Oprah Winfrey and PROTECT Join Hands to Help Pass Senate Bill 1738 - a Bi-Partisan Bill to Protect Children

I seldom watch Oprah Winfrey on television but because of the email notice I received from PROTECT.org, I watched the September 15th program.

The first 45 minutes of the show was about all the ways perpetrators groom and abuse children, beginning in infancy. Perpetrators have learned that the younger the child, the less chance of getting caught, simply because the child is too young to articulate what has happened to them. It is sickening to know that newborns are being sexually abused, filmed and the abusive videos are passed around on the internet.

Oprah also featured three young ladies who had been sexually violated by their neighbor. The man had groomed them and won their friendship as well as the friendship of their parents. Then when the girls came to his house for a sleep-over with his own daughter, he drugged them, sexually violated them, filmed it, and spread it across the internet. None of the girls remembered being violated because they had been drugged. The video that spread across the country via the internet was the proof that was needed to catch this man and prosecute him. He is just one perpetrator who got caught. There are more of them than we can imagine.

However, the technology to pinpoint where these internet abusers live is available. The only thing lacking is the money to hire additional help to pursue these individuals. The money is also available, but unless we let our senators know how we want this money to be spent, it will go elsewhere.

I wrote about a House and Senate Bill in July of this year. The House has already passed this bill and it is currently in need of the attention by the Senate. We have until September 26, 2008 to get this bill passed by the senate. The bill would allocate the needed funds to further protect this nation's children. All that stands in the way of finding and prosecuting these offenders of infants, children and teens is the passage of Senate Bill 1738.