Manitoba RCMP’s internet child exploitation unit has been touring schools in the province educating students on online safety.
The unit recently presented to Grade 10 and 11 students at Niverville High School.
“Who uses Snapchat? Who uses Instagram?” Cpl. Emmie Clements asked a group of Grade 11 students. Nearly every student in the auditorium raised their hand.
“We see kids having cellphones very young now, and a lot of times with kids having a cell phone, their brain is not fully developed to understand the consequences of their actions,” Clements told Global News.
While the presentations by the RCMP officers are catered to reach specific age demographics or grade levels, the officers speak frankly with the students about child exploitation, sharing intimate images and sextortion. By doing so, they want to ensure students know the law around consent and that sharing, or being in possession of any sexual images of a person under the age of 18, is illegal.
“And we as parents and educators don’t even know sometimes, either, how to educate kids on something like this. So bringing the RCMP in to help us land the message in a different way is important.”
The RCMP says they’ve seen cases of sexual exploitation, luring and sextortion rise in recent years.
“We want to see our workload decrease,” Const. Joanie Dugay told Global News. “Because we see an increase with social media, especially since COVID, because there was no school, students were spending a lot of time on their phones, on their tablets, so we saw a lot of sextortion cases increase.”
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According to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, the numbers have risen drastically in recent years. In 2020, there were 458 sextortion cases reported to Cybertip.ca. In 2021, that number more than doubled to 963, and nearly tripled in 2022 to 2,636. In 2023, reported sextortion cases spiked to 4,762. In 2024 and 2025, there were 2,507 and 2,827 reported cases, respectively.
“What we’re seeing is that technology is so intertwined in our day-to-day lives that this is where kids are spending a lot of time and predators know that,” said Lindsay Lobb, the director of operations for support services at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
“We’re also seeing that these apps have been created without child safeguards or child safety in mind, which really does allow adults to interact with young people with no guardrails.”
Clements says sometimes the RCMP’s school presentations result in more reports being made.
“It does happen that sometimes following presentations in schools we have reports because now they have realized how illegal it was (and) that they were victim of such and such offence, they bring it forward and then we investigate,” Clements said.
The goal of the presentations is to educate and ensure children stay safe.
“It’s a hard job. We have to look at some sensitive stuff, some hard stuff to look at,” Dugay said. “But the satisfaction of when we catch somebody and when we’re able to put in an arrest and put them in jail … At least we put that person out of commission and that person cannot harm other children.”