NATIONAL POST
Words get in way of saving children
Adrian Humphreys
National Post, with files from Allison
Hanes, National Post
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
With a proliferation of horrific allegations in the headlines,
Canadians can be forgiven for thinking that child molesters are everywhere. But what is the actual prevalence of the problem,
and how should we be dealing with it? In this, the final instalment of a four-part series, the National Post looks at what
the law-and-order approach prescribes and how the current system could be fixed.
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Changing a single word
in a seven year-old piece of legislation -- that was designed to support and promote electronic commerce in Canada -- could
help save children from horrific sexual abuse, police officers and child protection advocates say.
It suggests that
not all solutions to the problem of child sexual exploitation need to be buoyed by millions in capital infusion, backed by
sweeping new laws, clouded by medical debate on effectiveness or spark public controversy over whether being soft or hard
on pedophiles best helps curb their urges.
Experts who investigate pedophiles and work to help their child victims
say that much more can be done in the realm of law and order to reduce the impact of the sexual predators among us. One of
their targets is changing a three-letter word: "may."
Simply swapping the word "may" to "shall" in Section 7, Subsection
2 of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) would be an easy step towards helping police
intercept child molesters and pornographers, child advocates say.
The distinction may seem irrelevant to non-lawyers,
but in the backrooms of some of Canada's Internet service providers and in the squad rooms of police forces across Canada
there is a world of difference.
"The problem is, these cases move at the speed of light. Files are sent around the
world, copied, downloaded and erased in seconds --by the time you get a search warrant it can be too late," said Paul Gillespie,
who recently retired as the pioneering head of the Toronto police's Child Exploitation Section.
The existing guidelines on electronic documents state: "an organization may disclose personal information without the
knowledge or consent of the individual," under certain circumstances, one of which is to police "carrying out an investigation
relating to the enforcement of any such law or gathering intelligence for the purpose of enforcing any such law."
Police
have found that when they have evidence of someone trading in child pornography over the Internet and they want to know where
the activity is coming from, not all Internet service providers are forthcoming.
When some providers read the regulations,
they see the disclosure of the customer's name and address as an option, not an obligation, and tell officers to come back
when they have a court-authorized warrant.
Changing the rules from allowing ISPs to give a customer's name and address
to police to requiring them to provide it would help, say police.
Staff Sergeant Rick Greenwood, manager of the RCMP's
National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre, understands there are privacy concerns.
"All we care about is the
starting point. We're after the customer's name and address," he said. The ISPs are not being asked to turn over billing records
or credit card information; they are not giving police access to email in-boxes or Internet histories.
He likens it
to a licence plate on a car.
"If you jump in your car and race off along a highway and hit a child, there is something
we can do to investigate it. Someone can get a licence plate number or a description of the car," said Staff-Sgt. Greenwood.
"The
same should be true for the Internet. If you jump onto the information freeway, you need to be accountable. "
Police
would still need to get court authorization for any invasive investigation, such as reading email or tracking Internet activity,
officers say.
However, red tape, a lack of resources, and poor enforcement of existing laws all help child abusers
escape detection, or at least successful prosecution, activists say.
While Canada has laws allowing for the prosecution of Canadian citizens in Canada for child sex crimes committed abroad
-- so-called child sex tourism -- they are rarely used by prosecutors.
"We have known for many years that Canadian
pedophiles essentially operate with impunity in sexually exploiting children in developing countries," said
Benjamin Perrin, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law.
Prof.
Perrin said only one Canadian has been convicted under the child sex tourism laws (Donald Bakker, from Vancouver, who pleaded
guilty in 2005) and charges are pending against a second man (Kenneth Robert Klassen, from Burnaby, B.C., who was charged
this year for alleged sex crimes in Cambodia, Colombia and the Philippines.) Other countries, such as Australia and the United
States, have been far more aggressive in such prosecutions, he said.
"The RCMP needs additional resources to station
liaison officers in child sex tourism hot-spots to enforce our laws and protect children," said Prof. Perrin. To assist him,
he launched a Web site called
www.youwillbecaught.com <
http://www.youwillbecaught.com/> where members of the public can report tips on suspected child sex tourists.
Others suggest patching Canada's
sex offender registries into the airlines' "no fly" lists, designed to watch for terrorists, to alert investigators when a
known child molester is on the move.
It is not only overseas where sexual predators can travel without detection, however.
"In
Canada we don't put any effort into monitoring the movement of our sex offenders," said Mr. Gillespie. "A sex offender on
the Ontario sex offender registry can effectively get off of it by simply moving to another province."
He decries the fact that Canada's national sex offender registry is considered so secret that a municipal police officer
cannot access it. A Toronto police officer investigating a suspect has to contact the Ontario Provincial Police who must then
contact the RCMP to see if a name appears.
The registry is not linked to CPIC, the central police computer that officers
check when investigating an incident. A rampant child molester could be stopped by police for speeding and found with a carload
of children and yet a police check by the officer would not reveal his status as a registered child molester, Mr. Gillespie
said.
Tim Danson, a Toronto lawyer who has represented the families of the victims of some of Canada's worst sex offenders,
calls for a dangerous sexual predator law that would give authorities the power to pluck high-risk offenders off the street
at any time and detain them until they are no longer a threat.
Such a move would allow the system more leeway when
dealing with less aggressive pedophiles, he said.
"If the public knew that the real dangerous sexual predators were
being locked up there would be far greater tolerance for legitimate treatment programs for sex offenders who might be amenable
to treatment," he said.
Advocates also call on judges to hand out tougher sentences in those few cases that do end
in a successful prosecution.
A case involving a father in St Thomas, Ont., who molested his toddler daughter and allowed
others to watch online through an Internet link, goes for sentencing in December.
In that case, the prosecutor wants
the judge to look at the images of child abuse found on the man's computer. The father's lawyer is objecting.
Both
lawyers likely feel that a stiffer sentence may result from a judge.
"The courts are not meting out sentences that
reflect the public's disgust with these crimes," said Mr. Gillespie.
"It is not unusual for judges in these cases to
specifically not want to look at the images because they don't want to be so disturbed, they want to be able to sleep at night.
"But these pictures of child pornography are crime scene photographs. As horrible as they are, they need to be put forth
in court in all of their demeaning colour and sick detail. Judges should be too disgusted -- and their sentences should then
reflect that disgust."
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