Christopher Reynolds
The Pornhub website is shown on a computer screen in Toronto on Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS February 28, 2021 - 4:00 AM
OTTAWA - Serena Fleites was in seventh grade when a sexually explicit video of her was uploaded to Pornhub.
The fallout from that fateful post â made without her knowledge after a boyfriend demanded she send him naked images â would send her into a years-long spiral of depression, drug use and self-harm, as the illegal content resurfaced repeatedly on the Montreal-based platform and across the internet.
The California resident, now 19, says Pornhub took more than a week to respond to her initial request to take the video down, and weeks more to actually remove it, only to let it emerge again days later, a traumatic process that played out over and over.
Q & A: How youth can stay safe as they spend more time online
Local and provincial authorities are seeing a significant increase in the number of calls related to child sexual exploitation. Here s what to look out for.
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CBC News ·
Posted: Feb 26, 2021 7:30 AM ET | Last Updated: February 26
Online predators may be persistent or apply excessive pressure on their victims, says Stephen Sauer, director of Cybertip.ca.(Voyagerix/Shutterstock)
That s because pandemic restrictions are pushing kids and youth online.
And with that, comes new dangers, says Stephen Sauer, director of Cybertip.ca with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
Four people from the Waterloo region have been arrested and charged with criminal offences related to child sexual exploitation. The arrests come following a three-day joint investigation with the Ontario Provincial Police and Waterloo Regional Police Service between Nov. 17 and 19, 2020.
WINNIPEG The Canadian Centre for Child Protection is calling for regulatory changes that will better monitor the posting and sharing of child sexual abuse materials in the digital sphere. We have an epidemic online and we have an epidemic because we have failed to put any guardrails in and around what is happening in the online world, said Signy Arnason, associate executive director for the Manitoba-based Canadian Centre for Child Protection. We regulate all other spaces, everything in the offline world to protect children and somehow we ve abandoned kids online, said Arnason. The renewed call-to-action comes as the Canadian Centre for Child Protection presented federal lawmakers with findings from a probe into the amount of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) found on a popular pornographic website.