Washington, DC, Aug 2 - The sexual abuse and exploitation of a child is one of the most despicable and vicious crimes conceivable. As a father of four, I feel strongly about doing everything we can to keep our children protected—especially from sexual predators. On July 27, 2006, the President signed into law a bill that takes important action to protect our vulnerable youth from these vile perpetrators. I am proud to have strongly supported the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act.

Every parent’s worst nightmare is having a child become the victim of a violent criminal or sexual predator. Tragically, this nightmare becomes reality for too many families. The law is named for Adam Walsh who went missing from a department store 25 years ago, and was later found murdered. Adam’s parents, John and Reve Walsh, turned their family’s tragedy into action, advocating for victims rights and missing children. This law will help prevent this nightmare for families by strengthening federal laws to protect our children from sexual and other violent crimes, prevent child pornography, and make the Internet safer for our sons and daughters.

More specifically, the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act will integrate the information in state sex offender registry systems and ensure that law enforcement has access to the same information across the United States, helping prevent sex offenders from evading detection by moving from state to state. Data drawn from this comprehensive registry will be made available to the public through the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website, which will allow people to search for sex offender information their community.

The law also imposes tough mandatory minimum penalties for the most serious crimes against children and increases penalties for crimes such as sex trafficking of children and child prostitution. Grants to States are provided to help them institutionalize sex offenders who have shown they cannot change their behavior and are about to be released from prison.

New regional Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforces have been authorized to provide funding and training to help State and local law enforcement combat crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors on the Internet.

Further, it creates a new national child abuse registry and requires investigators to conduct background checks on adoptive and foster parents before they are granted custody of a child. By giving child protective service professionals in all 50 States access to this critical information, we will improve their ability to investigate child abuse cases and help ensure that vulnerable children are not put into situations of abuse or neglect.

This law is in line with a section of the AMBER Alert law that I authored requiring the Department of Justice to review the background approval process for volunteers of child related organizations. This pilot program requires the Attorney General’s office to look at the current state of fingerprinting technology and the federal and state governments’ capacity to perform these checks.

As a district judge for 20 years, I put criminals behind bars so our children might live in a safer world. Enacting this law sends a clear message that those who prey on our children will be caught, prosecuted, and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Since coming to Congress, I have worked to protect our nation’s children, and I will continue that fight for the safety of every vulnerable child.

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