Tim Tebow joins Congress’ offensive against child sexual abuse

Former NFL player and college football star Tim Tebow teamed up with a bipartisan group of lawmakers Tuesday to introduce legislation to combat child sexual abuse and identify victims in images of abuse spread across the darkest corners of the internet.

The Renewed Hope Act would provide Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with more resources to hire and train personnel, including computer forensics and criminal analysts, to investigate child exploitation cases and equip them with advanced victim identification methods.

One database of victims, the International Child Sexual Exploitation database housed under Interpol, has at least 50,000 images of unidentified children.

The goal of the legislation is to help investigators identify more abuse victims and find them.

“Until they’re identified, they have almost no chance of being rescued,” Mr. Tebow said in an interview with The Washington Times.

In 2015, Congress passed a law to create the Cyber Crimes Center (C3) and a Child Exploitation Investigations Unit within HSI. There are currently only seven victim identification specialists at C3, and the center is not allowed to hire more than 10 without congressional approval.

The bill would lift that requirement and provide the resources to beef up the investigative team. The goal is to eventually have 70 people working at C3 and another 130 investigators in the field, Mr. Tebow said.

“One of the best next steps in fighting this evil is giving these kids the best chance to be rescued by building a bigger rescue team, by giving them the opportunity for experts to speak into it, by having a central coordination hub, and by having the best training and victim identification expertise around the world,” he said.

Mr. Tebow spoke with The Times​ shortly after holding a press conference with the lawmakers who are introducing the bill: Sens. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, and Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat; and Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, and Laurel Lee, Florida Republican.

“No child should be the subject of online sexual exploitation and abuse,” Mr. Cornyn said, noting reports of child sexual abuse have more than doubled between 2019 and 2023.

The statistics lawmakers cited on online child sex abuse materials are jarring: 84% depict the actual sexual assault of a child and 47% show extreme abuse, including sadomasochistic acts.

More than half, 56%, of the images are children under 12 and 4% are infants and toddlers.

The legislation introduced Tuesday is “the bare minimum that we owe our children to stop this scourge,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said the number of rescues is far lower than it should be because of limited resources.

“This bill is about making sure we have enough investigators on the front lines to find the digital footprint of where these photographs are being traded and moved around the dark web … so that the law enforcement officers can go and rescue that child who’s in the midst of violent sexual abuse,” she said.

The lawmakers thanked Mr. Tebow for his partnership but said there should be bipartisan interest in advancing the measure regardless of the star power behind it.

“It shouldn’t take a celebrity to put this measure across the finish line,” Mr. Blumenthal said.

Mr. Tebow told The Times he’ll be spending more time on Capitol Hill this week trying to identify more cosponsors and building momentum to get the bill passed.

This is his first major push for legislation but he previously testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in March on child sex abuse and has worked through his foundation on prevention, rescue and survivor care.

The Tim Tebow Foundation started with the goal of helping the most vulnerable people in the world but there was one experience Mr. Tebow said “changed the trajectory of my life” and launched his work on child trafficking and exploitation.

Roughly a decade ago, Mr. Tebow’s father was at a pastor’s conference in a third-world country when a group of men brought in four little girls and started auctioning them off.

“My dad’s one of my heroes because he’s just not somebody that can look the other way,” Mr. Tebow said. “And so he took out all the money in his wallet, which was about $1,250 for the rest of his trip and to get home. And he used it to purchase the freedom of those four girls.”

Since then, Mr. Tebow has made it his mission to help as many victims of child trafficking and sex abuse as possible.

His foundation partnered with HSI and other stakeholders on two iterations of “Operation Renewed Hope,” which brought law enforcement and experts from all over the world to C3 to look at the worst cases of unknown abuse victims and try to identify them.

The first operation in August 2023 identified 311 previously unknown victims and another in March of this year identified 414 leads. Some of those children have been rescued and efforts to help the others are still underway.

Mr. Tebow is known for being outspoken about his Christian faith — his habit of dropping to one knee and praying before football games became known as “Tebowing” — and said that inspired the “renewed hope” name on the bill and the operation that preceded it.

“The biblical form of hope means to look forward with confidence, expectation and anticipation,” he said. “Because we get to hold on to God’s promises even in the midst of disappointment, chaos, tragedy and hardship.”