The Renewed Hope Act is aimed at identifying, protecting and aiding victims of online child sexual exploitation.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, would facilitate the training and hiring of at least 200 additional experts for the Department of Homeland Security to help identify and track down child victims whose images are disseminated online.
Lawmakers say the bill will also bolster efforts to bring to justice perpetrators disseminating sexual images of children online.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, around 200 cases of possible child sexual exploitation were reported in Connecticut, Hector Glynn, President of The Village for Families and Children, said.
“The numbers are increasing,” Glynn said. “At The Village, at any given day, we are treating hundreds of children who have been sexually assaulted or exploited.”
One in five girls and one in 14 boys in Connecticut have been sexually assaulted, Glynn said. Of those numbers, one in seven was under the age of six.
Reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online have increased year after year with millions of images and videos of horrific abuse in circulation, according to a Department of Justice report from 2023.
Advancement of the internet has caused sexual abuse of minors to expand and forced predators to adapt, Glynn said.
“Ten years ago, reports that came into DCF, or they came into The Village, most of the time the perpetrators were known to the family. There were close contacts, because that's how you build a trusting relationship,” Glynn said. “That is no longer true. Now, the grooming occurs on the internet and how quickly it is done is staggering.”
Annually about 300 cases of possible commercial sexual exploitation of children are reported to Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families (DCF), according to Doctor Nicole Taylor, DCF’s chief administrator of children’s behavioral health.
“The majority of youth who are trafficked actually live right at home while under the care and supervision of their parents,” Taylor said. “How do predators reach children right in their own homes? What is the leading way predators access them? Through the internet.”
Tactics may include narrowing down image location based on background content or identifying perpetrators based on the spread of similar images.
“On the internet, often they are just totally unidentified. Identify the victims, rescue them and protect them. Those are the objectives,” Blumenthal said. “To do it, we need the forensic analysis and experts who can use the tools like AI and the combination of images to analyze who is behind it and how to apprehend them.”
The Renewed Hope Act would increase resources to hire, train, and assign experts to the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit within DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations. It would also improve training in new and advanced victim identification technology for federal and local law enforcement.
