It’s the crime nobody wants to talk about. When the Vancouver Police Department issued its 2015 Annual Business Plan Report, reducing violent crime, organized crime and motor vehicle collisions was at the top of their goals for the year. Suspiciously absent was any sort of recommendation or information about child pornography cases, which saw a 750 percent increase in rate in the city from 2013 to 2014, according to Statistics Canada data.
It was the second-largest rate increase in the country and it comes after four years in which the rate had been relatively steady. In total, the city of Vancouver had 1077 child pornography cases, more than every province other than Ontario and, obviously, B.C.
“I can’t really explain that, except that child pornography is one of those crimes that people don’t report,” said Jessie Horner, a law professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and the author of Canadian Law and the Legal System. “If your house is vandalized, you report that, and you report your bicycle being stolen. Child pornography is one of those things that is never reported. It completely depends on police investigation.”
It is normal for police forces to celebrate big upticks in crime, as usually it can mean that the authorities are doing a more concentrated job cracking down on the violation in question. However, there are conflicting factors here. For one, not many cities would like to promote themselves as hubs of child pornography. There’s also the question of how this could happen. Was Vancouver treated with an influx of people engaging in this activity or was there a change in the way information was gathered?
“I remember there was one popular online takedown that happened last year, so your jump might have been as a result of that,” said Simon Fraser University professor Richard Frank, referencing the shuttering of Freedom Hosting, a server that hosted child pornography sites. “I would expect something like that to make a big dent sometime after the actual take down happened as the data they find is collected and charged against individuals who are arrested after the fact.”
Horner also believes that the influx is more due to police work than anything else. “What you can say is that police are doing something different and they are uncovering child pornography to a much greater extent,” says Horner. “One of the possible reasons is that the police have greater and greater powers of surveillance, more ability to get wire taps, to get information from servers and so on. To me, this is a reflection of increased police powers. This actually concerns me, because it says something about our loss of freedom, our loss of privacy.”
Bea Rhodes, president of the Vancouver-based counselling institution Rhodes Wellness College, offers up another perspective. Formerly working with Circles of Support and Accountability (COSA), a community-based initiative that works with sex offenders as they re-enter society from prison, Rhodes laments the shutdown of the Vancouver branch of COSA in 2010. “I have worked with sex offenders for many years and this group needs our support and encouragement,” she says. “No one ‘decides’ they want to be attracted to children. It is an unfortunate kink that causes life long suffering for both offenders and victims. But, trying to help pedophiles is not a popular avocation.”
The closure of COSA-Vancouver had to do with the cancelling of a federal contract. And while the initiative was saved in 12 cities around the country due to partial funding from the United Way, Vancouver’s branch didn’t survive. The city might need to see it return.