(LifeSiteNews) — Former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow testified before a congressional committee about the enormous presence of child sex trafficking in the U.S., including the widespread downloading, sharing, and distribution of child abuse and rape images under age 12, including infants.
Speaking before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, Tebow used a U.S. map to display the appalling pervasiveness of ongoing child sexual abuse and the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) across our nation.
He pointed to a national map riddled with bright clusters of red dots and explained that every dot represented someone who is downloading, sharing, or distributing rape images of children under age 12 — more than 338,000 unique IP addresses in all over just the last six months.
“And we know that 55% to 85% of them are also hands-on and we know that your average offender has 13 victims in their lifetime,” Tebow added.
Tebow shared how after launching “Operation Renewed Hope” two years ago with the aim of identifying and rescuing child abuse victims, the estimated number of victims has increased to over 89,000 kids within our borders.
“Every day we wait, they’re suffering. They’re crying,” he said. “And I believe right now many of them are praying that we would respond.”
The former NFL player was on Capitol Hill to urge members of Congress to pass the “Renewed Hope Act,” which would greatly expand the national rescue team of analysts and investigators.
“Will we actually accept the responsibility both of caring for these boys and girls and truly protecting them, or are we just going to continue to talk about it?” he told the congressional committee.
“There’s so much we can do. But the question is, ‘Will we?’” he asked.
At the opening of the March 3 hearing, Republican U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, the committee leader, explained that hundreds of thousands of children remain unidentified in global law enforcement databases.
“These are databases full of images of children who are bound, gagged, crying, exploited, and yet in thousands upon thousands of cases we don’t know who these children are, we don’t know where they are, and we don’t know where their abusers are,” Hawley said.
“These (images) are active crime scenes. Their abusers are still at large. In some cases, the abuse is still ongoing. What we lack is sufficient capacity to identify the victims and to get to them,” he noted.
Tebow famously launched “Operation Renewed Hope” in 2023 with the goal of rescuing children who are tortured and sexually abused for profit.
His organization expanded law enforcement’s analytical ability by hiring forensic review experts and investigators dedicated to reviewing digital images, identifying victims, identifying perpetrators, and then generating actionable leads for law enforcement.
“The worst moments of these children’s lives are being videotaped and they’re being shared with other offenders all over the world,” Tebow noted at the time. “Every time an image is downloaded, it creates a demand for these images and these videos. And the only way to meet that demand is with new victims.”
The unspeakable evil of child sexual exploitation, where an estimated two million kids around the world – infants, toddlers, 4- and 5-year-olds through their young teen years – are raped, sodomized, tortured, and threatened with death many times per day by depraved adults is not far away from any of us. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry and, to our great shame, the United States is the industry’s biggest consumer.
“We face an explosion of online child sex abuse material. More than 226 million reports have been made to the cyber tip line,” noted Hawley, who wondered, like Tebow, will the U.S. Congress “match the scale of the crisis with the scale of a response?”
