders standing before the courts are often not the type of individual who would otherwise attract a custodial sentence. Often they are in court as first- time offenders without a criminal past. They often have employment, families and community ties and are not the type that judges usually send to prison.
For example, the courts in Ontario recently dealt with the case of a seemingly respectable professor at the University of Guelph. He was a first time offender with no previous criminal record. When he was arrested by police, the officers found pornography in four different locations: his home computer, his computer at the university, his briefcase and he also had a sampling of pictures in his pocket for easy access. The judge gave him a 15-month conditional sentence, and he was granted permission to travel regularly to Mexico and Thailand, ostensibly for work purposes. However, both of these countries are well-known havens of child sexual exploitation.
Parliament must send a message to the judiciary that offences involving child sexual exploitation must carry a serious and meaningful consequence. We support minimum sentences and we further recommend Parliament impose a statutory requirement for sentencing judges to personally review the material that is the subject of the charge.
[Translation]
I would like to acknowledge the commitment of the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness to the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre and the work of the National Committee on Internet-Based Sexual Exploitation of Children. I would also like to thank the private sector for its help in combating this terrible problem. For example, Microsoft has worked with the police to set up the Child Exploitation Tracking System.
I would now like to give the floor to Detective Inspector Angie Howe, who heads up the OPP's Child Pornography Section, which has over 30 years of experience in dealing with child pornography.
[English]
Detective Inspector Angie Howe, Child Pornography Section, Ontario Provincial Police: Allow me to begin with a quote:
It's not like I was pinpointing this little girl....that night, I must have viewed some material beforehand. And I just got excited, and just went. I need to go out and see if I....With time, and I don't know that it is for other people, but for myself, and I would say that yes, viewing the material does motivate you to do other things.... The more I saw it the more I wanted it. And there's the one time where actually tried to do it....I really wanted to do it...not the killing part. But I really wanted to have sex with a child. And that was all consuming. I just came out of my place, and was overwhelmed with desire, and she was just there and there was nobody around. That's all it took.... I was just in that frame of mind, and it was just that easy....
I am sure many of you will recognize that quote from Michael Briere, who acted on his desire to have sex with a child and subsequently murdered Holly Jones, who just happened to be walking home that night from the corner store.
This is the first time in Canada that a link has been so vividly and loudly demonstrated between the viewing of child pornography and a subsequent contact offence — and what a link it is.
Historically, child predators have found their victims in public places where children tend to gather — schoolyards, playgrounds and shopping malls. Today, with approximately 70 per cent of our children on line, the Internet provides predators with a new place, cyberspace, to target children for criminal acts. The Internet can be used to traffic child pornography, to locate children to molest, to engage in inappropriate sexual communication with children and to communicate with other pedophiles to normalize their behaviour amongst each other.
As Chief Bevan stated, too often we are seeing non-custodial sentences for what are very serious offences against children. It is our experience that more than half of our offenders receive a conditional sentence. Only yesterday in the Region of Peel, an offender received a suspended sentence and three-years' probation. That is the first time that we have had someone receive a suspended sentence.
Earlier this year, we arrested a man in Alexandria for the third time for child pornography charges. He received conditional sentences for the first two offences and one of the first two offences was a contact offence. We are seeing this trend over and over again.
On a positive note, we also had a sentencing in Western Ontario where the offender received just shy of three-years' jail time. He was a second-time offender and it was a possession case. We were extremely pleased with that sentence but it is not the norm. A conditional sentence with house arrest puts the offender right back into the environment in which they committed the offence, the privacy of their homes, with time to spare on their hands. House arrest is not much different from the life these offenders typically lead.
It is our experience, and that of all Canadian police services, that offenders who collect child pornography subsequently will go on to commit contact offences. In the OPP's experience, 30 per cent to 40 per cent of our offenders have a previous sexual contact offence or have gone on to commit a subsequent contact offence. I have seen the pictures of child sexual abuse and, in my mind, the opportunity that it might even be one child is one child too many.
There is very little research in this area, particularly Canadian research. Recently, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, in collaboration with the OPP's Behavioural Sciences Section, announced a study that will look at offenders and risk factors. It will examine what factors distinguish child pornography offenders who commit future offences from those who do not.
The notion that Internet crimes are victimless is utterly false. The children in these images are being degraded, abused and humiliated in the vilest of manners. Every time that image is shared on the Internet, that cycle of exploitation is perpetuated and the child is revictimized again and again.
I came across a heartbreaking story in my research that I would like to share with you today, a story of a victim in an allegedly victimless crime. Her name was Thea Pumbroeck. Thea died on the floor in a bathroom in a Holiday Inn hotel in Amsterdam on August 27, 1984. She had already appeared in a number of child pornography magazines and videos. Her pictures are still available on the Internet today and, in fact, are highly sought after by pedophiles. Nobody remembers her. There is no commemorative foundation in her name to focus attention on helping victims of child pornography. Even the records of her death appear to have been misplaced. She seems to have been treated in death as little more than the object she had been in life. Thea died of a cocaine overdose while being filmed for a child pornography film. She was five years old at the time of her death.
You have all recently heard of the Disney World case. A young Russian girl was adopted by an American man and was violated for years in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. All of it was captured and sent across the Internet to other offenders by her alleged adopted father. Her first night in America, she had to sleep naked with her adopted father. His excuse? Because it was so hot. That began the cycle of violence and exploitation. He starved her so that even as she bloomed, she would appear to be much younger than she was. When she was saved, she weighed 57 pounds and she was 12 years old.
She has been saved and she is doing well. She was adopted by another family and is now stable, living a very good life. This is one of the first times we have been able to put a face and a voice to a victim. To hear her speak about her ordeal is heartbreaking.
Because the Internet is facilitating larger numbers of individuals becoming involved in collecting and possessing child abuse images, it follows that it is highly likely that more children are therefore now being abused than would have otherwise been the case. The voracious consumption of this material — and without a doubt it is voracious consumption — which is the current reality can only fuel the production of it and, hence, result in more sexual abuse of children. Without a doubt, possessors instigate the production and subsequent distribution of child pornography.
In child pornography cases, particularly possession cases, we often get guilty pleas. This is problematic because it means that not even the judges or the Crown attorneys see the images that are the reason for the charges. They do not get a true understanding of what images of child sexual abuse are and of the inestimable damage done to the children that are involved in these images. This is the basis for the recommendation made earlier that judges be required to view pornographic materials that are the subject of charges against the accused.
When I speak of collections of child pornography images, they are true collections. They are organized into file folders by title, age and physical description — hundreds of thousands of images. In every collection, we find new images — images of children that we have never seen before but, heartbreakingly, we know we will start to see over and over again. It is estimated that worldwide there is over 1 million different images on the Internet and approximately 100,000 different children being abused at any one time.
The images are getting more violent and the children in the photos are getting younger. As recently as one year ago, we did not often see pictures with babies, where now it is normal to see babies in many collections that we find. There is even a highly sought-after series on the Internet of a newborn baby being violated. She still has her umbilical cord attached; she is that young.
I would like to close the formal part of my presentation with a quote from the reasons for sentence of Honourable Justice Stong in R v. Partridge in 2000.
The tears of that small child pleading to the camera for help while what can only be described as a degenerate human being inserts his erect penis into her mouth cannot go unheeded. Her crying and tears of desperation cannot be in vain. Child pornography is a plight on our communities, it affects all innocent people.
Any consideration of sentencing of child pornography must begin with an appreciation of the nature of the material at issue. I have brought with me today carefully crafted briefing packages that contain a spectrum of child pornography images — images of real children. Child pornography is the obvious abuse of a child; it is an image of a crime in progress; it is traumatic and it is devastating. The sexual abuse of a child never stops. Every time someone downloads an image, a permanent record of that victimization is created and that victimization will continue forever.
When I started in this position a year and a half ago, I had not personally seen an image of child pornography. I thought that I could picture it and comprehend what it was, but that was not a realistic assumption. An image of child sexual abuse is a paradigm. Our minds cannot comprehend what we are seeing. It is not unusual to seize a collection of over 10,000 images organized by the offender's preferences, as I previously said. I caution you that the images I brought today are graphic and can be very disturbing. I am pleased to make them available to any senators who would like to see them. These booklets are not submissions to the committee and, as stated on the cover, they are the property of the Ontario Provincial Police and are being provided for an educational purpose.
When I put these booklets together for our previous presentation, I put much thought into the images I would share. They range in spectrum from what we consider 1 out of 10 to what we consider 5 out of 10. If senators would like to see them, I will hand them out and you can have a quick look through them before I collect them again. It is obviously your choice not to view them.
Senator Ringuette: I understand that you support mandatory sentencing because of your experience dealing with such cases and their outcomes. In your experience with these cases where sentences have not included imprisonment, have the judges been male more often than female?
Ms. Howe: That has certainly not been my experience. The sex of the judge has played no part in it. It has been equal across the board.
Senator Ringuette: You do not believe that people who are otherwise law-abiding citizens of good families and do a lot of community work, et cetera, will not stop this activity.
Ms. Howe: That is correct. We are starting to encounter second- and third-time offenders who are carrying on as if they had never been charged in the first place. Undercover officers go into chat rooms of pedophiles on the Internet. There are different chat rooms on different topics, one being the best way to molest a child. They also discuss their opinion that our judicial system is a joke. They say that if you plead guilty you will get a conditional sentence and the court will not look at the pictures. They tell people not to worry about losing their pictures in their case because they can be sent back to them.
They receive conditional sentences of house arrest. One of the conditions is usually that they are not allowed to have a computer, but that is very difficult to enforce. We know that in some cases they are back at it the next day.
Senator Ringuette: I greatly admire those who work in law enforcement. It must be very discouraging to know that these people will continue this activity due to minimal sentences.
Senator Pearson: Thank you for your presentation. It is a wonderful opportunity to be able to speak with representatives of a unit like yours that has existed for such a long time. Many of us who have been deeply preoccupied by this issue want to see more research on who the offenders are and what kinds of factors lead them to this activity. If we could diminish the demand, we might be able to diminish the activity.
You have already spoken of addictions research. Do you know of any other research that is being done on who the offenders are and what draws them to this activity?
Ms. Howe: There have been some European studies, but they are fairly dated. We are very excited about the first Canadian study, about which I spoke earlier, because they will try to profile an offender, which we have been unable to do. We know that 99.5 per cent of these offenders are men. Other than being male, the only thing they have in common is a sexual interest in children. Our office has encountered doctors, lawyers, teachers, mechanics, police officers, judges and unemployed people. They range across the entire spectrum.
Some studies have indicated that the average offender is a white male aged 24 to 40 who lives a solitary, isolated lifestyle, which are general characteristics. This new study will analyze the risk factors and characteristics in every case in Ontario to see whether they can come up with a profile that we can use as a risk indicator. We see so many cases that we have to triage them somehow. If the suspect who is involved with children is a teacher or doctor or has a previous offence, we treat the case as a high priority. We are hoping that this study will bring to light more factors along those lines.
A study done in the United States was published only a couple of days ago. I can forward that to you.
Senator Pearson: Please do.
Ms. Howe: It looked specifically at recidivism among child pornography collectors and whether they will go on to commit a contact offence.
In additions, there is an unpublished study by the U.S. Postal Service which says that approximately 35 per cent of the offenders convicted of possessing child pornography have had a previous sexual contact offence. We believe those are under-reported statistics. Unfortunately, there is hardly any research on this area.
Senator Pearson: Although we have the problems of technology and other things, we can do something by increasing penalties. We must do something else as well to make it an unacceptable behaviour. We have to learn what makes people think they can do these kinds of things.
Ms. Howe: In the year and a half that I have been in this field, it has received much media attention. The National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre in Ottawa, the Microsoft project and the provincial government's announcement of funding for a provincial strategy have all raised media attention and at the same time have given us way more cases to deal with. Since people are more aware of what child pornography is, we are getting more and more calls.
Mr. Bevan: The frustration of law enforcement worldwide is not only that there is a market for this material but also our inability to successfully rescue the victims. Policing worldwide has been able to rescue less than 1 per cent of the victims of child pornography.
We have adopted a whole new focus to improve our track record in this regard. The new tools developed in conjunction with Microsoft will help us to accomplish that, but our main objective is to find these young victims, wherever in the world they may be, who are being subjected to unspeakable abuses.
Law enforcement needs to concentrate on reducing the market for these images. Bill C-2 is a step toward doing just that. I am hoping that given the comments of Senator Pearson, we are now on the path to making this behaviour unacceptable.
The Chairman: Are the parents involved? Are they the guilty parties?
Mr. Bevan: They are in some cases. The Toronto Police Service was recently involved in a case where the perpetrator turned out to be the biological father of a six-year-old girl who was being molested in North Carolina. As I understand it, that person is now facing a term of 30 years in custody as a result of what he has done to his own daughter. The investigation of this case revealed that this person spent most of his days at home with his computer. He was well trained in using a computer, which allowed him to hide his identity at a very low level on the Internet, and he shared images of his daughter across the world with other like-minded individuals.
Senator Joyal: I recently read a report suggesting that police officers who work in the field of child pornography eventually have to stop to undergo psychological therapy because of the perturbation a person submitted to that kind of job suffers from after awhile. I can imagine if you spend eight hours a day looking at child pornography, at some point in time you could become quite troubled. The officers have to take time off to undergo psychological treatment before continuing to perform that kind of duty.
Can you talk to us about that issue? It is not directly related to these amendments, but it is part of the reality of what we are dealing with.
Ms. Howe: When someone applies to work on our unit at the OPP, they must undergo psychological testing to determine their suitability for this type of work. As the manager of the section, I would receive a yes or no, and then they would continue on to the next phase of their application.
They also undergo an operational briefing with me and a senior member in the section so that there is no doubt as to what they will be doing. The officers in the section often spend a good part of their day categorizing pornography into one of six categories, such as child nudity, child pornography, adult obscenity, et cetera. It is all linked together, and they will spend hours going through images like that. Without a doubt, it does bother you.
Members of our section start off with psychological counselling to determine if they are suitable. They are on a three-month secondment in the section to determine if they can handle the material. The reality is that some people just cannot do it. I personally do not know if I could work as an investigator in the section. I probably see about 20 or 30 per cent of what they would see in a day. It is incredibly emotional work.
After a three-month secondment, the officer will advise us whether they would like to stay on. They go back to the psychiatrist for another evaluation. If he determines they are still suitable, they are accepted into the unit on a full-time basis. Every six months after that, they have mandatory counselling with the psychiatrist. Obviously if they would like to speak to the psychiatrist at any time, they can do that. He comes to the office quarterly to present health and welfare sessions, talking about stress indicators.
Certain life events are stressful, such as getting married, having a baby or getting a divorce. These are common stressors that would bother any of us in our jobs, but they can often have an even more significant impact on our officers. We have a system in place to deal with those stresses. One of my major roles is to get to know the members really well and to look for anomalies in their behaviour.
Mr. Bevan: Like any other human being, a typical investigator finds this material so abhorrent that it is difficult to process. We have to give our investigators certain tasks and skills so that when they deal with this material, they are processing it as investigators should.
They try to put out of their minds the central image in the photograph, and they look through the rest of the photograph to find evidence to determine where the abuse is happening and to find any links with other images. This will ultimately help us accomplish our goals: to identify and rescue the victims, and to apprehend the perpetrators and bring them to justice.
By engaging the officer to gather evidence contained elsewhere in the photograph, we are giving them some motivation to continue to look at each one to process it as an investigator should and not be overwhelmed by the basic human reaction that one typically experiences when reviewing such images.
Senator Joyal: You have confirmed what I read in the report, and I think it is important to understand this point. I remember well the example in the report that officers were able to identify the origin of the victim and perpetrator because there was special upholstering on the corner of a bench. By widening that aspect of the photograph, they were able to identify the hotel chain by the type of fabric they use on their furniture, and they were then able to trace the origin of the photograph.
On the subject of the bill, you stated that in your experience sentencing is too light in comparison with the crime that we want to prevent and condemn. Do you have any statistics of court decisions over a period of time whereby conditional or suspended sentences have been imposed? In your opinion, such penalties are insufficient deterrents to perpetrators of child pornography. Can you provide this committee with some cold, hard facts about your assertion that the current sentencing is too light for what we want to achieve?
I would like to see statistics over a period of, say, five years to indicate how many cases have been prosecuted in Canada and how many conditional and suspended sentences have been imposed. Ms. Morency mentioned yesterday that this bill was studied in the other place and that there were references to figures. I do not know if they were precise, but do you have those figures?
Mr. Bevan: I do not have them with me. To my knowledge, there has been no comprehensive study done by Statistics Canada, but we will endeavour to provide this committee with whatever statistics are available. All we can provide you with now are the specific examples we have discussed about cases where charges have been laid and how they have been dealt with by the courts.
Senator Joyal: I agree. Certainly, I can recall such cases. However, you have to legislate when it is necessary not only on the perception of one case that might repulse you but also according to the statistical facts. If, in your position, you came to realize that the trend of the courts in respect of the Criminal Code was not cognizant of the seriousness of the problems that you face, would you have an opportunity to express your views before the Canadian Judicial Council? If so, you would not have to absorb the frustration of waiting for Parliament to introduce legislation that would reflect your concerns. Are you able to express your views before the court such that those responsible for the training of judges could be brought back? You have a better understanding of the phenomenon that you want to address. Something needs to be done within the system, and perhaps you could share your views with us.
Mr. Bevan: Senator Joyal, you have struck on an issue that has caused more than just a little frustration within our association and within policing in general. I would like to begin by asking Mr. Westwick to speak to the issue. On the issue of training, I would invite Detective Inspector Howe to respond. Some progress is being made.
Mr. Westwick: Senator, you raise an important issue in terms of the police relationship with the judiciary across Canada. A committee of the federal-provincial-territorial ministers dealing with justice reforms is currently underway. Many of those reforms directly affect policing disclosure and other issues we have had discussions about with this committee. At this time, the steering committee has not included the police or any national associations in their deliberations. We find this extremely frustrating. Although we understand and are respectful of the role of judges, it is difficult for us to see ourselves as part of the system and being excluded from that system when meaningful discussions are taking place.
The point we make is that every issue that becomes a problem for the judiciary in a trial begins as a criminal investigation in the police world. It seems to us that the courthouse door is not necessarily the best place to start making reforms, but that reform should expand outward from the court. This week I had useful and informative discussions with the minister's office. We are hopeful that this direction may change.
It is difficult for us to say that we would like to engage in meaningful discussions with judges on matters of substantive content when we have not reached the point of discussing matters of process with them. I suspect that the judiciary would be more concerned with talking about matters of substantive content as opposed to matters of process. We are working toward that goal. I would be pleased to report back to the committee when we have had some success in that area and are optimistic that processes can be put in place to allow this to move forward.
Senator Joyal: Madam Chair, we might want to make observations on this issue later.
Another point I would like to raise deals with the risk factor. My understanding of your description is that a person convicted of deviant behaviour would be sentenced to one year. At page 7 of the bill, clause 7(2) reads:
Paragraphs 163.1(2)(a) and (b) of the Act are replaced by the following:
(a) An indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of one year; or
(b) An offence punishable on summary conviction and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding eighteen months and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of ninety days.
This clause and the Charter implications were raised yesterday with the minister.
Let us begin with the principle that the minimum sentence is constitutional. I hear you talk about the risk factor and so I will draw a parallel. Having declared someone a user of hard drugs, you say that the person should go to prison for 90 days. You have punished the person but you have not eliminated the risk. Inadvertently, you might have caused additional frustration for the person that could cause the person to become a greater risk upon release from prison.
The minimum sentence must be coupled with treatment, whether for drug use or because of mental deficiencies. You can put the person in prison, but that does not change the cause of the problem. If someone is obsessed for whatever reason, it does not go away in response to imprisonment. I am not satisfied that support of this bill will resolve the issue — on the contrary. If the minimum sentence is not coupled with treatment prescribed by the court, the person remains a risk to society. The minimum sentence might protect the child for 90 days, but after 90 days, the ``gate is open and the horse can run.''
We must avoid taking too simplistic a view on a resolution to this issue. I understand from your description of the phenomenon that such individuals cross the professions and families. Most children are found to be at risk from their immediate family and neighbours. We have seen the statistics on children who have been abused. How can we be certain that in supporting this bill we are not opting for the easiest solution with the requirement to serve a minimum of 90 days?
Mr. Bevan: When we first came before the Justice Committee on this issue, we tried to make the point that it is important for the courts to take these matters seriously. Our submission in reference to encouraging both the prosecutors for the Crown and the judges to view this material was the most important point we tried to make.
We recognize that in court proceedings where plea bargains occur and any others for minimum sentence, the tendency is for the defence on behalf of the accused to try to manoeuvre so that the accused would avoid facing that penalty. There would be other plea bargains. That is important to us because we need to get back to the central issue that brings the person to court. The minimum sentences were added to the bill to try to make the judicial system take note of the issues that brought the person to court in the first place.
In respect of mandatory treatment, we deal with this issue on a regular basis with other sexual offenders who are brought into the penitentiary system. A number of treatment programs are offered by Corrections Canada while a person is incarcerated for an offence. The treatments currently available also deal with this kind of deviant behaviour.
There are treatments in place through Corrections Canada. The court can certainly order that the accused person participate in these programs while in custody. In reality, it is always a personal choice. An accused person can be successful in that treatment, or they can choose to be unsuccessful in that treatment. In that case, the people released at warrant expiry, having served every day of their sentence, quite often are those who have been exposed to the treatment program but have chosen not to participate. Those are the most difficult offenders to manage once their sentence has come to a conclusion.
We have a good deal of experience on the streets of this community and communities across the country every day dealing with that type of offender. It is not limited to those who would consume child pornography.
Senator Joyal: Should we not add that a person who goes into prison should be, by decision of the court, considered for special treatment? Should we look into section 810 of the Code — I do not want to mention the famous case we heard two weeks ago — where the person has a certain number of conditions attached to his or her release?
I have listened to the stories and the oral material you have delivered today. We should take all means legally and constitutionally at our disposal to address this phenomenon so that it can be effectively reduced, if not eliminated. Child pornography is spreading so quickly via the Internet. We have not yet adjusted the means we have at our disposal to constrain its manifestation.
Perhaps I am ill-informed, but I am not sure we are making our best effort. I am not against what is in the bill in principle, but I am not sure it is everything we can do.
Mr. Westwick: We very much welcome the debate. The points you have raised are valuable, not just in this area, but in many other areas where treatment is so important, such as drugs and other kinds of sexual offences and criminal behaviour.
Sentencing is a very blunt tool. It is not a specific tool. It is not surgically precise. While I would love to engage in a broader discussion with you about some of the principles, I think it is difficult philosophically and conceptually to fashion treatment under sentencing, and particularly of a mandatory nature.
Senator Pearson will remember debates we had about the Young Offenders Act and the Youth Criminal Justice Act where the issue of mandatory treatment was so controversial for young offenders. Huge Charter issues must be dealt with. It is a very difficult issue. We would certainly support further research in this area as well as further public debate. It is an important issue.
From a law enforcement perspective regarding sentencing, we are trying to bring to the courts' attention in a meaningful way the severity of these offences that on the surface are otherwise less serious offences, such as mere possession of child pornography. These offences have a serious consequence; that is, they create the market which creates the abuse, and so on. We are looking to general deterrents and, to whatever extent possible, the specific deterrent associated with sentencing as it stands.
A meaningful discussion of a cure is a much broader discussion. The police community and the CACP in particular would welcome the opportunity to join with you in a discussion of that nature.
Senator Joyal: Knowing the situation as you do, is it your opinion that there are not enough professional studies to understand the issues? This phenomenon has been bursting since the spread of the Internet all over the planet. Perhaps the justice system, including lawyers and all of those involved in the implementation of the Criminal Code, do not have all the tools they need on a professional basis to understand the situation and to take the appropriate measures, which are multifaceted. There is no one single way of addressing this problem. Priority should be given in this milieu to supporting a better understanding.
The question was put to you about the normal profile and essential characteristics of the person and what we should be looking for so we are more effective in our approach to solving the problem.
Mr. Westwick: It is very difficult to come before you and say as a law enforcement community that we do not have the statistics or research, academic or otherwise, to evidence that.
I note that a five-year review of this bill was introduced in the Commons. Perhaps the way to look at it is we will be together five years from now discussing these same points. It would be wonderful if the professional studies you have described and that Senator Pearson spoke about were available between now a review of this bill. I would invite the committee to make that recommendation. The CACP would be more than willing to partner with government or the academic sector to pursue that research so that it is available for the kind of discussion you and your colleagues have raised with us. My hope is that those who move that process forward would listen to a recommendation from you and your colleagues.
Mr. Bevan: There have been studies on other paraphilia. Dr. Peter Collins has given evidence before the Justice Committee. He is a recognized expert with many years of experience dealing with a variety of aspects of sexual deviants.
Having worked in and around this area for a number of years, I have some experience in seeing this kind of material and in dealing with investigations surrounding it. In fact, the Ottawa Police Service has been in the business of dealing with Internet-based sexual exploitation of children since 1998.
At a recent executive committee meeting we were debating whether we needed to expand the number of members assigned to do this work. We brought in the sergeant in charge of the unit to do a demonstration. She signed into a chat room as we were talking. She purported to be a child at school using the Internet and was almost immediately approached by an individual trying to lure her. Within 12 minutes she was sent copies of child pornography.
The prevalence is incredible. With the proliferation of the Internet, we need to conduct studies not only on the nature of this kind of offence but to the extent it goes on in our society. Our children are exposed to this 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There are very few homes in this city where children do not have access to the Internet.
Studies show that 70 per cent of the nation's population have direct access to the Internet. That access is not limited to evenings or weekends. They are subjected to stalking or luring by predators on the Internet 24 hours a day.
Senator Joyal: When I was a child, you had to watch television from 5:00 to 7:00 and then you were out for the rest of the evening. If you wanted to buy a certain type of magazine, you had to go to the store and the cashier would not sell it to you. There are now no barriers. As you said, any child has access to Internet. That is the first thing they learn in school. When they are in Grade 6, they already know how to use a computer. The situation is so different from when I was growing up.
As I said yesterday to Ms. Morency from the Department of Justice Canada, it is a new world. I am so concerned that our tools have not adapted to what we are trying to fight. We are deluded if we think we are doing something.
Mr. Westwick: I cannot miss the opportunity to put in a plug, if I may. We know that the government is planning to introduce legislation in the near future on what is broadly called lawful access. That term refers to the ability to conduct intercepts. That is the updated version of what we used to refer to as the wiretap provisions of the Criminal Code. This will be difficult and controversial legislation. I said the same thing to the Commons committee.
When this legislation is being considered, I hope that we will be able to harken back to the discussions that have occurred in the context of Bill C-2. The concepts we are discussing today are important not only to this legislation but also in the context of investigating motorbike gangs, terrorism and the like.
When we talk about the tools that law enforcement needs in order to be effective and surgical in conducting these investigations, there is a huge need to update the Criminal Code.
Senator Ringuette: When Senator Joyal was talking about mandatory treatment, which is not in this bill, I could not help but think of mandatory seminars for people who have been found guilty of drunk driving. Some people I know have told me that the seminar shows them horrific experiences and it is like shock treatment.
Mothers Against Drunk Driving have managed to put forth an effective marketing strategy so that people are well- informed of the dangers to others and the consequences of driving under the influence. Maybe we should foster a similar group of mothers to act on this subject.
I realize that this legislation represents an improvement. Hopefully more improvement will be seen with the review in five years. Given the expansion of the Internet, the increase in volume and targeting in chat rooms, I wonder if a review in five years will be sufficient. Perhaps we should be reviewing this bill in two years so that a study can be brought forward. Perhaps a group of mothers can form a highly supported lobby group against child pornography.
Mr. Bevan: The strategy being executed by MADD is similar to the john school. It is similar to a strategy to deal with domestic violence, where peer pressure is the tool used to try to change certain behaviour.
The offences we are discussing today are committed on the Internet. They are committed in private and are meant to be kept hidden from everyone else. Once people walk out of that room, no one else will see what they have been up to. The peer pressure that can be brought to bear is limited.
There are things that I think can be done in the future. With changes in technology on almost a daily basis, the opportunities that these predators will have to be more intrusive into the lives of children will change dramatically between now and five years from now. I take your point.
[Translation]
Senator Rivest: You say that police forces need to track down the criminals, but your primary concern lies with the children and their protection. You have indicated that barely 1 per cent of children have managed to get out of these situations. Is that an international statistic?
Mr. Bevan: Yes.
Senator Rivest: That is a tiny percentage, but this is a world-wide phenomenon because of the Internet. So it is difficult for a police officer in Ottawa to identify a child in a photo as being Canadian. The child could be from anywhere.
The police can be relatively more effective in controlling Internet chat rooms where there are predators, because they are more local. However, videos, which are obviously produced internationally, are more difficult to control.
As has been the case for other scourges that the world has had to deal with, is there no other real solution than concerted action at the international level? There have already been conferences and concerns expressed by governments. I suppose that there are meetings and coordination at the international level. Certain countries have been identified. Obviously, human nature is the same everywhere. There are sexual predators of all races and in all countries. That said, certain regions of the world have been identified repeatedly in connection with this problem. Where illegal drugs are concerned, Columbia comes to mind, and for child pornography, Eastern countries and certain Asian countries are often mentioned.
Are you able to tell us that serious efforts are being made in those regions to reduce — because it will never be possible to eliminate this evil — the rate at which child pornography is produced?
Mr. Bevan: That question is difficult to answer. Concerning your point about international coordination, a Canadian centre recently set up in Ottawa is working closely with Interpol, which is the world police cooperation centre and involves members of the international police community.
Their aim is to identify the regions and people responsible in those regions for producing child pornography images, videos and other materials.
For example, there was a very recent investigation undertaken in Canada that started in Toronto and Ottawa. The suspects and victims were in Spain. The International community and the Interpol investigators were able to identify those responsible.
Nine people were arrested and more then 13 victims were freed thanks to international cooperation by police forces in investigations involving the Internet. The international aspect raises thorny issues. Certainly, G8 members are involved in an international process, but other countries may be involved as well.
[English]
Senator Mercer: First, thank you for coming, and thank you for the work that you do.
To carry on the discussion about the five-year review, I am not convinced that five years will work. I am not sure that two years or six months will work. We do not know what technology will be on sale tomorrow at Future Shop that will change our lives again. I think that there is probably some need for an ongoing review. It is a struggle for us from this side to provide a method of doing it, but I think we should all consider that.
Given the minimum sentencing provisions of this bill, is there not a fear that we may now have more acquittals than convictions? Faced with minimum sentences for guilty verdicts, will those judges who have been prone to not impose stiff sentences in the past now find ways of not find some people guilty, thus moving in the opposite direction than that proposed by Bill C-2?
Mr. Westwick: Senator, a discussion of mandatory minimum sentencing is difficult, no doubt about it. Historically, when police have come before parliamentary committees, it was their primary submission. Whatever the issue was, we were always asking for longer and mandatory sentences.
To be frank, I do not know the answer to your question. It will be very interesting to watch the Canadian courts, not just in terms of the judiciary and how they respond, but how Crown attorneys, defence lawyers and the accused themselves respond and how the dynamic plays out. While I would not want to endorse the bill on the basis of creating a laboratory merely to study mandatory minimum sentences, it will give law enforcement, legislators and academics an opportunity to look at the very important and difficult questions that you have raised.
I do not have a great deal of difficulty with the mandatory minimum sentences that are found in this bill, although I am not a supporter, in general, of mandatory minimum sentences. The police community is divided on this issue. I believe the sentences here are short enough in terms of 14 days or the 45 days. We are not talking about two- or three- year stretches in a penitentiary. These mandatory minimums are short enough that I hope they will not distort the process but rather will allow it to unfold. They will send the serious message of denunciation that needs to be sent, both as a general deterrent and on a specific basis, to the individual before the court.
Mr. Bevan: If the minimums prompt more trials to be held, the consequence would largely be more awareness in the community. As a result, we would see a greater condemnation than we do currently in society. If judges were less inclined to accept guilty pleas and to run trials because, as you say, perhaps there would be some reluctance to issue the minimum sentence, there may as well flow from that a greater awareness across the community and perhaps even a greater condemnation than we see at present.
Senator Mercer: Mr. Westwick talked about this bill not being meant to create a laboratory for a study. In the context of how we do things in this country from the legislative, policing and academic sides, I am nervous that no one will do the study. No one will be monitoring or reporting. As we said earlier, the five-year review may be much too long for us to be able to respond to changes. I would feel more comfortable if someone out there were doing the review and monitoring the process, and also monitoring the reaction of the judiciary.
Mr. Westwick: All I can do is repeat our earlier submission. We think a huge opportunity exists for the Senate to make a strong and meaningful recommendation about research addressed at several issues, but this issue in particular. My sense is, given the strong feelings for and against a mandatory minimum sentence generally, that it might find favour with the government in terms of answering some of the questions once and for all. We would then all be in a better position to make informed decisions about mandatory minimums.
Mr. Bevan: Certainly we have found that this issue is a problem elsewhere. There was comment by one of your colleagues earlier about long-term supervision orders and how effective they are at monitoring someone's behaviour after they have been released. We have been trying to get information out of the Centre for Justice Statistics in Canada, a branch of Statistics Canada, and we have found that that particular phenomenon has been under-studied. I would dare say that it has not been well studied or well approached in Canada.
On the bright side, now that a national centre has been established to track all cases in Canada, within a very short time, certainly a two-year time frame, and I have no doubt within a five-year time frame, we will be in a better position. We are now collecting those statistics. Based on those experiences, we will be doing an analysis into the future. The next time we come back before the committee, we will have better research to present to you.
Senator Pearson: I want to go to another section of the bill for a moment. They are all interrelated, but I am interested in the new crimes regarding voyeurism. Will they help you?
Ms. Howe: Our section personally has not had an opportunity to deal with voyeuristic offences. I can give you examples that highlight what we are looking for in the bill.
A young junior high school girl was on her way to gym class and was changing in the change room. She was 13 years old and fit the definition of a child under the Criminal Code of Canada. Unfortunately, she was isolated by her peers. She had been made fun of, was overweight, self-conscious and had low self-esteem, all those awful societal things. One of the other girls in the class surreptitiously took a picture of this girl changing, which obviously fits the definition of a voyeuristic offence. Before you could snap your fingers, this picture was sent around the school. Even speaking to the societal implications of how that continued to affect this girl's self-esteem, it takes us into the offence. To have measures in place to deal with that scenario would help us. In addition, a national sex offender registry and DNA tools would be beneficial. I hasten to add that this is not my area of expertise because we have not dealt with it very often.
Mr. Bevan: Across Canada, we have experienced the consequences of the proliferation of cameras, especially cell phone cameras. I am directly familiar with investigations where pedophiles have mounted cameras on their shoes and visited shopping malls in order to take pictures up someone's skirt. Cameras have been placed in washrooms to capture these kinds of images.
The voyeurism problem is not something new. It has been uncovered in a number of high profile cases. Paul Bernardo, for instance, took images of unsuspecting women and girls for his own sexual purpose. There are other offenders who may not be of that particular order but are actually engaged in capturing these images and then posting them on the Internet. This section of the bill will help deal with individuals who are actively engaged in collecting those images at present.
Mr. Westwick: Many people perceive voyeurism as a mere sophomoric prank, something that is fun. The fact that it has been raised to the level of a criminal offence sends out a strong message so that parents and educators can reinforce the condemnation of this activity before it becomes part of a criminal pattern.
Senator Pearson: Are minimum sentences involved with voyeurism?
Mr. Westwick: No.
Senator Pearson: That leads me to the question of prevention. I remember a bill that began to deal with sexual abuse. That was 25 years ago. I was talking to a specialist from the United States who said that a large number of sexual offences are committed by adolescents. He said that we should be putting an emphasis on working with adolescents because a sexual inclination can be shifted while they are in adolescence. It is much more difficult to do when they are older.
We need to work very hard on education programs associated with this problem, and this leads us into a very difficult area. I know that police are changing their educational programs and the way they interact with schools. It might be difficult to get the required permission from the school board, but it is important that young people learn very early on in life that this is a totally unacceptable way of behaving and that young children cannot be made objects in this way.
Mr. Bevan: Through the efforts of our school resource officers, I am familiar with instances where they have had to deal with those situations. I can also speak from personal experience. My wife is the principal of a very large elementary school. In discussions that I have had, this is something that is on the minds of educators. It is very parallel to things that we must do to identify troubled youth. We must also provide educators and school administrators with the tools they need to identify the behaviours that are precursors to the problems you talk about. That is a challenge that will face us in the future.
Senator Pearson: It ties in with the research that will be done on leading indicators.
Ms. Howe: From our perspective, education is a huge part of the child pornography issue. We need to educate judges, parents, police officers and everyone we possibly can, particularly parents, about the dangers of voyeurism. There is not a kid on the street who does not have a cell phone. Eighty per cent have picture capability and 80 per cent of the children use them for that capability alone.
In another case, 14-year-old kids outside of Hamilton had a sex club. They did not date each other in school, but after school they would go home with their web cams and masturbate with each other. That was how they dated. The reason we got involved was because we found out about it. At that point, there is no offence. The age of consent is 14. One member of the group was copying the images through a web cam and sending them out over the Internet, which gives rise to the distribution part of the voyeurism offence.
Mr. Westwick: I want to raise an ugly topic, which is the issue of costs. One of the difficulties associated with policing, particularly at the municipal level where much of this work has to be done, is all of these programs have huge cost implications for police. The prevention programs that Chief Bevan is talking about and that I know exist in the Ottawa Police and in many other municipal departments are very expensive. Many investigative law enforcement tools are now available. There are lots of opportunities to investigate this kind of crime, but it is not like it used to be. When Senator Joyal talked earlier about buying magazines in a store, it was a fairly simple kind of investigation to conduct. The investigative work that is required now involves very expensive equipment, huge commitments to training officers to operate this equipment, and the paper wars that are so often the case in these investigations.
I cannot miss the opportunity to bring to your attention the fact that it can be a difficult conversation when municipal chiefs are called upon to appear before their councils and police services boards. That exercise goes on across the country throughout the latter part of the year. The huge cost implications for these kinds of programs is a very important message.
The Chairman: Thank you for your presentation and the answers you have provided.
[Translation]
We have been faced with harsh reality today. If you have other documents that would be helpful to us, I would invite you to send them to the committee. As you can see, we have taken the time to listen to your testimony and ask you questions.
We have more leeway than the House of Commons, there are fewer people and we do not have that partisan approach that can interfere somewhat. Everyone wants to improve things, and Bill C-2 gives us the impression of being a step in the right direction. But we are aware that there is still much to do in this area.
[English]
Senator Pearson: I will not say that I would like to see the materials, but the opportunity to see the materials.
The Chairman: Before you arrived, Senator Pearson, senators who were here said no, thank you. However, if you want to see the materials, it is a personal decision, not a group decision.
The committee adjourned.