Stop the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth Awareness Week
By Contributor
March 5-9 is “Stop the Sexual Exploitation of Children and Youth Awareness Week” and the RCMP will be supporting many events bringing this terrible reality to the forefront.
The RCMP encourages the public to take advantage of the different information sessions.
“We have a growing number of partners and resources available to the public to help make the Internet a safer place for children,” said Corporal Mat. Van Laer of the RCMP Integrated Child Exploitation (ICE) unit.
Other key partners hosting events include Stop Exploiting Youth, a community program run by Pacific Community Resources Society that helps youth escape environments in which they are vulnerable to sexually exploitive relationships, and the Safe Online Outreach Society, a society dedicated to providing online safety information across the province.
“The more we can get parents, children or anyone else aware of simple online safety tips, the safer our children and the following generations will be. Education is the most efficient tool at our disposal to make it harder for online sexual predators to get to our children,” Corporal Van Laer says.
The RCMP “E” Division Youth Strategies has developed iSMART (Internet + Social Media Awareness Resource Toolkit) to provide police officers, educators and communities with access to current Internet safety information.
This resource supports the RCMP’s effort to prevent online victimization of children and youth by providing information and tools necessary to engage smartly over the Internet.
The public is also encouraged to continue reporting any suspicious online activity directly to their respective police agency or to Cybertip.ca, Canada’s tipline for reporting the online sexual exploitation of children at www.cybertip.ca.
