The Winnipeg-based Canadian Centre for Child Protection will receive $2 million in funding from the federal government to help investigate and prevent the online exploitation of children, officials announced Tuesday.

The new funding will help the centre, which owns and operates the Cybertip.ca reporting website, to handle more leads from the public about suspected child exploitation, develop educational material and raise public awareness of the problem.

Centre director Lianna McDonald said need for a one-stop shop for battling online child exploitation has never been greater.

"As the sexual exploitation of children is something that increases in this country, we have struggled to combat child sexual abuse and the ways in which such horrific crimes against children are now permanently recorded on the internet," she said from Ottawa.

McDonald illustrated the severity of the problem with the case of one girl, aged between six and eight years old, whose sexual abuse was photographed.
 
"This one horrific picture, which showed her being sexually abused, propagated almost 800,000 times in an 18-month period," she said.

The centre's online and telephone tiplines have received more than 20,000 reports of suspected child pornography, online luring, prostitution involving children, or so-called sex tourism involving children.

As of January 2008, reports to the tipline had resulted in 30 arrests and the removal of nearly 2,800 websites from the internet.