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Safeguarding Children from Online Predators
By Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
June 13, 2006
The invention, and subsequent expansion, of the Internet has completely transformed our world. It has changed the way we do business, the way we pay our bills and get information about our health care, the way we stay in touch with our friends and families. And the tremendous effect of the Internet on our day to day lives has certainly extended to our children. With little more than a mouse and a keyboard, students have access to educational tools and resources that just a few years ago, teachers could only dream of. A high school senior writing his final research paper can search millions of archived articles in a matter of minutes. A middle school student in Pennsylvania can have a conversation with one in Barcelona. The possibilities are endless, the potential benefits extraordinary.
But while we need to harness all the prospective good that the Internet can do for our children, it is critical that we recognize, and combat, the dangers that come with it as well.
In some respects, the Internet is an unrestrained medium. Children can access images and information that may be entirely unsuitable and potentially destructive--images and information that, offline, they are protected from. It is also an anonymous medium, meaning that those who wish our children harm are free to interact with them under any pretense they choose--a thirty-year old man can pose as a teenage boy, and in most cases, no one will be the wiser.
In recent hearings, Congress has heard disturbing and saddening accounts of how such predators have used these aspects of the Internet to exploit our children. We have all seen the troubling headlines coming out of Pennsylvania and states across the country, and the frequency of these abhorrent crimes seems to be increasing. While the statistics show that the prosecutions in child pornography and child abuse cases have increased nearly every year, we know that there is more to be done to protect our children, and it must be done now.
Thankfully, the Justice Department (DOJ) has recognized the need for a new, expanded approach to preventing and punishing online predators. In February, DOJ launched Project Safe Childhood, an initiative to “combat the proliferation of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation crimes against children.” Congress must support the bold and necessary steps taken by the DOJ, and in order to mandate that we do, I introduced the Project Safe Childhood Act.
My bill will authorize and expand Project Safe Childhood. It will add new elements regarding child exploitation crimes, steps like requiring warning labels on commercial websites that contain sexually explicit material, and strengthening the requirements to effectively report child pornography. Appropriately, it will increase penalties for registered sex offenders, child sex trafficking and sexual abuse, and other child exploitation crimes. And to prevent the frequency of such heinous crimes, it will establish Children’s Safety Online Awareness Campaigns and authorize grants for online child safety programs.
All of us, particularly those of us with children, want to know how to keep America’s children safe. And we want to know that anyone that endangers or harms our children will be punished, and punished severely. I am the proud father of six children, and there is nothing I take more seriously than keeping them from harm. That is what this bill is all about--ensuring that our kids in Pennsylvania, and the millions of children like them across this nation, are safe from one of the greatest dangers they face. I call on my colleagues in the Senate to pass this critical legislation, and pass it now.
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