November 10, 2010
Government of Canada takes action to protect children from sexual predators
“Sexual exploitation of children causes irreparable harm to the youngest and most vulnerable members of our society,” said Warawa. “Our Government is committed to helping prevent sexual offences against children by ensuring that adult sexual predators receive sentences which reflect the extreme seriousness of their crimes.”
The proposed legislation would establish mandatory prison sentences for seven existing Criminal Code offences such as luring a child, sexual assault and aggravated assault. As a result, conditional sentences (i.e. house arrest) would no longer be available for any of these offences.
The proposed legislation would also increase mandatory prison sentences for seven sexual offences involving child victims, such as possessing and accessing child pornography and sexual exploitation.
As well, this bill would create two new offences with mandatory prison sentences that seek to prevent the sexual exploitation of children by making it illegal for anyone to
- provide sexually explicit material to a child for the purpose of facilitating the commission of a sexual offence against a child (this process is often referred to as “grooming”); or
- use telecommunications, including the Internet, to communicate with another person to agree or make arrangements to commit a sexual offence against a child. The new measures would also require judges to consider prohibiting suspected or convicted child sexual offenders from having any unsupervised contact with a child or any unsupervised use of the Internet. This would help prevent them from offending and re-offending.
These proposed reforms build upon other criminal law amendments already introduced by the Government to better protect children against sexual exploitation, including Bill C-22 (the Protecting Children from Online Sexual Exploitation Act) and Bill S-2 (the Protecting VictimsFrom Sex Offenders Act), both of which are currently before Parliament. An on-line version of the legislation is available at www.parl.gc.ca.
