BILL C-15A: Bill C-15A became law
in July 2002. It deals specifically with child pornography
and exploitation on the internet and specifically
banned cyber-luring, using the internet to communicate
with children for sex. (see government
release)
BILL C-20: The current law carries
harsh penalties, but is open to broad interpretation
by courts (as an example, see Sharpe case below).
To deal with this, the government has drafted new
legislation to amend the current law. (see
copy of draft Bill C-20)
THE SHARPE CASE
The case of John Robin Sharpe highlights how Canada’s
child pornography laws can be intrepreted.
In 1995 John Robin
Sharpe was arrested and charged with two counts
of possession of child pornography and two counts
of distributing child pornography. He had pictures
of boys under the age of 14 engaged in sex and a
collection of his own stories titled 'Kiddie Kink
Classics." He fought the charges claiming that
the stories and images had 'artistic merit'.
The case was heard by the Supreme Court of Canada
in January 2000. Three of the judges were in favour
of retaining the 1993 law and four appeared to be
a favour of striking down some or all of the legislation.
After a lengthy debate most of the law was upheld
and the case was sent back to British Columbia courts
for retrial.
In March 2002, the B.C. court
found Sharpe not guilty of possessing written child
pornography. He was found guilty on two counts of
possessing pornographic pictures of children and
later sentenced to four months of house arrest.
Justice Duncan Shaw found Sharpe's
stories did not advocate committing a sexual crime
and had artistic merit, "irrespective of whether
the work is considered pornographic."
ENFORCING THE
LAW
In the three years that the Toronto Child Exploitation
unit has been tracking child pornography they've
made 27 arrests and seized 84 computers with millions
of images.
But the police have been frustrated in their attempts
to get jail time for these offenders. Most get conditional
sentences or house arrest.
The police frequently spend more
time investigating the cases than offenders will spend
in jail. That's what one detective constable in the
Toronto Child Exploitation unit believes will happen
with her case.
"Based on the volume and that he's been involved
in this business for 30 years we're going to be lucky,
very lucky if we see six months," says detective
constable Sue Burke.
"This shouldn't be happening
to children. And it does. It happens every day,
all over the world, thousands of times a day. And,
there doesn't seem to be the political will to do
anything about it," says another member of
the unit, Ian Lamond.
In 1999 Vancouver detective Noreen Water found 64,000
pornographic images in the home of a convicted paedophile,
Tony Marr. She spent a year preparing her case.
She hoped that he would get jail time.
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Instead he received a conditional
sentence and probation. One of the conditions of
his probation was that he avoid the Internet and
computers except for medical purposes or work. But
a recent surveillance video shows him apparently
working around a computer and exchanging CD's.
TOO MANY OFFENDERS TO ARREST
The Landslide investigation alone (see
more) gave the Toronto Child Exploitation unit
more than 241 names. This unit is one of the few
police units in Canada that actually investigates
child porn on the internet.
Of the 2329 Canadian leads in the Landslide database,
almost 2000 have never been looked at by the police.
That's because most communities simply don't have
the will or the resources or the officers who are
trained to do the job.
"There is an awful lot of them.
That's the worst part, we worked really hard in
Toronto to try and address this issue and the harder
we work it just feels like we're scraping the tip
of the iceberg," says Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie.
Police say stricter laws with better enforcement
would make their job easier. They want sentences
for child pornography to have a minimum mandatory
jail time. They would also like to collect DNA for
a national databank of child sex offenders and raise
the age of sexual consent from 14 to 16.
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