another 31 per cent in 2007.79 While this may be indicative of a genuine underlying increase in such acts, police-recorded crime statistics are a function of both the number of actual acts, as well as awareness of the criminal nature of the act, and willingness to report. While Statistics Canada notes that “[it] is difficult to know to what extent the growth in child luring offences reported to police may be related to increased efforts to raise public awareness or to other factors, such as advances in police efforts to capture online predators, or to an increase in the number of luring incidents”, it nonetheless concludes that “growing access to technology may increase the risk of online sexual exploitation of children and youth.”80 ICTs also enable perpetrators to have increased access to information about victims. Social networking sites can host enormous quantities of freely shared personal and biographical information. An inherent risk of such information sharing is the fact that children often lack discretion and rely on a false sense of privacy and safety. Even children who do attempt to protect their privacy and security regularly struggle to keep abreast the frequently changing privacy rules of social network sites. New features in social networking-sites such as geotagging of images and “checking-in” to places via mobile devices can further enhance offenders’ knowledge of a child’s location.81 Services and applications are available which make it easier for offenders to gather personal information about their prospective victims. For example, the “cree.py tool” extracts information associated with a single e-mail address from diverse social networking sites, providing the user with a dossier of information on potential victims, including geolocation data when available. In addition to publicly available information, and while most sites and applications increasingly employ extensive cybersecurity, personal information always risks compromise through hacking and other forms of illegal access.82 ICT may further facilitate access to child victims for the purposes of human trafficking. Perpetrators may recruit new victims, including children, through websites, as well as by using social media technology to advertise their services to a Statistics Canada, 2009. Child Luring Through the Internet. Ibid. P.6 and P.9. 81 See Livingstone, S., Olafsson, K., Staksrud, E., 2011. Social networking, age and privacy. EU Kids Online. Available at http:// eprints.lse.ac.uk/35849/1/Social%20networking%2C%20age%20 and%20privacy%20%28LSERO.pdf; see also Choo, K. R., 2009. Pp. 16-18. 82 Ibid. 79 80 broad public. The 2013 United States Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, for example, made special note of the impact of technology on recruitment of trafficking victims: “In the fight against modern slavery, technology can be a double-edged sword. Traffickers use technology to advertise their services widely and develop new methods to recruit, manipulate, and lure potential victims. Meanwhile, governments, anti-trafficking advocates, and technology companies are collaborating to leverage technological tools to turn the tables on the traffickers.”83 Similarly, child sex tourists may use chat rooms, message boards, peer-to-peer file-sharing servers, news groups, and specialized websites to obtain information on potential victims and destinations, share stories, trade child sexual abuse material, and plan travels.84 Some reports suggest that technology is the engine behind a growth in the sex trade, and that extensive use of the Internet for marketing sex tours is consonant with overall Internet usage in a country.85 In the process of accessing child victims through online contact, offenders may use ICTs to break down both physical and psychological barriers to abusing or exploiting children. For example, many social networking sites effectively enable users to cover or hide their true identities, allowing perpetrators to easily adopt false identities in order to lure children into an online relationship. Once children feel emotionally attached and begin to trust offenders, perpetrators may more easily reveal their true identities, while still maintaining the loyalty of their victims.86 Offenders may also make use of pornography or child sexual abuse material to remove psychological barriers by convincing their targets that child abuse is “normal.” Offenders U.S. Department of State, 2013. Trafficking in Persons Report. P. 14. Available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/210737.pdf. 84 U.S. Department of State, 2007.Trafficking in Persons Report. P. 23. Available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/82902.pdf#page=25&zoom=auto,0,477. 85 Shared Hope International, 2007. Demand: A Comparative Examination of Sex Tourism and Trafficking in Jamaica, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Available at http://sharedhope. org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DEMAND.pdf; Jamaican sex markets lag behind those in the other countries in the use of the Internet to advertise and promote its thriving local commercial sex markets, most likely because of the limited use of the Internet within the country. 86 See ibid. P. 12; see also UNICEF, 2011. P. 5. 83 16 STUDY ON THE EFFECTS OF NEW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ON THE ABUSE AND EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN