Meet the woman from Richmond Hill who is among this year’s Nobel Peace Prize nominees

The Richmond Hill native has already accepted dozens of national and international awards for her work on child sex exploitation. CTV’s Beth Macdonell has more.

Cheryl Perera already has 35 prestigious national and international awards under her belt, but now the 39-year-old of Richmond Hill could win one of the highest honours in the world.

Nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, Perera has devoted her life to empowering children facing sex exploitation since she was a teenager.

“I’m feeling immense gratitude for this honour and to be among the people that have been nominated in the past. It’s more than I could have ever imagined,” Perera told CTV News Toronto in an interview Monday.

Perera is an activist and the founder of ‘One Child,’ which she says is the first non-governmental organization committed to empowering children here at home in Canada and around the globe to act against sex-exploitation.

“I had no idea where this was going to take me,” Perera said. “I was just very passionate and just wanted to learn more and when I look back at all this time it just blows my mind that this is where it has come.”

Perera’s path began in high school when she learned about child sex trafficking. When she was just 16, she posed as a 15-year-old in a Sri Lankan under-cover sting operation with a predator more than twice her age.

“[It was] utter turmoil I think, but I was trying my very best to stay calm.”

The predator was apprehended.

Since then, Perera has gone on to work with children in more than 20 countries, giving presentations and creating what she calls an army of youth who share tools to recognize, prevent, and help children facing sex exploitation - some as young as five.

Her global influence has been growing in media, international conferences, and the United Nations.

One of Perera’s goals has been to close the gap on children having opportunities to create solutions, along with access to the training and tools to work towards those solutions.

Perera said internationally, poverty is a driving force in the trafficking of children, and the Greater Toronto Area is a hub for sextortion. The average age for being trafficked in Canada is just 13-years-old, with schools and online messaging being vulnerable spaces.

“The issue is just getting worse, especially with the development of artificial intelligence. It’s just giving [people] more tools to groom children.”

Perera said she’s worked with Meta to remove images involving youth sex exploitation and she plans to continue working with the tech sector to further her organization’s education programs and scale-up her work supporting victims.

“Seeing the change in these children, the transformation that can take place, that is what keeps me going.”

Perera’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination is a testament to how anyone with compassion and dogged determination – even a child – can make a difference.

“I was just a regular teenager and ended up on this journey because I was passionate and really cared about it,” she said.

Perera is one of around 200 people nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year. The Nobel committee then creates a short list in the spring before the final vote in October.