Rate of child sexual assault in New Brunswick 2nd highest in Canada

WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced​ ​​​sexual violence or know someone affected by it.

The girl was just seven or eight years old when she was sexually assaulted by a family friend.  

A teenager by the time her assailant was sentenced in 2024, she described for a New Brunswick court “being dead for 10 years” after the assault.

The sentencing judge called her victim impact statement “difficult to read for its description of how her happy family life, pre-assault, was cut short” by what had happened.

“The assault left [her] unable to function, suicidal, and self-harming,” the judge wrote. “That one sexual touch against this child negatively altered the trajectory of her life and that of her family.” 

That survivor’s experience is far from the only such story in New Brunswick, where the rate of police-reported sexual assault charges involving children has been among the highest in the country.

In 2023, Statistics Canada’s crime report shows sexual assault charges occurred in cases involving New Brunswick children under 12 at a rate of about 130 per 100,000.

That rate has been steadily climbing since 2020, when the rate in the province was almost 96 per 100,000. 

The 2023 figure is nearly double the national average of 69 per 100,000, and the highest rate in Canada after Nunavut.

The New Brunswick rates of sexual assault in children aged 12 to 17 have fluctuated since 2020, but in 2023 it was one of the highest in Canada — at 520 per 100,000. That’s compared to the national rate of about 383 per 100,000.

In 2023, New Brunswick police reported 109 victims under 12 and 245 victims aged 12 to 17.

The question is “Why?” And it’s a hard one to answer, according to Mary Ann Campbell, director of the University of New Brunswick’s Centre for Criminal Justice Studies and Policing Research. 

The number of offences may be increasing, Campbell said. But it could also be that better interventions are catching more cases of harm, and more charges are being laid as a result.

Regardless, Campbell said it’s concerning to see more instances of sexual assault, a charge that tends to indicate a more serious crime.

“We’ll often see laying of the charge of sexual interference or child sexual exploitation types of charges, but less so sexual assault,” she said. “And that’s often given when there is more severe violence that has been committed against the child.”

Campbell noted sexual assault remains the most underreported crime in Canada, and that’s especially the case when the victim is a child. 

‘Impacts can be everlasting’

Insp. Marie-Eve Mackenzie-Plante, the officer responsible for the New Brunswick RCMP’s serious crimes division, began her career working with victims as part of a sex crimes unit. 

She said it’s challenging to describe how children are affected by sexual assault, because the harm shows up in a variety of ways. 

“The impacts can be everlasting and throughout that adult life, depending on the resources that are readily available,” Mackenzie-Plante said.

Social worker Sylvie LeBlanc said people often think children are too young to understand what’s happening to them, and so the impact of sexual violence might be less, but the opposite is true. 

LeBlanc, who works with youth victims as co-director of the Violence Prevention Centre, a non-profit organization in Kent county, said the experience often leaves children with a sense of guilt and shame that can show up in all areas of their lives. 

“Shame is the feeling that I am wrong,” she said. “Guilt is the feeling that I did something wrong, right? So shame is very internalized. So really feeling like, ‘I am the problem.'” 

That can lead children into a “cycle of violence” in later relationships, LeBlanc said. 

“It’s related to all the things that we talk about [that] can be the shame, right? ‘I’m not good enough. I’m not a good person.’

“So obviously your standards in terms of how someone’s going to treat you [are] very low.”

She said it’s also common for child victims to suffer from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder, which can show up in a variety of ways. 

“It can be children that were very social before start to be more isolated, don’t talk, don’t play as much … children that were not necessarily that aggressive or outgoing [have] more emotional outbursts,” she said.

“Then of course more in terms of cognitive, like learning issues too. And we see a lot of loss of focus, not as attentive in class and even in terms of memory.”

Self-harming behaviour can be another consequence, LeBlanc said. 

The potential physical health effects are equally troubling. 

LeBlanc pointed to the Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs, study, which found trauma in childhood is related to heart attacks and even premature death.

Rate ‘consistently higher’ in N.B 

A high rate of child sexual assault isn’t a new issue for New Brunswick.

Campbell is also a member of the province’s child sexual harm advisory committee, which, in 2019, submitted a report on the issue to the Department of Public Safety.

“A custom request from Statistics Canada for data for all years available (2009-2016) confirms that New Brunswick has had a consistently higher police-reported rate of sexual violations committed against children and youth (0 to 17 years of age),” the report says. 

The most recent figures from Statistics Canada are not surprising to Marie-Andrée Pelland, a criminologist at the University of Moncton who also sat on the province’s child sexual harm advisory committee.

“We live in a province where there [has] been a lot of history of sexual abuse,” Pelland said.

Before that committee report, an audit of municipal police investigations into sex crimes between 2010 and 2014 found that most victims in New Brunswick were children and most were under 12 years old.

Since the committee issued its report to Public Safety in 2019, Pelland said, the province has introduced more resources geared toward supporting victims of child sexual harm. 

“The report showed that we didn’t have some kind of services that [were] specially trained to help those children,” Pelland said.

“If we think about what are the resources that we have [introduced] since the last five years, we have more and more professionals who are able to intervene with victims of sexual abuse. … So that can lead to more visits to the police to report sexual abuse.”

The RCMP’s Mackenzie-Plante believes New Brunswick’s higher rural population could be another factor behind the rates.

Because rural areas tend to have fewer hospitals, psychologists and sexual violence centres, Mackenzie-Plante says, there are also fewer settings for professionals to intervene and perhaps prevent sexual harm.

Mackenzie-Plante also said greater public awareness and improved police training could also factor in. 

Police approach shifts

A review of the New Brunswick RCMP in 2017 found that just 52 out of more than 800 members had the proper training to investigate sexual violence, and even fewer had the specialized skills to interview children. 

Instead of interviewing children who reported sexual harm, RCMP officers were referring them to the Department of Social Development. The review said not having an officer present for the interview “could be detrimental to the criminal investigation.”

Mackenzie-Plante has since trained 40 officers to interview child victims alongside Social Development staff.  

Officers are also trying to communicate that “regardless of the outcome of the file, that we believe the victims,” and in turn, she believes more survivors are coming forward. 

“We’re getting reports of historical sexual assault,” Mackenzie-Plante said.

She noted these cases would show up in the Statistics Canada numbers for the year in which police laid charges, not the year an incident is alleged to have occurred. 

A major focus area for Mackenzie-Plante has been to improve public education and access to victim support. 

More resources required

Pelland and Campbell both say support and access to it have improved in the province.

But to bring down the child sexual assault rates, they said, there must be more resources for potential offenders. 

It’s an error to only focus on the victim, because I would like to live in a world where there is no sexual abuse,” Pelland said. “For that, we need to extract the aggressor.”

Campbell said there are studied, effective treatments for people with deviant sexual interests, but in New Brunswick these resources tend to only be provided after a person has committed a crime.

“We demonize them because of what they’re doing,” she said. “But yet at the same time, we have an opportunity to shift that behaviour and prevent future harm.”

For example, in 2021 Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health launched Talking for Change. 

The federally funded initiative offers a helpline, assessment and psychotherapy for people 18 or older in Atlantic Canada, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and Nunavut who are attracted to minors.

However, Pelland cautioned, it may be years before those interventions actually translate to lower crime rates.

Beyond that, both Pelland and Campbell said sex education at school and at home is crucial to preventing sexual harm in children. 

“That’s not just relevant to teenagers, it’s something we’d want children to understand as well,” Campbell said, noting consent, basic anatomy and boundaries are important for children to understand. 

“It really can make a difference between a situation where a child is abused for years, versus a child who may be able to recognize they’re in a dangerous situation and what to do about that before it happens.”

In general, LeBlanc said, New Brunswick’s high crime rates underscore the need to talk more about child sexual assault. 

“Child sexual abuse flourishes in silence,” she said.

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Resources for survivors of sexual assault: 

If you are in immediate danger, call 911. 

Sexual Violence New Brunswick – 5 p.m. to 8 a.m. daily, 506 454 0437

South East Sexual Assault Centre (Moncton) – 1 844 853 0811

Kit’s Place Child and Youth Advocacy Centre (Saint John) – 1 800 360 3327 or 506 634 8295

Beauséjour Family Crisis Resource Centre – 506 533 9100

Boréal Child and Youth Expertise Centre – 506 383 8300

Libère Toi, francophone support line – 506 395 3555

L’éclipse (Edmundston) – 506 739 7729