Protecting America's Most Vulnerable
By Ray Ross, Respect Life Ministry
On March 3rd Senator Josh Hawley chaired a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled “Lost and Exploited: Confronting Child Trafficking and the Failure to Protect America’s Most Vulnerable.”
The hearing focused on the growing failure to protect our children particularly those under the age of twelve who are being exploited through the internet and the massive circulation of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
One witness testified that they work from a database that has grown to include 465 million images and videos of sexually abused children. Another mother testified that her daughter was abused as a baby 25 years ago and that the images and videos of that abuse has spread across thousands of servers. When she contacted Google to stop the searches for those images and abuses, their response was that she needed to contact each individual web master to have the media removed. Google didn’t want to help.
Tim Tebow is the CEO of the Tim Tebow Foundation here in Florida. He testified that over six months the DOJ has build a map of 338,000 different IP addresses responsible for downloading, sharing and distributing child rape images.
Staca Sheehan, Analytics VP for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children testified that they have over 226 million exploitation reports including 305,000 trafficking related reports from last year. The average age of a trafficked child is 15 and most are girls.
In short, this is a massive problem and only getting worse. The internet and existing law which grants internet providers immunity plays a significant role. Finding and freeing these abused children is a huge challenge and requires resources, technology and funding.
As Catholics we Respect Life and we are called to defend the most vulnerable. We know that child trafficking is a significant issue here in Florida and we can assume it is going on right here in Venice and the surrounding communities. On March 21, Our Lady of Lourdes hosted the movie, The Sound of Freedom which was an excellent step in educating the members of our parish.
Thinking about what we can do as Knights, I immediately thought of the work that Deacon Peter does at Laurel Civic in caring for at-risk children through after school tutoring, summer programs and nutritional programs as well as educational programs for parents. Laurel Civic’s upcoming Summer Teen Empowerment Program; for example, is designed to reach and engage teens to become lifelong learners and leaders. This is an amazing program. Run by one of our own. Shouldn’t we consider providing more assistance to Deacon Peter and Laurel Civic than we currently do?