Date: 2008-09-27
Speaker: WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. I rise today to urge my colleagues to support Senate bill 1738. the PROTECT Our Children Act of 2008. Mr. Speaker. I dont have to tell you that children today are growing up in a completely different world than we did. Our children have wonderful opportunities to learn in ways that we never had. but there are also dangers our generation never had to consider. The Internet has facilitated an exploding multibillion dollar market for child pornography. Tragically. the demand for this criminal market can only be supplied by graphic new images. and these images can only be supplied through the sexual assault ofmore children. This bill. like its House companion. H.R. 3845. that passed the House overwhelmingly last November. addresses an issue that is central to the goals and vision of Speaker NANCY PELOSI and the New Direction Congress. protecting our children. The Internet is a truly wonderful tool. It has opened up the world for our children. but it has also opened up our children to the world. A year ago. in June. I visited with a very special group of parents called the Surviving Parents Coalition. and I was not prepared for what they had to tell me. They shared with me their own horrific stories of how their children were abducted by sexual predators. As we all know. some of these children will never come home. As the mother of three young children myself. their stories broke my heart. And as a Member of Congress. I felt compelled to act. What surprised me most about these brave parents was their message. they told me that if we wanted to prevent predators from hurting other children like theirs. that the way to do it is to go back through the Internet and get them. A 2005 Justice Department study found that 80 percent of child pornography possessors have images and videos of children being sexually .penetrated. another 21 percent possess images of bondage. sadistic abuse. and torture. The children depicted in these photos are very young. There are even Web sites that provide live payperview rates of very young children. These images are crime scene photos created by a thriving industry that uses children as sexual commodities. Special Agent Flint Waters of the Wyoming State Police. a highly respected child exploitation investigator. testified at a Judiciary Committee hearing last year that there are nearly 500.000 identified individuals in the United States trafficking child pornography on the Internet. Thats half a million people right here in the United States. And law enforcement knows who they are and they know where they are. But what shocked me the most and what compelled me to get involved in this issue is that. due to a lack of resources. law enforcement is investigating less than 2 percent of these known 500.000 individuals. And make no mistake. law enforcement knows where they are. they just dont have the resources to go get them. Even more shocking is that it is estimated that if we were to investigate these cases. we could actually rescue a child victim nearly 30 percent of the time. Il 1745 Think about that. That means there are thousands of children out there in America just waiting to be rescued. .Alicia Kozakiewicz. whose testimony at last Octobers judiciary hearing moved all of us. is a living. breathing reminder of the lives that we can save. Alicia told us how over a period of months she was groomed by a 40yearold predator pretending to be a teenage girl. When Alicia. who was 13 years old at the time. agreed to meet her cyberfriend in real life. he kidnapped her from her suburban Pittsburgh driveway and held her captive in his Virginia dungeon where he performed unspeakable sexual acts upon her day after day and broadcast it over the Internet. Just when Alicia told us that she had given up all hope. she was rescued by FBI agents. The FBI found her because the Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. or ICAC. had the technology to lift the digital fingerprints of this perpetrators crimes and to discover the location where he had held her captive chained to the floor.