Patricia Schroeder: “I just rise to say this is a very important bill. If there is anything any society or community should do, it is protect…”

“I just rise to say this is a very important bill. If there is anything any society or community should do, it is protect its children. When we go back as far as we know in history, that has been one of the main goals of people coming together to live in any kind of a community, to protect the young and to protect their children, and, as we have gotten to be a more sophisticated society, it has been more and more difficult to carry this out. I was very proud in 1993 to have carried the National Child Protection Act. That was the beginning of this, and this is the bill that Megan's Law is built upon because what it says is the FBI should maintain a national network and that States should report convictions of child abuse and child molestation to the national network maintained by the FBI. If we do not have this national network, people could flee their record by crossing State lines, even if a State tried to be very vigilant.”