(LifeSiteNews) — Former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow testified before a Congressional committee on Wednesday in support of a yet-to-be-drafted bill to create a team to identify and rescue children who are being sexually abused for profit.
Tebow recounted how his “heart was broken” and “eyes were opened” when he was told that 20,000 boys and girls are being abused and raped to produce child pornography, which Tebow refers to instead as child sexual abuse material (CSAM). He eventually came to learn that the real number of these exploited children is more than 50,000 and growing.
🔥Legendary Christian NFL player goes ON-RECORD on Capitol Hill, DEMANDS FBI institute “Rescue Team” to save exploited children as the FBI instead targets Catholics and parents at school boards pic.twitter.com/Uokl85B10i
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) March 7, 2024
This horrific reality drove him to team up with Camille Cooper, now the Tebow Foundation’s vice president of anti-human trafficking and child exploitation, to launch an effort to identify child victims of sexual abuse with the help of law enforcement. The result, Operation Renewed Hope, the first initiative of its kind in the U.S., last year identified more than 300 child victims of sexual abuse and rescued several victims from active abuse.
“It was an incredible operation, but that’s a tiny dent today in what we’re called to get to,” Tebow told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance. He implored them to approve legislation that would bolster further such identification and rescue efforts because, as several of those testifying during the hearing noted, these anti-child exploitation task forces don’t have enough manpower or resources to meet the scope of the problem.
“There are so many frontline warriors and heroes, but there are just not enough,” Tebow said. “So this bill is strictly to create a rescue team that has the funding, the support, the training, the technology so that they can get to these 50,000 (children).”
He pointed out that in sports, extraordinary resources are given to teams in order to maximize their chances of winning a game, “something that ultimately, as much as we care about it, doesn’t matter.”
“Why would we not give as much, if not more resources to the frontline heroes that are going after the most vulnerable boys and girls on the planet?” Tebow said.
The NFL star predicted that his own words would “probably fall flat” before the congressional committee, so he shared with them the words of one of his “heroes,” a girl who was raped almost every day for seven years. She wrote amid her abuse:
“Rescue me. Help me. Monsters are chasing. Can’t you see? Monsters are whispering. Can’t you hear? Monsters are shouting you’re nothing. Can’t you feel my pain? Monsters are pushing. End it all. Just jump. Monsters are laughing; You’re all alone in this. Can someone please rescue me?”
Tebow continued, “This girl and thousands of boys and girls just like her are calling out to you and to me … Every single one of those boys and girls is worth us answering the call and doing everything we can so they can experience the faith, hope, and love they deserve. Not the bondage and torture they’re in right now.”
“I believe if we build that rescue team, we will have a chance at getting to every one of those boys and girls. I got a message last night from a girl who has been rescued, and she said thank you so much for speaking up for us … But if all we do today is speak, all I do is speak, I also missed the mark. We have to do more than just talk about it. We have to act on it,” he concluded.
In September, the Tebow Foundation announced its “unKNOWN campaign,” which seeks to unite law enforcement and other agencies around the world to train and equip investigators, analysts, and prosecutors ultimately to prevent further exploitation of children.
⚠️ LINK IN BIO ⚠️ As big and daunting as this evil of trafficking and CSAM is, our God is so much bigger and we can have hope that He is rescuing and redeeming lives all over the world. Let’s do our part today. Will you pray and will you join us? Thank you for considering joining… pic.twitter.com/R7XUqARwGU
— Tim Tebow (@TimTebow) August 3, 2023
“These children are literally waiting. They are suffering. They are crying. They are alone,” Cooper said in the campaign video. “And they don’t think anyone is coming to help them. But we can. We can build that army, and we can go get them.”
“The reason we call this campaign ‘unKNOWN’ is because that’s how these children feel,” Cooper continued. “They feel like nobody knows them. Nobody sees them. Nobody can hear them.”
“Most have probably prayed many times, ‘God help me! Where are you?’ Maybe some of those prayers could be answered by you and me, our incredible team and partners,” Tebow suggested.
“I can’t think of any greater public safety goal than to rescue children (who are) being tortured,” Cooper said. “Fifty thousand (50,000) children seems like a pretty daunting number. It’s a city of children that we need to go find.”
Journalist Julie Bindel recently highlighted the fact that pornography is “breeding” pedophiles. She quoted Michael Sheath, an expert in child protection who pointed out, “Mainstream, freely available porn gives men permission to go that step further. It’s what normalizes the sexual abuse of children.”
“But this legal stuff, accessed mainly by men who are surfing Pornhub or whatever site, can be a gateway to the illegal content in which real children are horrifically abused by adults,” Sheath noted. “You can’t have child abuse images without child abuse having taken place.”