WINNIPEG—Sexualized images of children under the age of 9, most depicting explicit sexual acts, represent the largest and fastest-growing category in Canada’s underground child pornography trade, according to exclusive data obtained by the Star from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.

And their abusers, say experts, are overwhelmingly family and friends.

Cypertip.ca, a national, non-profit tip line run by the centre that gathers and investigates alleged child pornography online, last year catalogued more than 15,000 images from the Internet of children up to 8 years old, according to the data.

Those images accounted for 56 per cent of the 26,886 inventory of images Cybertip.ca analysts documented last year, a seven per cent jump from 2012-2013.

Even more disturbing, the data shows 73 per cent of the images of young victims depicted sex acts that included “bondage” and “torture.” That figure was up 12 per cent over the previous year.

“It continues to shock me,” says Signy Arnason, director of Cybertip.ca. “If your deviance is pedophilia, it’s not hard to imagine that people want to dig deeper into those trenches and seek out deeper and darker content and material to satisfy their sexual deviance as time progresses.”

The data marks the first time that the age category from newborn to 8 accounted for more than half of the material Cybertip.ca analyzes. Images of children in older age categories dropped or held steady from the previous year.

“If there is an increase in the interest in young children as an erotic potential for people out there, that causes a very serious concern, because the lower the age, the more severe the pedophilia,” said Dr. John Bradford, a forensic psychiatry professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in sexual deviation.

“It’s a whole other level of severity and concern. It’s more pathological. And we know it increases the harm ratio and risk of re-offence. All of that are very significant red flags.”

Arnason says that while teens and tweens are often exploited by strangers who lure them online and groom them, the youngest victims are typically abused by those they know well.

“When you’re abusing very, very young children, somebody has to have access to that child and needs time alone with them, so it’s likely a family member or someone close within the family,” she says.

The average age of child pornography victims was about 12 when Paul Gillespie ran the Toronto Police Service’s child exploitation squad a decade ago.

Today, the average age of victims he sees has dropped to age 5 or below, says Gillespie, who is now president of the Kids Internet Safety Alliance, which trains police and prosecutors around the world in investigating child exploitation.

“The appetite (for younger children) is identical everywhere,” says Gillespie. “It’s hard to believe there could be more heightened levels of depravity, but there is.”

There were 622 Canadians charged with child pornography in 2013, up from 442 in 2009, according to Statistics Canada.

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“This is a societal need to do better than we’re doing. I can never understand why the average citizen doesn’t throw up when they hear this stuff. . . Once you see one of these photos your life is never the same again.”

Catherine Chabbert, one of eight Cybertip.ca analysts who review complaints from the public before forwarding potentially illegal material to police, says many of the images depict children too young to even communicate the abuse.

In some cases, she has seen unknown children literally grow up before her eyes — from children to young adults — in a sequence of explicit images.

“A lot of the progressive abuse happens in a timeline,” she says. “I’ve seen timelines of a child with a collage of those images starting off when a child was an infant until they’re 14 years old. . . . Sometimes it’s still occurring because they haven’t found the offender or the victim. It’s a scary thing to know and to keep with you.”

Stephen Sauer has been an analyst at the Cybertip.ca offices in Winnipeg for the past decade.

In some cases, images of the increasingly young are customized to the wishes and appetites of those who consume them, he says.

“Typically, individuals are requesting images from offenders and offenders will create those images on the spot,” he says. “They might be asking for a certain type of abuse and there’s a close community where individuals are sharing this type of images.”