Amanda Todd's Mom expresses relief U.S. man sentenced for sexually exploiting 3 B.C. youths
12-year-old boy in B.C. dies by suicide in response to online sextortion, police say
By Amy Judd 
The family of a 12-year-old boy who died by suicide after he was sexually extorted online is speaking out about what happened.
Carson Cleland took his life on Oct. 12 after being the victim of online sextortion, Prince George RCMP said Monday.
“Nothing was worth doing this,” Ryan Cleland, Carson’s father, told CKPG News.
Reports of sextortion, the practice of extorting money or sexual favours from someone by threatening to reveal evidence of their online sexual activity, are on the rise, Prince George RCMP said.
Sextortion is most prevalent in youth between the ages of 13 and 18, police said.
So far this year, Prince George RCMP has received 62 reports of online sextortion, already surpassing the 56 reports received in 2022, police confirmed.
Prince George, B.C. has a population of 74,000.
“Be more active with your kids, even if you are active, which we were,” Carson’s mother, Nicola Smith, told CKPG News.
“Talk to your kids about predators and all the things that’s happening and the safety of online. As much as younger kids hate parents going on their phones, maybe they have to.”
Police said parents need to know about the dangers for kids online.
“We are calling for parents and caregivers to be honest with their youth about the dangers of online activity, especially if they are engaging in chats with people they don’t know in real life,” Cpl. Jennifer Cooper said in a news release.
“While not every case of online sextortion will end in tragedy, the consequences of this kind of activity can follow a youth for their entire life, which needs to be something we talk about openly with our kids.”
Carson’s family said he preferred to use Snapchat to talk to others.
“They’re just not built for problems like this yet,” Cleland said. “They’re not built for adult problems like this yet.”
Here's a parenting hint that should help with this:
Parents, be willing to talk to your children about anything, without getting angry! Explain to them that being able to talk about anything is vitally important but that keeping secrets from each other will damage that relationship and cause one or the other to start lying. This is how rebellion often starts. Teach your kids to not do anything that they might have to lie about afterward.
“About 90 per cent of the sextortion victims that are reporting to us are young males,” Stephen Sauer, director of Canada’s national youth tipline for online sexual crimes, Cybertip.ca. told The New Reality.
Teen boys between 14 to 17 are the most impacted by these crimes. Experts said boys are more likely to start communicating with someone on social media – especially when they think it’s with someone their own age who is sexually interested in them.
If you are the victim of sextortion, it is important that you stop all communication immediately with that person and do not give in to their demands. Deactivate the accounts that you are using to communicate with that person and, most importantly, reach out for help and report it. Call your local police and contact NeedHelpNow.ca and Cybertip.ca for support.
In Carson’s case, police said they are still looking for a suspect.
If you or someone you know is in crisis and needs help, resources are available. In case of an emergency, please call 911.
The Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, Depression Hurts and Kids Help Phone 1-800-668-6868 — all offer ways for getting help if you, or someone you know, is suffering from mental health issues.
For a directory of support services in your area, visit the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention.
Learn more about how to help someone in crisis on the Government of Canada website.
B.C. boy’s death underscores rise of sextortion in Canada. What can be done?
By Sean Boynton 
The death of a 12-year-old boy in British Columbia who police and his family say fell victim to online sextortion has advocates warning the issue is getting worse in Canada.
For years, law enforcement and researchers have been warning about the dangers of rising incidents of criminals targeting minors through sextortion, calling the problem an “epidemic” that is leading to mental health issues and suicide. Despite some steps taken by governments and social media companies to increase safety online, the number of reported instances continues to rise.
No steps have been taken by Trudeau's Government since he took office in 2015. Canada is one of very few western countries who have done nothing on this file, not just sextortion but the pandemic of child sexual abuse too.
“We have a public health emergency on our hands,” Signy Arnason, the associated executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP), told Global News in an interview.
Back in September, the CCCP’s national tip line for reporting online child sexual abuse, Cybertip.ca, reported they were receiving on average 40 reports of sextortion per week. Today, that number has increased to 50 per week.
Cybertip says when the gender of victims is known, 91 per cent of those targeted in sextortion cases have been male, with teen boys between the ages of 14 and 17 most likely to be impacted.
The agency says male victims are predominantly exploited for money, as opposed to female victims who are coerced into providing more sexual images.
Statistics Canada reported last year that police-reported extortion cases in Canada rose by nearly 300 per cent in the last decade. It also says non-consensual distribution of intimate images involving adult or child victims increased by 194 cases in 2021, a nine-per-cent jump from the year before, and a 52-per-cent increase compared with the previous five-year average.
Prince George RCMP, who reported 12-year-old Carson Cleland’s death, said it has received 62 reports of online sextortion so far this year — already surpassing the 56 reports received in 2022.
Carson, who took his life on Oct. 12, largely used Snapchat to talk with others, his family said. His mother told CKPG News in Prince George, B.C., that she and Carson’s father were already talking to their son about online safety and how to protect himself before he died, but urged other parents to be “more active” with their own kids.
Arnason said part of the issue is parents are being made to feel solely responsible for protecting their kids from online predators when it should be up to governments and tech companies to establish proper safety guardrails.
“We know it’s absolutely impossible to be managing your kids’ online activity because you’re not with them 24/7, but their devices are” she said. “We’ve unfairly saddled this issue on parents … and we feel like we’re screaming into an echo chamber. We need action. We need governments to step in. Otherwise we’re going to continue to talk about this.”
Police also say sextortion cases can be incredibly complex and time-consuming. Investigators can face extreme difficulty obtaining evidence — both the images and correspondence between the aggressor and the victim — because social media and online messaging platforms encrypt and often delete messages from their servers. Snapchat’s servers are designed to automatically delete all one-on-one and group-chat messages as soon as they’re viewed.
Snapchat should be illegal for children of any age.
Cpl. Jennifer Cooper of Prince George RCMP told CKPG News that perpetrators of online sextortion have international reach, further complicating efforts to bring them to justice in Canada.
“You get into issues of ‘where are they?’ — having to trace IP addresses across continents — and ‘is this a crime in the country that they are residing in?'” she said. “So then we have to start looking at international crime (law), and that can be incredibly time-consuming. It’s very resource-intensive to do these sorts of investigations.”
Those complexities were made clear in the lengthy prosecution of the Dutch man convicted last year of extorting, blackmailing and harassing B.C. teen Amanda Todd, whose death by suicide in 2012 at the age of 15 thrust the issue of sextortion into the national spotlight.
But not to the point where Trudeau's government would actually do something about it.
Aydin Coban was first charged in 2014, but first had to face trial in the Netherlands for a series of related charges in his home country. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison for those crimes in 2017, then finally extradited to Canada in 2020 to face trial for the charges related to Todd, which led to a conviction last year.
His 13-year sentence is to be served in the Netherlands after his current sentence ends next year, but has been delayed as an Amsterdam court considers amending it to one consistent with Dutch law, which could shorten the prison stint to four-and-a-half years.
In B.C., Todd’s case and a continued rise in sextortion incidents helped inspire the Intimate Images Protection Act, passed earlier this year, which creates an expedited legal process for victims to seek the removal of intimate images and videos uploaded to online platforms without their consent.
Other provinces including Manitoba, Alberta and Nova Scotia have similar laws and have sought to strengthen them in recent months. Manitoba’s updated law, for instance, shifts the burden of proof in lawsuits filed over shared images on the accused to show they had permission from the victim.
Federal legislation was adopted last month that adds sextortion to the list of offences that would require a perpetrator to register with the National Sex Offender Registry.
The Criminal Code of Canada made it illegal to share intimate images without consent in 2014, but the code does not include responsibility for online platforms that publish them, or compel them to comply with requests for removal.
Those platforms, including Instagram and Snapchat, have introduced updated safety measures in recent years. But most of them — like Snapchat’s new feature that warns minors if they are adding a follower who is not shared by mutual friends — puts the onus on the users. Parents can still enable controls that block sensitive content, but those don’t cover direct messages from followers.
Arnason said Canada should look to model new legislation on sweeping online safety laws passed in the United Kingdom and European Union. Those laws impose regulations on social media and tech platforms and opens the door for federal lawsuits against those that don’t actively crack down on explicit, non-consensual materials as well as hate speech and misinformation.
She added the urgency is further compounded by the rise of artificial intelligence. Last month, the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation warned that AI-generated deepfake images will overwhelm child exploitation investigators without government action.
“AI is an absolute nightmare in our space,” she said.
In a statement provided by his office, Justice Minister and Attorney General Arif Virani said he will continue to work with other ministers to introduce online harms legislation that includes protections against sexual exploitation of children — “but we must take time to do this properly,” he added, declining to give a timeline for when that bill — first promised in 2019 — may be tabled.
“Too much is at stake,” he said.
How many more lives will be destroyed while you take your time? How is it that you have no sense of urgency about this?
Cybertip and police urge victims of sextortion to cut off contact with perpetrators immediately and inform their parents or a trusted adult, while also keeping a copy of their communication. Victims should never give into the threats they may receive, or else the perpetrators will continue to act.
Parents are also being urged to foster open communication with their children and keep them regularly updated on the potential dangers of online platforms like social media.
But Arnason said she’s getting frustrated by continuing to repeat the same warnings to parents and children while governments and companies continue to delay action.
“Would you ever find a 12-year-old walking into a bar who is then murdered, and then everyone asks why the parents didn’t do more? No — you’d be holding the bar owner accountable for letting a minor into their facility,” she said.
—With files from the Canadian Press
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Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc says he hopes the federal government will be in a position to introduce its long-promised online harms legislation “soon” in the wake of the death of a 12-year-old B.C. boy whose family and police say was a victim of online sextortion.
The Prince George RCMP first reported 12-year-old Carson Cleland’s death as being linked to sextortion on Monday. The northern B.C. police detachment says it has received 62 complaints of sextortion this year, up from 56 in 2022, and experts have warned it is part of a growing trend.
“I hope and think we’ll be in a position to introduce that legislation soon. But this is a tragic reminder that some of the harms done online are very real and that a 12-year-old boy in British Columbia takes his own life in such a horrible way. He should remind all of us that the online world can be very dangerous and vulnerable people can be preyed upon,” LeBlanc said Tuesday.
The government first promised legislation to better address online harms in 2019, but legislation has not been tabled yet.
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