Central Okanagan RCMP are seeing a disturbing trend — a rise in people accessing and possessing child sexual abuse material.
Police are uncertain why this crime seems to be growing in the Okanagan, but say a new unit is trying to combat the surge.
Two recent arrests are indicative of cases local police have seen a lot of over the past few years.
“They have, unfortunately, a list of other investigations that they have to get to,” said Kelowna RCMP Insp. Beth McAndie.
The individuals were arrested a couple of weeks ago for accessing and possessing child sexual abuse material and that investigation is still ongoing.
“Electronic devices were seized, and they’ve been forwarded to our partners to forensically examine those devices. Once the information from those devices are sent back to us, then we’ll do a thorough investigation of them and forward a pretty comprehensive report to Crown counsel,” said Cpl. James Jenkins, supervisor of Kelowna’s ICE Unit.
The arrests were made by the Kelowna RCMP’s Integrated Child Exploitation (ICE) Unit. As the number of these types of cases has steadily risen, McAndie hoped to launch the unit when she first transferred to the detachment, making it only the second unit in the province.
“I had previously worked at Surrey detachment where we had created a similar team, just because we saw a need to develop an expertise in this area,” said McAndie.
“It really takes special people, special investigators to do this work. There’s a lot of experience that is required, a lot of empathy, and a lot of understanding of what goes on in these types of investigations. ”
Suspicious individuals are brought to police attention after a geolocation search by the National Child Exploitation Crime Centre.
“Large companies like Google and Facebook, all the major ones, even smaller ones have measures in place to detect child sexual abuse material. They forward that information including the IP address. That gets sent to BC ICE and they review that information a little further and they send that to Kelowna or whichever other city it resolves to,” said Jenkins.
Since the unit’s launch in January, four people have been arrested and McAndie says the ICE Unit won’t be slowing down anytime soon.
“There was enough work sort of already stacked in the queue, those that we thought posed the most risk that required the most attention. The team has really been active executing a number of search warrants,” said McAndie.
Possessing and accessing child sexual abuse material is up 21 per cent nationally and in Central Okanagan is up 67 per cent.
RCMP aren’t exactly sure what they can attribute the rise to, but one theory is that police are being made aware of more incidents.
“Whether it’s reporting and the technology used by companies to identify images or child abuse sexual material and more global awareness and society taking a stand,” McAndie said.
Mounties say they’re working with parents, providing them with tips to protect their children.
“They play a large role in helping us keep kids safe so they can do things like learn the apps or the video games their kids are using, play the video games with their kids and learn the chat functions for example,” Jenkins said.
RCMP recommends parents visit the Canadian Centre for Child Protection’s website for further resources.