_{over 2,500 children could be rescued}

House Democratic Caucus Chairman Brian Moran was joined by law enforcement and children protection groups to brief members of the House of Delegates on “Alicia’s Law”. The plan, named after the 13-year-old victim of an online predator, will create a strong statewide network of highly trained law enforcement to track down and arrest child sex predators. During the briefing, Delegate Moran released results from the Internet Crimes Against Children database that showed 19,357 hard drives with hard core pornography here in Virginia since 2005.

Delegate Moran was by joined Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown and Lt. Mike Harmony of the Southern Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC) and Srgt Johnny Hall and Det. John Chapman of the Northern Virginia ICAC to brief members of the House of Delegates on “Alicia’s Law”.

The briefing included a live demonstration of the national online system that identifies and cracks down on predators. According to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces presentation, law enforcement has logged 215,197 felony transactions since 2005 in Virginia of the most brutal images of child pornography. During the presentation, ICAC members reviewed sample hard drive analysis of a child pornographer in the Richmond metro area.

“This new information makes a compelling case for the General Assembly’s swift action on Alicia’s Law,” Moran said. “With thousands of online predator’s active in Virginia, we must build the capacity to track and arrest them. After spending time with Alicia, learning her story and hearing the compelling information from law enforcement, I know now – more than ever – how important it is to the victims, their families and the community that we act.”

“Alicia’s Law” would increase law-enforcement capacity to crack down on Internet child sex predators by:

• Expanding the regional Internet Crimes against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program to ensure we have one cyber unit in each county dedicated to these cases. The ICAC officers are on the front lines of tracking cyber predators and this provides them with the resources desperately needed to expand staff and facilities and build the infrastructure necessary to capture these known offenders.
• Creating three regional computer forensic labs dedicated to crimes against children. The computer forensic backlog is the single-greatest bottleneck for law enforcement. Officers report that sometimes they wait months to have a hard drive analyzed. The time lost results in more children being put at risk.
• Authorizing a grant program in the Department of Criminal Justice Services for additional localities that take on the effort to track and catch online predators.

According to a 2005 study by the Department of Justice, 55% of Child pornography possessors had committed contact offenses. And, according to ICAC, 30% of these cases would result in the rescue of a local victim. That means, out of these known traffickers, we could conservatively rescue over 2500 children here in Virginia.

“Delegate Moran’s strategy is to reach into every community in Virginia and catch the predators who are hiding in plain sight,” said Grier Weeks, Executive Director of the National Association to Protect Children. “Law enforcement now knows how to locate thousands of these criminals in Virginia alone, and that means they can rescue thousands of child victims.”

REGIONAL BREAKOUT

Data from the central ICAC database in the Wyoming regarding Virginians trafficking in child pornography. The following is the top 30 regions of child pornography on hard drives distributed through these peer-to-peer networks since 2005.

Virginia Beach	1956
Norfolk	1367
Richmond	1256
Herndon	1058
Newport News	887
Chesapeake	815
Hampton	674
Alexandria	657
Fairfax	507
Arlington	503
Woodbridge	467
Roanoke	406
Falls Church	386
Reston	373
Fredericksburg	360
Manassas	353
Portsmouth	336
Ashburn	319
Springfield	246
Charlottesville	243
Williamsburg	229
Yorktown	226
Midlothian	222
Centreville	203
Vienna	162
Stafford	156
Annandale	152
Harrisonburg	147
Lynchburg	139
Winchester	136
Mc Lean	129
Waynesboro	124
Blacksburg	121
Warrenton	105