Hundreds of thousands of sexual predators are at large within the U.S. and law enforcement has the evidence to arrest and prosecute them. But officials estimate that they are able to investigate less than 2% of the 570,000 known child exploitation offenders, due to lack of resources. The Combating Child Exploitation Act, S. 1738 (House Bill HR 3845 Protect Our Children Act) will create the largest law enforcement army ever created for the protection of children, rescuing thousands of children from recurring sexual abuse. Officials estimate that in 30% of the child exploitation cases they have the resources to follow up on, a child victim is rescued. This leaves literally hundreds of thousands of children waiting for someone to rescue them from repeated sexual abuse.

At the core of this bill is technology that tracks and locates computers by their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and serial numbers. Using this technology, child pornography has been traced to more than 570,000 computers nationwide. These serial numbers can be used to obtain search warrants. Furthermore, this technology traces who is uploading images, who is downloading and how much. Using this technology, The ICAC data network logged 800,000 transactions in a 26 month period of a single movie of an eight year old girl being raped.

Please join the Surviving Parents Coalition in urging Congress to pass S.1738 to more than double current funding to increase the number of forensic labs, federal-state task forces and federal agents to combat child pornography. The bill, which passed the House 415-2 in November and is pending in the Senate, would spend $1.05 billion over eight years ($2 per child per year).

• URGE YOUR SENATORS TO SUPPORT S.1738.

This law is a full-disclosure bill that will require states to track and publicly report the practices of judges, prosecutors and law enforcement agencies regarding crimes against children. For example, the number of plea-bargains, sentence lengths, and verified locations of sex-offenders.