PROTECT Act Will Combat Child Exploitation Online – Legislation authored by Rep. Wasserman Schultz passes House, will crack down on child pornographers

(Washington, DC)  —  Today, the PROTECT Our Children Act, authored by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) passed the U.S. House of Representatives. PROTECT (H.R. 3845) was introduced in October in the House of Representatives to build a strong nationwide network of highly trained law enforcement experts to track down these offenders and put them away.

“We need to think of this as a war,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL-20). “A war we must wage against sex predators, a war for our children. This legislation would train federal, state and local police forces to lift the digital fingerprints left by child sex predators so they can be put behind bars.”

The PROTECT Act takes a bold step forward in addressing the growing problem of child exploitation. The Department of Justice and the FBI have testified before Congress that child exploitation is growing rapidly. New investigative techniques have allowed law enforcement to identify nearly 500,000 individuals trafficking child pornography over the Internet. Due to the lack of resources at the Federal, state and local level, we are investigating only 2% of the known offenders. Research shows that if we were to investigate these cases we could rescue a victim of child exploitation thirty percent of the time.

“What compelled me to introduce my legislation is that in many cases children only have the law to protect them,” said Rep. Wasserman Schultz. “Kids can’t make sure that their parents watch them, and they certainly can’t fight off an adult who seeks to do them harm. All children have are their family and the law, but in cases where the family either knowingly or unknowingly fails our children then the only protection that they have at the end of the day is the law.”

“Rep. Wasserman Schultz got a billion dollar child protection bill passed in the House in less than a month. We’re still shaking our heads at what a huge heart and nerves of steel can pull off in Washington,” said Grier Weeks, executive director of the National Association to Protect Children.

The bill will create a Special Counsel within the Department of Justice to plan and coordinate child exploitation prosecution efforts. The bill also builds upon the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program to ensure that we have at least one cyber unit in each state dedicated to these cases.

Specifically, the legislation will authorize $1.05 billion over the next eight years for:

• ICAC Grant Program – The Attorney General will be required to establish a formula grant program for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program, funded at $60 million for FY 2008, increasing to $100 million in FY 2015. This will ensure that local agencies have the additional resources necessary to create robust cyber units with highly trained investigators.

• Increased Federal Agents – The bill will authorize over $40 million per year over the next eight years for 250 new federal agents at the FBI, and the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement Agency. These new agents will be dedicated to child exploitation cases.

• Increased Forensic Capacity – $7 million per year to establish increased forensic capacity for child exploitation cases at the Regional Computer Forensic Labs (RCFL).

Companion legislation (S. 1738) was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Biden (DE) and Boxer (CA).

Last month, during testimony at a Judiciary Committee Hearing on Sex Crimes and the Internet, Alicia Kozakiewicz, who survived, and transcended, her own experience as a child victim of an Internet predator said the following: “Please support Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s bill (H.R. 3845) and Senator Joseph Biden’s companion bill (S. 1738). Support the children, save us from pedophiles; the pornographers, the monsters. The boogie man is real and he lives on the net. He lived on my computer and he lives in yours. While you are sitting here, he’s at home with your children. ICAC task forces all over this country are poised to capture him, to put him in that prison cell with the man who hurt me. They can do it, they want to do it, don’t you?”