"You Will Be Held Responsible, Regardless of Your Age"
What the Edmonton AI exploitation case actually means, legally.
On June 17th, ALERT’s Internet Child Exploitation unit announced charges against two 14-year-old boys from an Edmonton junior high school.
The allegation: they photographed female classmates without consent, pulled more images from the girls’ social media accounts, and used AI software to sexualize them. The images were shared between the two boys. Then word spread through the school.
Staff Sgt. Alison Church, who’s spent her career investigating internet child exploitation, said the number of victims could be in the double digits. She also said this:
“You will be held responsible, regardless of your age. These are serious crimes.”
And then the line that’s been sitting with me since I read it:
“I think we are the tip of the iceberg with investigations that involve artificial intelligence.”
This is the second case like this ALERT has investigated in six months. In December, a 17-year-old in Calgary was charged with making, possessing, and distributing CSAM after allegedly doing the same thing across several Calgary-area high schools.
I want to walk you through what’s actually happening here legally, because I think most people — parents, teachers, even some lawyers — don’t fully understand how this works, and the gap between what people assume and what the law actually says matters a lot right now.
First: the law has actually been ready for this longer than you’d think.
Here’s the thing that surprises people. Canada’s child sexual abuse and exploitation material law — what most of us still call “child pornography” (or “CP”) provisions, though that language officially changed in October 2025 — was written broadly enough to already cover this.
Section 163.1 of the Criminal Code defines the material as a visual representation “whether or not it was made by electronic or mechanical means.” That phrase has been sitting in our law since long before anyone had a “Nudify” app on their phone. The Supreme Court confirmed back in 2001, in a case called R v Sharpe, that this includes images of “imaginary” people — meaning even fully computer-generated depictions count, not just photographs of someone real. The Court wrote that the law extends “to drawings from the imagination, cartoons, or computer generated composites,” because, as the justices put it, “with the quality of contemporary technology, it can be very difficult to distinguish a ‘real’ person from a computer creation or composite.” They wrote that more than two decades ago. It reads almost prophetic now.
That reasoning is exactly what let a Quebec court hand down an eight-year sentence in 2023 to a man who used deepfake technology to superimpose children’s faces onto other bodies in sexual abuse material — Canada’s first known prosecution of its kind. The judge in that case, R c Larouche, wrote: “The use of deepfake technology in criminal hands is chilling. The type of software allows crimes to be committed that could involve virtually every child in our communities.”
So when these boys allegedly ran real photos of real classmates through AI to sexualize them, the law didn’t need updating to call that a crime. It already was one.
Making it: up to 14 years, with a mandatory minimum of one year.
Possessing it: up to 10 years.
These are not minor charges, and the fact that the alleged offenders are 14 does not make the offence smaller. It makes the situation, frankly, more devastating.
The voyeurism charge sits alongside this for a separate reason — the alleged taking of photos at school without consent, for a sexual purpose. That’s its own offence under section 162, and the Supreme Court has already ruled that “in public” doesn’t mean “no expectation of privacy.” A 2019 case called R v Jarvis — involving a teacher who secretly filmed students with a hidden camera pen — established that students retain a reasonable expectation of privacy at school, photographing or not. The Court held that being in a public or semi-public space doesn’t automatically erase someone’s right to privacy; what matters is whether a person would reasonably expect not to be recorded the way they actually were. That precedent is doing real work in cases like this one.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, though.
If the same thing happened to an adult woman — if someone took her photo and used AI to “nudify” it — the law might not actually protect her the same way.
Twice in the last year, Canadian courts have acquitted men in deepfake cases involving adult or near-adult women, because the specific offence meant to cover this — section 162.1, the “intimate image” law — was written to require an authentic depiction of the real person. Not a synthetic body wearing someone’s face.
A Nova Scotia judge put it plainly in March, in a case called R v MSK: “The law does not reflect the technology that exists today, and to combat advancing technologies in the commission of offences requires the dictates of Parliament.” She went further, writing that forcing AI-generated images into the existing definition of “intimate image” “would be a patchwork assembly to take the enormity of artificial intelligence and force-feed it into incompatible legislation.” In that case, a man had used AI to generate fake nude images of five former high school classmates using their real faces and distributed them — and was acquitted on the distribution charge specifically because the body in the image wasn’t actually hers.
An Ontario judge reached the same conclusion months earlier, in a case involving a man and his wife (R v RK1). He found that a digitally altered image — her face on a body that wasn’t hers — didn’t meet the legal definition either, writing that he couldn’t “shoehorn images into a definition simply because I find the photographs deplorable.” He called the conduct “morally reprehensible and, frankly, obscene.” Not criminal. Those are different things in law, even when they shouldn’t feel different at all.
I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it’s the actual headline here, more than the Edmonton case itself.
These boys can be charged with the most serious offence in our Criminal Code because their alleged victims were minors. If they’d done the exact same thing to a 19-year-old former classmate, the prosecution would currently be on much shakier ground. There’s a bill in Parliament right now — Bill C-16 — that would close that gap by rewriting the intimate images law to explicitly include AI-generated content. It hasn’t passed yet. As of right now, in June 2026, an adult woman victimized this exact same way has less legal protection than a 13-year-old does.
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the current state of Canadian law.
A few things I think everyone needs to actually understand:
This is not “boys being boys.” Const. Stephanie Bosh, who led the Edmonton investigation, said it well: “It is very illegal and very predatory to do something like this. You will be held accountable, even if you’re a kid yourself.” I’ve spent enough years in courtrooms to know how easily this kind of thing gets minimized in conversation — it’s just an app, it’s not even a real photo, boys are curious, kids don’t understand consequences. All of that is exactly the kind of thinking that lets harm multiply before anyone takes it seriously. The harm to a victim doesn’t care whether the image is “real.” Her body wasn’t violated, but her safety, her dignity, and her sense of control over her own image absolutely were.
The age of the person doing this does not protect them the way people assume. The Youth Criminal Justice Act (aka the YCJA) governs how young offenders move through the system — it shapes process, privacy of records, and rehabilitation focus. It does not erase the offence. A 14-year-old facing a CSAM charge is facing something real, with real consequences, even within a youth justice framework designed differently than adult court.
If your child’s image has been used this way, or you suspect it has — move fast, and don’t pay anyone who promises to “remove it” for a fee. Report to Cybertip.ca. If your child is under 18, use NeedHelpNow.ca and the Take It Down tool, which can stop images from spreading before they multiply further. Preserve everything — screenshots, usernames, timestamps — before anything gets deleted or an account disappears. And go to police specifically asking for the Internet Child Exploitation unit. Not every officer who answers the phone will know exactly how to handle this. ICE units do.
If you work with kids — teachers, counsellors, coaches — this is now part of your job, whether anyone trained you for it or not. Researchers at Stanford found that the majority of teachers have received zero guidance on how to handle AI-generated intimate image incidents. Staff Sgt. Church called this case “the tip of the iceberg.” I believe her. The data backs it up — a Canadian survey released in late 2025 found that 1 in 6 teen victims of online sexual victimization had experienced exactly this: someone making a fake nude or sexual image of them.
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
We built a legal system that, almost by accident, currently protects a 13-year-old from this more thoroughly than it protects a 25-year-old. Not because lawmakers decided children deserve more protection than adults — though arguably they should — but because the AI-CSAM law happened to already be broad enough, and the adult intimate images law happened not to be.
That’s not justice working as intended. That’s justice working by coincidence.
Parliament is trying to fix the adult-side gap right now with Bill C-16. It hasn’t passed. Until it does, if you’re an adult woman dealing with this exact violation, your legal options are murkier than they should be — though far from nonexistent, and there are still real paths forward, including provincial civil remedies in several provinces that move faster than criminal court ever could.
If anything in this piece applies to you or someone you know — whether you’re 14 or 40 — you don’t have to figure out what applies to your situation alone. That’s exactly the kind of question I help people work through.
All details about the Edmonton case are drawn from ALERT’s public statements and reporting; the allegations are unproven and the accused are protected under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Cases referenced:
R v Sharpe, 2001 SCC 2.
R v Jarvis, 2019 SCC 10.
R v Downes, 2023 SCC 6.
R c Larouche, 2023 QCCQ 1853.
R v MSK, 2026 NSPC 12.
R v RK1, 2025 ONCJ 542.
Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act (introduced December 9, 2025; not yet passed as of writing)