Former NFL quarterback and now anti-human-trafficking advocate Tim Tebow shocked a Senate subcommittee hearing room Tuesday by revealing that more than 330,000 people accessed or exploited “child rape” imagery in the United States in the past six months.
The vast majority of victims in such explicit photos and videos remain unidentified, he said.
Tebow testified before the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism and urged Congress to pass the Renewed Hope Act of 2026 which takes aim at the growing crisis of online child exploitation.
The 2007 Heisman winner and head of an anti-human trafficking and child exploitation foundation also shared that segment of his presentation on X where it’s garnered more than a million views.
Displaying a map of the U.S. plastered with red dots merging into one another, he told the committee:
Every one of those red dots is an IP address that has downloaded, shared or distributed child rape images, almost all under the age of 12. And that’s just a six-month screen shot of it. There’s over 338,000 on there. The blue dots on there — and you can’t really see them – are the ones under investigation.
“In a sea of red,” committee chairman Josh Hawley (R-MO) interjected.
“Isn’t that a problem of what we’re talking about?” Tebow responded.
It’s not the first time the former professional athlete has delivered emotional testimony in Congress. Two years ago, he appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and read a message from one of the approximate 20,000 boys and girls whose images and videos of their sexual abuse and rape were housed in a global database at Interpol, most of their identities unknown.
Tebow delivered more of the same Tuesday, but with the numbers growing:
At one point he also said:
In preparation for this hearing, we asked Interpol what the new number was of unidentified images. And it’s now over 89,000 series. And that’s just one database. The U.K. has a database called CAID. The Child Abuse Image database. Canada has a database. Their database has over 94 million uncategorized files waiting for assessment that it has scraped from the dark web. We don’t even know yet how many children that represents.
The Renewed Hope Act of 2026 would create and provided resources to a specific task force of analysts, investigators, and forensic specialists who would focus on identifying unknown children seen in sexual abuse images so they can be located and rescued.
As of now, the Homeland Security Investigations Cyber Crimes Center has only seven analysts assigned to the time-consuming process of identifying the large number of children impacted by sexual abuse and rape, Fox News reported.
“They need more resources, plain and simple,” Tebow said.
The bill took a step forward in January when it passed committee markup.
“Child trafficking is a scourge on our society,” Rep. Hawley said in a statement. “I am convening this subcommittee hearing to expose how our youth are groomed, exploited, and overlooked by the existing system.”
He added, “Congress must dismantle the criminal networks that profit from exploiting the most vulnerable among us and put an end to child trafficking.”
Veteran crime writer Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets , which documents one of the worst cases of child sex abuse in U.S. history, and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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