Former football star Tim Tebow urged members of Congress on Wednesday to dedicate greater resources toward finding and rescuing victims of child sexual exploitation.

Tebow’s foundation has been working with federal law enforcement agencies to rescue victims. As part of Operation Renewed Hope, conducted over 15 days last summer, they were able to identify 316 victims.

But the scope of the problem is vast, and the resources devoted to catching offenders and helping victims is insufficient, Tebow and other advocates told the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance. 

“I've had the privilege of playing for a lot of sports teams in my life,” Tebow said. “And on almost all of them, we've had incredible resources to give us a better chance at 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?”

A Heisman Trophy winner and two-time national champion at the University of Florida before playing for the NFL’s Denver Broncos and New York Jets, Tebow called on the lawmakers to pass a bill that would create a “rescue team” of analysts to locate and protect children globally seen in sexually abusive imagery. 

The legislation would also establish a position within law enforcement that focuses solely on victim identification, expand the training capabilities of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Interpol on the issue, and modernize the International Child Sexual Exploitation database so agencies around the world can keep pace with the growing threat.

“If all we do today is speak, all I do is speak, I also missed the mark,” Tebow said. “We have to do more than just talk about it. We have to act on it and be about it.”

Tebow said shortly after he hired Camille Cooper as vice president of anti-human trafficking and child sexual exploitation at the Tim Tebow Foundation, he asked Cooper, “What breaks your heart the most?” She wrote the number 20,000 down on a piece of paper and explained that was the number of unidentified children who appear in photos and videos being abused and raped. 

After lining up a meeting last year in Lyon, France, with victim-identification experts from Homeland Security, Interpol, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Europol and other groups, agencies and countries, Tebow learned the number of identified victims was actually at least 50,000.

He called Operation Renewed Hope “incredible,” but added that the 316 boys and girls identified were only “a tiny dent in what we’re called to get to.”

Tebow read a poem he said was from a young girl who was raped “almost every night” for seven years.

“Rescue Me. Help ‘ME!’ Monsters are chasing!” the poem began.

Another witness, Jim Cole, testified he was recruited to establish the Victim Identification Program and Laboratory at Homeland Security Investigations' Crimes Center. 

He described one case, part of an initiative called Operation Sunflower, in which a Danish victim-identification specialist found images on the darknet of a young girl who had been sexually abused. Focusing on a blurry highway sign seen through a car window, Cole’s lab determined one photo was taken in Kansas. Agents began a physical search of the area, eventually pinpointed the exact location of the photo and then quickly identified and rescued the 11-year-old victim. 

But Cole said that during his seven years running the program, he had just four employees working to identify victims.

“It’s not near enough personnel for this task,” he said.

Cole later joined the nonprofit organization Operation Lightshine, which works to combat child sexual exploitation and human trafficking. The group raises private funding to help local and state agencies with detective salaries, vehicles and forensic tools.  

“OLS underscores the glaring shortfall in federal support for this crucial battle,” Cole said. “OLS should not have to exist.”

There was bipartisan sympathy across the subcommittee. 

“The United States has a duty to protect our children from becoming victims of these despicable acts,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., the panel’s chairperson. 

Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., said if lawmakers truly care about the safety of children and victims of sexual exploitation, they will provide the necessary resources to fund law enforcement agencies, nonprofit groups and prosecutors’ offices working on the issue.

“It seems clear that we must evolve our focus to stress more on the victim-centered prosecution, although that will require dedicated additional resources,” she said. “Law enforcement should not have to choose between rescuing children and finding criminals.”

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says it received 32 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation in 2022 — up 47.4% from two years earlier. Of those reports last year, 99.5% were about possession, manufacturing and distribution of child pornography.