If you are facing child luring charges, you need a criminal defence lawyer in Calgary to look at your case as soon as possible.

Child luring is a serious criminal offence in Canada that involves communicating with someone under 18 years old for the purpose of committing another offence against them.

  • More specifically, the law says this is when an adult uses the internet, texting, or other digital communication to contact a young person in order to facilitate sexual offences, abduction, or child pornography offences.
  • This law applies even if the person being communicated with is actually an undercover police officer pretending to be a child. The offender only needs to believe they are talking to someone under 18.
  • Child luring is a hybrid offence, meaning the Crown prosecutor can choose to treat it as either an indictable offence (more serious) or a summary offence (less serious).
  • If prosecuted as an indictable offence, child luring carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison with a mandatory minimum sentence of one year. If prosecuted summarily, it carries a maximum of two years with a mandatory minimum of six months.
  • A conviction also results in mandatory registration as a sex offender and may include additional restrictions on internet use and contact with minors after release.

Strategic Criminal Defence is a top Google-rated criminal defence firm in Calgary, with over 500 5-star reviews. Our firm, and our experienced legal team, have defended clients in over 10,000 criminal cases. Leveraging our extensive network of lawyers and decades of experience, we craft defence strategies to help those accused of child luring beat the charge.

The lawyers at Strategic Criminal Defence are both highly experienced and dedicated to defending your rights and future in the face of these charges. Contact a lawyer today by calling (403) 719-6410.

Key Takeaways

  • Child luring is when you use technology to talk to someone under 18 for sexual purposes.
  • Even if you think you’re talking to a minor but are really talking to an undercover officer, you are still committing the crime.
  • This is a serious hybrid offence that can be charged as either a summary or an indictable offence.
  • There are mandatory minimum sentences:
    • one year in prison if the crime is indictable
    • and six months if it is summary.
  • In the worst cases the maximum punishment is 14 years in prison.
  • Conditions of bail usually don’t allow you to use the internet, talk to kids, and require you to be monitored electronically.
  • You are likely to have to give up your electronic devices and stay away from places where children gather.
  • With the right legal help, you can defend these charges.
  • Some possible defences are entrapment, not having criminal intent, or taking reasonable steps to check someone’s age.
  • If you are convicted, you have to register as a sex offender and face long-term restrictions.

How Our Lawyers Help With a Child Luring Charge

If you are being charged with child luring, a Strategic Criminal Defence lawyer can help.

  • We can protect your rights by making sure the police don’t break the law when asking the details about your messaging and internet history.
  • We can gather important digital evidence. This includes full conversation logs and/or context that might help everyone understand what you really meant or how hard you tried to prove their age.
  • Our lawyers are experienced with child luring cases and know how to question evidence which comes from undercover operations, or argue that they could have been engaging in entrapment.
  • We provide skilled representation during trials, examining the prosecution’s proof of what you knew, what you meant, and what the communications really were.

Examples of Child Luring Charges

In Calgary, the following situations could lead to charges of child luring: 

  • On social media, a 35-year-old man contacts a girl he believes to be 14 years old. He proposes they have sex together. The fact that the girl is actually an adult police officer working undercover is irrelevant, because he believed he was talking to a minor, and he is charged with child luring.
  • While playing an online game, a thirty year old woman chats with a thirteen-year-old boy. Over the course of several weeks, she sends him sexual pictures, tries to convince him to meet her alone, and moves their conversations to private messaging. Charges of child luring result from the boy’s parents calling the police after discovering the messages.
  • An adult texts a 15-year-old neighbour, offering money and gifts in exchange for having sex. These messages are discovered when the teen’s parent looks through their phone, and the adult is accused of child luring.

Consequences of a Child Luring Charge

If you are charged with child luring, you could face serious legal consequences that could change your life forever. 

  • Child luring is a hybrid offence. In other words, the Crown prosecutor can choose to go ahead with an indictment (for more serious cases) or a summary conviction (for less serious cases). This choice has an effect on the possible punishments you could get.
  • If child luring is charged as an indictable crime, the minimum sentence is one year in prison. The longest possible sentence is 14 years in prison. This means that everyone who is found guilty must spend at least one year in prison, even if it is their first time.
  • If someone is charged with a summary conviction offence, they must serve at least six months in jail. The longest sentence is two years in prison.
  • In addition to these immediate punishments, being found guilty of child luring means that you have to register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Information Registration Act for at least 10 years and maybe even for the rest of your life.
  • The court will probably also put strict conditions on your probation after you get out, such as not being able to use the internet or be near places where kids hang out.
  • A conviction also leaves a permanent criminal record that makes it very hard to find work, may keep you from travelling abroad, and often leads to lasting social stigma even after you have served your time.

Child Luring Charge Defences

If you’ve been accused of child luring, there are ways to protect yourself. You can fight these charges in court if you have the right legal strategy, even though they are very serious.

Our lawyers can help determine which of these potential defences could apply to your situation.

  • Reasonable Steps to Verify Age: The law knows that people can lie about their age online, so it requires reasonable steps to check age. If you can show that you did everything you could to check the age of the person you were talking to, this might be a good defence. Asking for ID, video chatting to see how someone looks, or asking specific questions about experiences related to age are all examples of steps that might be reasonable. Most of the time, just asking “are you over 18?” often isn’t enough.
  • No Plan to Commit a Crime: The  prosecution must show that you planned to do something illegal, like making child pornography. You might have a defence if you talked to a young person in a way that was maybe inappropriate but you have evidence that it was not not meant to commit these crimes.
  • Entrapment: The police often do undercover work where they pretend to be kids online. You might have an entrapment defence if the police pushed or tricked you into doing something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Child Luring Charge Investigation

  • Police officers sometimes pretend to be teens on social media, dating apps, or chat rooms to find adults who want to have inappropriate contact with them.
  • If the police think someone is trying to lure a minor, they collect all the digital messages that the suspect and the young person send to each other.
  • This includes texting, using social media, and/or talking on dating apps. They look for messages that show the adult thought they were talking to a child and wanted to meet for sex or asked for sexual things like private pictures.
  • Investigators will check their computers and online accounts. Digital forensic experts look for signs of conversations with the minor and patterns of similar behaviour with other young people on phones, computers, and tablets.
  • Police also gather proof of the suspect’s identity, such as IP address logs, account details, and device IDs, to prove who sent the messages. They might talk to the young person who was involved and anyone who saw the messages.

Bail Conditions for Child Luring Charges

If you’re charged with child luring, you may be able to get out on bail while you wait for your trial, but the rules will be very strict: 

  • Most of the time, the biggest restriction is that you can’t use the internet.  This includes smart TVs, gaming consoles, tablets, smartphones, and computers. You may be allowed very limited access to the internet under strict supervision in very rare cases when you need it for work.
  • You won’t be able to talk to the alleged victim or anyone else under 18 years old. This means you can’t talk to kids directly or indirectly in any way. You won’t be able to go to places where kids hang out, like schools, playgrounds, community centres, and public pools.
  • The court will probably make you give up all of your electronic devices that weren’t already taken during the investigation.
  • You might have to give up your passport to stop travelling outside the country, and you will have to check in with the police or a bail supervisor on a regular basis, sometimes as often as three times a week.
  • If you break any of these rules, you could be charged with a different crime for not following a release order, and you will probably have to go back to jail until your trial.

For more information, visit our page on The Bail Hearing Process in Calgary.

Frequently Asked Questions

When someone uses telecommunications (like the internet, texting, or phone calls) to talk to someone under 18 years old with the intent of committing another crime against them, this is called child luring. Some of these crimes are sexual exploitation, sexual assault, child pornography, and/or kidnapping. You don’t have to actually meet the young person or commit the crime for the law to apply. Just talking to them with the intent of helping one of these crimes is enough. You can still be charged if you thought you were talking to a child, even if the person you were talking to was actually an adult (like an undercover officer).

If you thought someone was over 18 when they weren’t, that doesn’t automatically protect you from child luring charges. Section 172.1(4) of the Criminal Code says that you can only use “reasonable steps” to check someone’s age as a defence if you thought they were older than they really were. Just asking someone “how old are you?” or believing what they say about their age isn’t usually enough.

Child luring is when you talk to a minor with the specific goal of helping another crime listed in the Criminal Code, like sexual interference, inviting sexual touching, or child pornography. If you talk to someone under 18 in a way that isn’t appropriate, it might not be child luring if you don’t mean to commit or help commit these specific crimes.