Congressman Morgan Griffith
Recently, I attended a Republican Whip meeting where Tim Tebow and members of his organization stopped by to say hello to Members of Congress – Tebow was testifying the next day at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on child sexual abuse. One of the women who was with him was a familiar face, Camille Cooper, now the Vice President of Anti-Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation at the Tim Tebow Foundation.
When we first crossed paths, I was in the Virginia House of Delegates and Camille was working to help Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown, who assisted with the formation of the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program.
The ICAC Task Force Program was formed in 1998 in response to the growing number of children and teens using the internet, the growing number of child predators using the internet in an effort to contact and exploit underage persons, and the explosion of child sexual abuse images available online.
The Program was started by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), which works in conjunction with a national network of coordinated task forces, made up of local, state, and federal law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies.
Today, there are 61 task forces throughout the country. Sheriff Mike Brown helped start the Southern Virginia (SOVA) ICAC Task Force when the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office was selected as one of the first ten task forces in the nation in 1998.
Originally called “Operation Blue Ridge Thunder,” the task force covered all of Virginia and West Virginia.
Today, the SOVA-ICAC Task Force covers from far Southwest Virginia to the Delmarva Peninsula on the Eastern Shore and north to Greene County.
Since 1998, the ICAC program has led to more than 134,000 arrests nationwide, based on complaints referred to the program. In 2019 (latest data available), the SOVA-ICAC arrested 291 individuals, identified and/or recused 129 child victims, and examined 745,911 gigabytes for digital evidence.
Though a real and ever-growing threat to our children, the internet and internet related crimes were still relatively new in 1998.
Knowing the importance of the task force, I fought to get funding for Sheriff Brown’s program into Virginia’s biennial budget.
This wasn’t the first time I had done work to combat child sexual abuse.
In 1994, I started drafting legislation relating to civil commitment for sexually violent predators. Passed in 1999, the law allowed the state to hold certain sex offenders at psychiatric facilities after their criminal sentences if the offenders were deemed “sexually violent predators.” However, the state did not appropriate the money for the program.
In 2003, I once again fought to get funding for the legislation. Joining me in this quest was then-Attorney General Jerry Kilgore and victim advocate Paul Martin Andrews. A native of Virginia, Andrews was kidnapped in 1973 at age 13, held in an underground box and sexually assaulted by convicted child abuser Richard Ausley for eight days. As an adult, he became an advocate for bolstering Virginia law for continued civil commitments for sex offenders after their criminal sentence ended.
Andrews testified about the urgency for civil commitment for sexually violent predators. Andrews spoke about how Ausley was scheduled to get out of prison soon and research data indicated he would offend again. Once the legislature heard Andrews’ testimony, funding for civil commitment of sexually violent predators was passed.
Unfortunately, child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children are still a major problem in our society. As the internet has become more and more a part of our daily lives over the past 30 years, the work to protect our children on the internet remains important.
I continue to look for legislative solutions on the federal level to support victims of sexual abuse and protect our children. For example, I just co-sponsored a bill that would prohibit the importation or transportation of child sex dolls and robots. Currently, people are able to make physical features and “personalities” of robots resemble actual children, even taking their voice from social media to make the robots sound like the child. This can lead to an attitude of normalization for sexual encounters between adults and minors. This bill will help stop that practice and help protect our children.
I am also extremely thankful to the more than 5,400 officials who are part of the ICAC program. They work every day to put child predators in prison and help victims achieve justice.
