On the recordMarch 12, 2015
I thank my colleague from Texas. I thank him for his leadership on this legislation, along with Senator Klobuchar and others, in bringing this to the floor. Senator Grassley, the chair of the committee, is with us. I appreciate the fact that these two bills which we have worked on over the last few years are included in the legislation the Senator mentioned. Sadly, some of the most vulnerable youth are those who are missing or are in foster care, kids who end up being, unfortunately, exposed to human trafficking, sometimes sexual trafficking. So the idea of the missing children legislation is really very simple. It says: Let's help find these children as quickly as possible by having better information on them. I will give one example of that. In Ohio we have had 71 kids who have gone missing since January 1. These are 71 children who are out there somewhere--minors. For those 71 children, we only have 22 photographs. This is since January 1. One thing this legislation does is it says: Let's get the data, including photographs, so all of us can have an opportunity to find these young people before they become subject to human trafficking. In Ohio we, unfortunately, have this issue in all of our regions, including in some of our smaller communities as well as our bigger urban centers where we have sex trafficking. They say the average age of children who are getting involved in this is between 11 and 13 years old. We have talked a lot on the floor over the last several days.…
