Manitoba seeing rising cases of child sexual exploitation: advocate

Manitoba’s Advocate for Children and Youth wants the province to do more to protect children from sexual exploitation.

The Manitoba Advocate for Children and Youth is raising alarm bells over the rising number of child sexual exploitation cases in the province and is looking to the government for help.

“We have an alarming rate of children that are being exploited,” said Manitoba advocate Sherry Gott.

“The government continues to not develop an old strategy that should be updated. It’s outdated and some of the issues are not being addressed.”

According to Gott, more than 400 children in the province are exploited every year in the visible sex trade. However, this statistic only includes known cases.

Gott believes the actual number of children being abused behind closed doors and online could be in the thousands.

Now, Gott is calling on the government to do more to protect the province’s children.

“There should be a wraparound approach to helping these children or these youth that are entrenched in sexual exploitation,” she said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I think there needs to be more emphasis on just one strategy. There needs to be multiple departments joining to develop a strategy that would work.”

Families Minister Nahanni Fontaine agreed that child sexual exploitation numbers have increased.

She said the government is travelling across the province and speaking with community stakeholders about how to modernize the strategy to address this issue.