John Walsh, Lampson & House Lawmakers Pass Legislation to Protect Children

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John Walsh, Lampson & House Lawmakers Pass Legislation to Protect Children

John Walsh, Lampson & House Lawmakers Pass Legislation to Protect Children Lampson Legislation Puts Child Predators in Crosshairs, Aims to Make Communities and the Internet Safe for Children

Good news came today in the fight to keep America's kids safe from predators and pedophiles. The House voted to approve two bills by Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Stafford, that put child predators in crosshairs and aims to make children in America safer in their neighborhoods and on the internet.

"Child safety is a national priority," said Rep. Lampson, founder and co-chairman of the Congressional Missing & Exploited Children's Caucus. "Parents form the front line when it comes to keeping children safe, but child safety is a shared responsibility. The SAFE Act and NCMEC's reauthorization provide increased resources for law enforcement to capture, prosecute and incarcerate the worst of criminals that mean to harm our children."

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) Reauthorization, titled Protecting Our Children Comes First Act, H.R. 2517, will double the funding available for NCMEC, which has handled more than 137,600 missing child cases, 120,000 successfully, and more than 540,000 CyberTipline leads since 1984. This is the largest increase in funding for NCMEC in the agency's history.

"These important bills mean so much for the safety of children," said NCMEC co-founder John Walsh. "I thank Congressman Lampson and the other co-sponsors for their hard work and dedication to protecting America's greatest resource: our children," he said.

"It seems like every time I open the newspaper, I read another story of a child that has been victimized," said U.S. Representative Judy Biggert (R-IL-13), the lead Republican cosponsor of the bill. "Clearly more can and must be done. That's why it's so important that we give the National Center the tools and resources it needs to continue keeping our children safe."

H.R. 2517 will increase the previous authorization for NCMEC from $20 million to $40 million until 2013. NCMEC has seen a tremendous increase in the need for their services over the past two decades from law enforcement agencies and government agencies. The ubiquity of the internet has placed added strain on NCMEC's CyberTipline, which began in 1998 and has jumped from 3,500 reports its first year to more than 110,000 most recently.

"Child pornography on the internet has become a global epidemic," Rep. Lampson continued. "The playgrounds of yesterday are the chat rooms and websites of today. Predators break into our children's bedroom through cyberspace and coerce them into leaving the safety of their home for harmful situations."

Rep. Lampson's SAFE Act, Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, H.R. 3791, takes the battle of child pornography to internet service providers that host child pornography on their servers. The SAFE Act will increase safety for children online by providing law enforcement with improved resources and increasing the penalties for service providers that host child pornography on their servers.

Penalties for internet service providers (ISP) that fail to report incidences of child pornography increase from $50,000 to $150,000 for the first instance; and from $150,000 to $300,000 for each subsequent incident per day that the material is on the internet.

"The Internet, while providing a world of opportunity to our children, has also contributed to a worldwide expansion of child pornography - enabling predators to more easily abuse, exploit, and prey on our children," said Congressman Steve Chabot, a senior member of the House Judiciary Committee. "The SAFE Act will provide law enforcement with better tools and information to put child predators behind bars."

Both pieces of legislation will make great progress in fight to keep America's children safe and quell the recent surge of internet child pornography that has become a global epidemic.

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