Time to end the nightmare

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: protecting children.

A quick word of caution. The following story is one in which parents may want to come back to later on out of the earshot of young children. You can fast forward about 6 minutes to continue with today’s program if you’re concerned about that. [PAUSE]

NICK EICHER, HOST: 50,000 children world-wide—and maybe more—are victims of a heartbreaking form of exploitation. It begins with an act of abuse, but then lives on because the perpetrator records the moment of abuse and uploads videos or photographs of the crime for sale. The dark web has made the spread of this material difficult to control.

REICHARD: Last week, former football star Tim Tebow was on Capitol Hill to bring attention to the problem. A panel of child-welfare advocates and law enforcement agents joined with him to ask Congress to do more about it. WORLD’s Paul Butler has the story.

TIM TEBOW: Why we're here today is to talk about the MVP…Not the MVP most of you are probably thinking, No…a more important MVP, the most vulnerable people.

PAUL BUTLER: Tim Tebow speaking to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance last Wednesday. He and three experts were there to testify about the growth of online distributed child sexual abuse material…known by the acronym: “C-SAM.”

Representative Andrew Biggs of Arizona is committee chairman and hosted the hearing:

ANDREW BIGGS: We must bring attention…to these innocent victims, these children who are living in the shadows, longing to be discovered and rescued. We must not shy away from hard topics and hard conversations, we have got to do better…

The internet has led to an exponential growth in the number of victims and spread of C-SAM as it provides an immediate distribution channel for the content. Jim Cole is a retired special agent with Homeland Security Investigations.

JIM COLE: The horrific rape on video by her own father and in minutes is available on a dark net Child Exploitation site with over a million members. In under an hour that child's worst moments are downloaded by thousands of offenders around the globe. In 24 hours that numbers 10s of thousands.

But technology alone is not to blame. Past attempts to address child sexual abuse led to policy with unintended consequences.

Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention Act in 1974. It created a two track reporting structure for sexual abuse. Camille Cooper is an anti-trafficking advocate and vice president with the Tim Tebow foundation.

CAMILLE COOPER: If you are raped by your neighbor, your case goes to law enforcement. If you are raped by a parent or caretaker, your case goes to social services, and you get a social worker instead of a cop. This is a diversion program for child rapists. This law acted as an incentive to grow your own victims, so that you wouldn't go to jail. Most of the images are being produced by fathers, family members, and child offenders within the child's circle of trust.

Much of the current CSAM enforcement focuses on those who download or distribute the materials. But law enforcement is slowly changing its focus to do something to rescue the unknown children in the images and videos.

They’re no longer waiting for sexual abuse reporting from victims, but being proactive, searching for clues in the published materials that might tip off law enforcement as to the victim’s whereabouts. Once again Jim Cole:

COLE: This methodology emphasizes uncovering new material and focusing on innocuous clues hidden within the…multimedia content, shifting the priority to finding and safeguarding victims instead of just putting offenders in jail.

Artificial Intelligence has led to an increase in exploitative content—as creators can so easily create deep fakes and revenge porn. But AI has also proven to be an incredible tool for Cole and his team to analyze actual abuse images and video for clues.

COLE: We are buried in an ocean of data … that is just impossible for human beings to manually go through to find the relationships. To find the victims. To find the offenders. The goal of the victim identification lab at C3, our mission statement is to conduct advanced analytics on multimedia files of child sexual exploitation material to identify and rescue the child or children, identify and apprehend the offender or offenders, and identify and locate the crime scene.

Law enforcement and legislators are seeking assistance from big tech in the fight against CSAM. Many are inexplicably hesitant to help. John Madsen is board president for a law enforcement lobbying group:

JOHN MATSEN: And when platforms can turn a blind eye to the content, then that's troubling…If the same things were happening in a physical world environment, then we would shut that down. We would, there's all kinds of things that would happen. But because it's in a virtual space…parents are helpless to hold anyone accountable.

Non-government agencies like the Tim Tebow Foundation have helped identify and rescue hundreds of children working with the FBI, Homeland Security, and INTERPOL.

Last fall the U.S. Senate passed a bipartisan bill that would fund and reauthorize the Project Safe Childhood Act of 2006. It’s intended to counteract some of the problems of the 1974 law mentioned earlier, as well as develop better coordination on child sexual exploitation cases across federal, state, and local law enforcement. It is currently in committee in the U.S. House.

For Tim Tebow, he’s motivated by his faith to do what he can to raise awareness and support efforts to rescue these vulnerable and exploited children.

TEBOW: Every single one of those boys and girls is worth us answering the call and doing everything we can so that they can experience the faith, hope and love that they deserve. Not the bondage and torture that they're in right now. I believe if we build that rescue team, we will have a chance of getting to every one of those boys and girls. We have to do more than just talk about it.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Paul Butler.

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