Morgan Griffith on Internet Crimes Against Children

Editorial comment: It's been too long since I've found one of these e-mails on the appropriate weekend. 

It's a very relevant topic to this web site. We need good strong testimony on this. We have seen that efforts to censor online socializing in the name of discouraging crime, not inflaming criminals, etc., may actually promote violent crime--as when violent troublemakers turned the Trump rally into a riot in 2021. 

Trump was being shadowbanned as the system worked at the time--his followers weren't seeing his tweets on their home pages, but people who were aware of this and clicked over to his page could see his tweets. The excuse for censoring the then President was that he was likely to inflame people who refused to accept the results of the electoral college votes. But in fact, as Dinesh D'Souza was able to share with some of his Tweeps, including me, Trump posted a video thanking his fans and advising them to go home. Trump was clearly trying to prevent the rally turning as ugly as it turned, and Twitter censorship was preventing his doing that.

On the other hand, up to a certain point, allowing criminals to post about their criminal intentions helps fight crime and protect victims. Obviously some interference should take place. Using school bullies as an example, in order to avoid describing uglier crimes, although (trigger warning) some are mentioned below...I think that, at the point where a disturbed twelve-year-old starts live-streaming video coverage of exactly how he knocks down eight-year-olds and takes their lunch money, web sites should have a mechanism for reporting that to a human who can activate a mechanism allowing only police officers to see that video. But at the point where he's saying, "I knocked down this eight-year-old kid yesterday and took his lunch money, and today I'm going to beat up a few more little kids, until I have enough money to buy some bootleg antidepressants and get high," a case might be made for leaving that up. It might be disgusting to normal human beings--motivating them to shun the bully, which is good--but it might help adults, not necessarily police, supervise the sick twelve-year-old and keep him away from those little kids. 

We need to keep the channels of communication open. We need to keep people who care watching them. People, not algorithms. People who know when children typing things like "You are a hideous, horrible, ugly person and deserve to die" are sitting side by side, giggling, playing a game in which the character addressed is a serial murderer, and when they're doing an unsupervised, unethical science experiment to see whether they can actually get a classmate--who is not sitting beside them or giggling--certified insane. Children's use of the Internet needs to be very carefully supervised...by their parents, not by computer programs.

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith, R-VA-9:

"

Internet Crimes Against Children

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.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office.  You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at https://morgangriffith.house.gov/.

"