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THE fifth estate: Landslide
porn laws on the internet > Printer Version
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November 5th, 2003
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.
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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.
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"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.
the
fifth estate: Landslide
child porn on the internet -
porn laws in Canada - child
porn and sexual abuse
the landslide case - profile
of a pornographer - resources
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