Hearings to examine the STOP CSAM Act.

Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Counterterrorism

2025-03-11

Source: Congress.gov

Summary

The Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism convened a hearing on the Stop CSAM Act to address the urgent crisis of online child sexual exploitation. Witnesses including NCMEC, the International Justice Mission, survivors, and law enforcement officials testified on the scale of the problem, citing over 300 million children worldwide exposed to CSAM and a 140% increase in urgent reports over three years. Key topics included platform accountability, the failure of current reporting procedures, the need for victims to have legal recourse in court, and the dangers of generative AI creating child sexual abuse imagery. The hearing emphasized that tech companies currently evade responsibility due to lack of mandatory reporting and enforcement, and that victims lack the ability to sue or have their images removed. The legislation aimed at strengthening privacy protections, improving cyber tip line reports, creating a victim restitution board, and requiring platforms to take down CSAM content within 48 hours. Testimony highlighted real-life cases of exploitation and the urgent need for legislative reform to hold tech companies accountable and empower survivors and parents.

Participants

Transcript

This first hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism to order.  It is a privilege to serve as the chair of the subcommittee during this Congress, and I'm equally delighted to have as the ranking member my colleague, Senator Dick Durbin, who is on his way over from lunch.  His staff tells me I can blame Senator Schumer.  I said I blame Senator Schumer for so many things.  But he will be joining us shortly.  It's really a delight to have Senator Durbin as the ranking member on this committee.   And it's particularly a privilege to partner with him on this important topic that we're here to discuss today.  Senator Durbin and I have worked together on a number of initiatives.  I don't think any is more important than confronting the scourge of child sexual exploitation or CSAM.  You know, that's a anodyne sounding abbreviation.   But as I hope everybody in the room appreciates and those who are listening online understand, that abbreviation stands in for a terrifying, horrifying reality.  We're talking about, in a word, child pornography.  We're talking about child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse.  The amount of this material online, available online, is truly astounding.  And we're going to talk about that over the course of today's hearing.  But of course, these aren't just statistics.  Every single instance of   of CSAM online represents a real child, a real person who has been tragically and oftentimes life alteringly abused.   And it's the conviction of myself and I know Senator Durbin and I hope every member of not just the subcommittee but the entire Senate Judiciary Committee that we have to do something about this.  We've talked about it for years.  The time to take definitive action is here.  And that's why the legislative framework that we are discussing today I think is so incredibly important.  But let me just give you a sense of the scope of the problem that we're talking about worldwide.   302 million children have been victims of child sexual abuse material and child sexual exploitation online.
Let me say that again, worldwide, 302 million children.  300 million children globally have been subjected to online solicitation.   solicitation that is for some sort of sexual abuse or following some sort of sexual abuse.  To give you another angle on the scope of this problem, when an online platform becomes aware of instances of child sexual exploitation under our law, they're required to report those instances to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, NCMEC, their cyber tip line, and we're delighted to have the CEO of NCMEC with us today.  But just consider this data.   In 2014, the number of reported instances of online child sexual exploitation in 2014 was 1.1 million.  Now that's a staggering number, but consider where it is today.  In 2023, the year for which we have the most recent full data, that number was 36.2 million.   1.1 million in 2014, 36.2 million reports of online child sexual exploitation in 2023.  And the number of urgent reports, those are cases where the child is thought to be at present risk.  You might say clear and present danger.  That number has grown by 140% in just the last three years.  If you think about the images themselves,   The poster behind me gives you some sense of this.  Back in 2004, there were 450,000 images reported online of child sexual abuse material.  Again, that number in itself is huge.  Nothing like what we're seeing today.  The number today tops 104 million known reported images of child sexual abuse online.  This is truly a crisis.  It is an epidemic.   And it's not a theory.  It affects far too many children in the United States of America to say nothing of the, as we've seen, hundreds of millions of children worldwide.
So the question is, what are we going to do about it?   And that's what we're here to talk about today.  Senator Durbin and I, in the last Congress, introduced what I believe is truly landmark legislation, which I might add, passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in what is nothing short of a miracle by a unanimous vote.  This legislation would protect child victims and witnesses in courts with new rights, new safeguards, new procedures.

Sign up for free to see the full transcript

Accounts help us prevent bots from abusing our site. Accounts are free and will allow you to access the full transcript.

Sign up