Tim Tebow urges Congress to crack down on online child sexual abuse

Former football star and current philanthropist Tim Tebow told Congress that there are 89,000 unidentified victims of online child sexual abuse.

Law enforcement’s best guess of how many children were victims was 20,000 two years ago, he said.

But investigative partnerships through his anti-human trafficking organization, the Tim Tebow Foundation, found that 57,000 children had yet to be identified — 185% more than initially reported.

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism urged Congress to address gaps in the federal investigation system, identifying what more can be done to dismantle child trafficking systems.

Chairman Josh Hawley said that what the federal government lacks is sufficient capacity to identify victims and get to them.

“These are children who our government could identify and rescue if we had the will and the resources to do it,” the Missouri Republican senator said at the Tuesday hearing.

At the top of the hearing, he encouraged victims in attendance to stand, applauding their courage for pushing toward addressing online child exploitation.

Staca Shehan, vice president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s Analytical Services Division, said her organization received over 21 million child sexual exploitation reports in 2025, translating to more than 61 million images, videos and other content.

The Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center has seven full-time victim analysts to identify sexually abusive images of children. The Renewed Hope Act of 2026, promoted by Mr. Tebow, would equip the Department of Homeland Security with more analysts, investigators and forensic specialists, including enhanced training, to identify unknown children in sexual abuse images.

Named by the committee as Jane Doe, the mother of a child abuse victim said that more than 25 years after her daughter was made a victim, she still receives notifications from the Department of Justice of another offender found in possession of the images — now numbering in the tens of thousands.

She described her family’s circumstances as a systematic failure when decisive action “could have spared my daughter years of additional abuse.”

Movies have been made from the images of her daughter, she said. The abusers will change hashtags, the color of the shirt or add a flower to the picture, making it harder to identify the picture.

“I’ve had a fight with Google about it, saying, ’For the safety of my child, you have to get these images off,’” she said.

Mr. Hawley said the bill would let her family take social media and tech companies to court for “evading accountability” and for allowing the circulation of such images, therefore profiting from them. He also encouraged the Senate to show “a little independence from these tech companies” and address the issue.

“Ms. Doe, no victim in here today, not a one of you can get into court against these social media companies. That is just wrong, and I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because the amount of money that flows into this body for those companies keeps the courtroom door shut for you. We need to open it up, and we need to say that you’re more important than any amount of money.”

Executive Director of Rights4Girls Yasmin Vafa’s recommendations were threefold: reduce the demand through trafficking prevention laws; encourage jurisdictions to adopt buyer accountability programs that finance services and prioritize prosecuting; and strengthen oversight of trafficking by requiring standardized data collection, reporting and the dissemination of screening tools.

“This combination of indifference and entitlement is the engine that fuels sex trafficking,” she said.