Police services across Canada reported 16,905 incidents of online child sexual exploitation (OCSE) in 2024, which was a 16 per cent decline from 2023. That’s according to a Statistics Canada report released Tuesday, but the numbers dating years back paint a different picture.
Between 2014 and 2024, the rate of OCSE rose by 347 per cent, with hundreds of children in Manitoba estimated to be impacted every year.
These statistics match up with what Cybertip.ca, Canada’s national tipline for reporting online child sexual exploitation, has been seeing.
“We saw a massive increase especially in cases of luring, sextortion that really ramped up during the COVID pandemic,” says Cybertip.ca director David Rabsch. “What we have seen is that steady increase, but that drop off in ’24 and another increase in ’25. This is a huge problem and it’s not looking like it’s going away anytime soon.”
Cybertip.ca receives an average of six sextortion reports per day. Rabsch believes stronger regulations are desperately needed to change that.
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“Like online harms legislation that recently passed in the U.K., hopefully in Canada in the future. Age restrictions that they put in place in Australia. We want to make sure government specifically is putting the obligations on to industry forcing them to make these changes that need to be made, through regulation and through legislation.”
Addressing this skyrocketing issue is something that Manitoba Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine says will require collaboration between three levels of government.
“If you are somebody that does this work for years, unfortunately these numbers aren’t shocking,” explains Fontaine.
“As the minister responsible, we support organizations right now that are working with men to try and combat that.”
Fontaine also stressed that social media companies need to play a pivotal role in getting offenders off their platforms and reporting them to proper authorities.
The most recent statistics from 2024 show nearly 17,000 incidents of online child sexual exploitation. That’s a rate of 223 incidents per 100,000 people aged 17 and younger.
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