In the News

As proud as I am to represent South Florida in the House of Representatives, the job closest to my heart is being a mother to my nine-year-old twins and my five-year-old daughter. As one of only a handful of mothers with young children in Congress, I can assure you that I have no higher priority in Washington than protecting our children from harm. Parents and teachers already know our children are growing up in a completely different world than we did. The Internet and the latest technologies provide our children with wonderful opportunities to learn in ways my generation never had. But they also present dangers my generation never had to consider.

In 2007, a very special group of parents called the Surviving Parents Coalition came to meet with me in Washington. These parents share a tragic bond: each of them had children who were abducted, sexually assaulted, and worse. Many of their children will never come home. I listened to one mother, Erin Runnion, describe how her eight-year-old daughter, Samantha, was abducted from her front yard in broad daylight when a stranger asked her for help finding his lost puppy. When I thought of my own youngest daughter, her innocent, helpful nature, and her love for dogs, I feared that she, too, might be susceptible to the same type of ruse.

However, as parents, our worries can no longer be confined to the dangers and strangers our children might encounter on the street. Another mother, Mary Kozakiewicz, told me how her daughter Alicia’s predator came for her through her computer, disguised as a teenager in an Internet chat room.

Over a period of months, Alicia was “groomed” by a forty-year-old man pretending to be a teenage girl. He preyed on her insecurities and got inside her head. Only thirteen years old at the time, Alicia agreed to meet her teenage cyber-friend “in real life.” When she walked outside to meet her new friend, she was kidnapped from her suburban Pittsburgh driveway and driven to Virginia, where her adult male captor locked her in his dungeon and performed unspeakable sexual acts upon her for days and broadcast it over the Internet. Just when Alicia had given up all hope, she was rescued by FBI agents. The FBI found her because the Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task force had the technology to lift the digital fingerprints of this crime and discover the location where he held her captive, chained to the floor.

The Internet is a wonderful tool. It has opened up the world for our children. But it has also opened up our children to the world. Simply put, it’s not enough anymore to teach our children only how to handle strangers on the street. We must also teach them how to handle strangers on the Web. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that the Internet is now a bigger draw to our children than television. They reported a survey that found that eighty-three percent of children between the ages of ten and fourteen spend more than an hour on the Internet each day. Only sixty-eight percent spent that much time in front of a television.

The good news is that there are things we can do to protect our children online. To successfully combat child exploitation, we must be successful in three critical areas. Like a three-legged stool, we need a balanced approach to all three. If we neglect any one of them, the stool will fall.

The first leg of this approach is technology. My nine-year-olds have been online for years. So has my five-year old. As a parent, I take some comfort in the fact that I have installed parental control software on my home computers. But technology is constantly advancing, and we need to make sure we take advantage of these tools. From filtering software to educational video games, there are more ways than ever for children and parents to keep themselves safe online. With the proliferation of cell phones, Blackberries, iPhones, and other mobile devices, children of all ages now access the Internet from places besides their home computers. We must ensure our online safety strategies keep up with technology and the ways our children access the Internet and interact with others online.

The second leg of the stool is education. Parents will not always be there to keep their kids safe, and technology might not always be able to keep up. Predators and others who mean harm may always be able to outsmart parental controls. Our next-best line of defense is education. This year, I held several online safety education events at middle schools in my congressional district that teach both parents and children how to recognize the “grooming” process – or the process by which online predators try to gain children’s faith and trust. Furthermore, as the recent MySpace cyber-bullying suicide case in Missouri shows, online dangers are hardly limited to sexual predators. Children need to learn how to respond to cyber-bullying and how to be safer by not revealing too much about themselves on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.

The final leg of this stool is law enforcement. When technology and education fail us, we must ensure that we have a strong law enforcement safety net to fall back on. As I have learned over the last several years, this safety net did not exist. Our children are at risk because they can get unintentionally swept up in the booming multi-billion dollar online child pornography industry. Tragically, the demand in this criminal market can only be supplied by graphic new images of abuse. These new images can be supplied only through the sexual assault of new victims and more children. This is a market that treats our most precious ones as sexual commodities. It is beyond disgusting.

A 2005 Justice Department study found that eighty percent of child pornography possessors have images and videos of children being sexually penetrated. Another twenty-one percent possess images of bondage, sadistic abuse and torture. The children depicted in these photos are very young. There are even websites that provide live “pay-per-view” rape of very young children. This is not protected speech. These images are crime scene photos that are 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 House Judiciary Committee hearing last year that there are nearly 500,000 identified individuals in the United States trafficking child pornography on the Internet.

What shocked me most, and what compelled me to get involved in this issue, is that due to a lack of resources at the local, state, and federal level, law enforcement is investigating fewer than two percent of these known 500,000 individuals. Law enforcement knows who these individuals are, and they know where they are; they are just too overwhelmed to respond. Even more shocking is that it is estimated that if we were to investigate these cases, we could actually rescue child victims nearly thirty percent of the time. Think about that. That means there are thousands of children out there in America – just like Alicia – just waiting to be rescued.

As a mother, this broke my heart. As a Member of Congress, I felt compelled to act. Last year, I was proud to file a bill, the PROTECT Our Children Act, with one of my personal heroes, a giant in the Senate, and now our Vice President-elect: Joe Biden. The bill passed both the House and the Senate and became law on October 13, 2008. This new law will help provide the safety net we currently lack, and so desperately need, by giving us the resources and the coordination to bring online child predators to justice. The PROTECT Our Children Act created statutory authority for the same highly successful ICAC task forces that saved Alicia’s live, and so many more like her. The new law will make sure we supplement the local ICAC effort with hundreds of new federal agents at the Department of Justice, who will be solely dedicated to crimes against children. We authorized hundreds of millions of dollars to fund these state, local, and federal efforts and ensure that these critical ICAC task forces have every resource they need.

The bill also set us on a new course by creating a National Strategy for Child Exploitation Prevention. We learned last year that the Federal government’s child exploitation interdiction efforts have been disjointed and haphazard at best. The Department of Justice will now be required to develop, implement and publish a national strategy to help garner all of our nation’s collective resources to combat this growing problem. The legislation also requires the Department to designate one high-level official responsible for this strategy and to be accountable to Congress. I believe we will not only begin to stamp out the scourge of online child pornography, but that we will also save the lives of real children who have inadvertently become tangled in this sinister side of the Web.

Of course, we can never fully eliminate the threats and dangers to our children when they go online. When I tuck my children in at night, I feel comforted by the fact that my husband and I have educated ourselves about tools we can use to protect our children and that we have educated our kids about being safe online. But I feel more secure knowing that we are putting in place this law enforcement safety net and that the United States government is now dedicating more resources and exerting greater effort to combating child exploitation. It is my profound hope that other parents, not only in Florida but all across this country, will educate themselves and their children and find a similar sense of security.

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FOOT NOTES:

1) Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the United States Representative for Florida’s 20th Congressional District. She serves on the House Committee on Appropriations and the House Committee on the Judiciary. Rep. Wasserman Schultz and Sen. Joseph Biden were the lead sponsors of H.R. 3845/S.1738, the Providing Resources, Officers, and Technology to Eliminate Cyber-Threats to Our Children Act (PROTECT Our Children Act) in the 110th Congress. The bill became public law on October 13, 2008. Rep. Wasserman Schultz attended the University of Florida and graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science in 1988 and with a Master’s Degree in 1990. She has been married to Steve Schultz for seventeen years and together they have three children. She is proud to call South Florida home, where she resides with her family in Weston.

2) Alex Mindlin, Preferring the Web Over Watching TV, N.Y. TIMES, August 25, 2008, at C3.

3) Id.

4) Id.

5) Cyber-bullying is the use of the Internet to harm or scare others through deliberate, repeated hostile behavior.

6) Janis Wolak, David Finkelhor & Kimberly J. Mitchell, Child Pornography Possessors Arrested in Internet-Related Crimes: Findings From the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Alexandria, VA), 2005 at 5.

7) Id.

8) Sex Crimes and the Internet: Hearing Before the H. Comm. on the Judiciary, 110th Cong. 60 (2007) (statement of Flint Waters, Special Agent, Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force).

9) Id. at 45.

10) See Providing Resources, Officers, and Technology To Eradicate Cyber Threats to Our Children Act of 2008, Pub. L. No. 110-401, 122 Stat. 4229.