(LifeSiteNews) — For the last few weeks, former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow has been speaking out against child sex trafficking while promoting his organization’s all-hands-on-deck approach to rescue children lost in that nightmarish world.
“Boys and girls all over the world are being abused and tortured, and we still don’t even know their name. Their identity is unknown,” Tebow said in a short video announcing the Tebow Foundation’s “unKNOWN campaign.”
“Every day, children under 12, some children as young as infants and toddlers, are at home, they’re in their bedrooms, some children are being raped,” said Camille Cooper, the Tebow Foundation’s vice president of anti-human trafficking and child exploitation.
“The worst moments of these children’s lives are being videotaped and they’re being shared with other offenders all over the world,” Cooper explained. “Every time an image is downloaded, it creates a demand for these images and these videos. And the only way to meet that demand is with new victims.”
Tebow said that rather than call these videos and images “child pornography,” his organization refers to them as CSAM, “Child Sexual Abuse Material.”
“Out of all these videos and images that are being distributed, we know through our team and partners there are over 50,000 children’s images that sit in a global database, and we don’t know who they are,” Tebow said. “But we do know that God knows.”
“These children are literally waiting. They are suffering. They are crying. They are alone,” Cooper said. “And they don’t think anyone is coming to help them. But we can. We can build that army, and we can go get them.”
“The reason we call this campaign ‘unKNOWN’ is because that’s how these children feel,” Cooper continued. “They feel like nobody knows them. Nobody sees them. Nobody can hear them.”
“Most have probably prayed many times, ‘God help me! Where are you?’ Tebow averred. “Maybe some of those prayers could be answered by you and me, our incredible team and partners.”
“We’re saying yes to the value that every single boy and girl has. They are worth fighting for because we know that they are loved by our heavenly Father,” he added. “And he is also calling us to get them.”
⚠️ LINK IN BIO ⚠️ As big and daunting as this evil of trafficking and CSAM is, our God is so much bigger and we can have hope that He is rescuing and redeeming lives all over the world. Let’s do our part today. Will you pray and will you join us? Thank you for considering joining… pic.twitter.com/R7XUqARwGU
— Tim Tebow (@TimTebow) August 3, 2023
The unKNOWN campaign seeks to unite law enforcement and other agencies around the world to train and equip investigators, analysts, and prosecutors, and ultimately to prevent further exploitation of children.
“I can’t think of any greater public safety goal than to rescue children [who are] being tortured,” Cooper said. “Fifty thousand (50,000) children seems like a pretty daunting number. It’s a city of children that we need to go find.”
“For the first time in history, we have technology to help locate these children,” she promised. “And that technology is going to help us find these children all over the world.”
The unspeakable evil of child sexual exploitation where an estimated two million kids – toddlers, 4- and 5-year-olds, up through their young teen years – around the world are raped, sodomized, tortured, and threatened with death many times per day by depraved adults is not far away from any of us. It’s a multibillion-dollar industry and, to our great shame, the United States is the industry’s biggest consumer.
“It is one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world,” Tebow noted in a recent interview. “A lot of those studies and reports are actually also believed to be underestimated. It is growing. Some of the different campaigns and videos that we actually shot, we’ve done it in neighborhoods that have been really nice because we wanted to say, ‘Look, in this neighborhood, in this area, it’s been right here.’”
Tebow has long been consistent in his messaging and his heroic personal engagement to protect the most vulnerable among us. In 2020, speaking on behalf of the unborn, he encouraged fellow pro-lifers:
What you’re doing here matters. You’re fighting for life. You’re fighting for people that can’t fight for themselves. And my question to you is: Are you willing to stand up in the face of persecution, in the face of adversity, in the face of criticism, when other people are going to say it’s not worth it, when other people won’t stand beside you? Maybe not everybody is going to be with you. Will you stand up for what’s right?
The Tebow Foundation’s push to promote its unKNOWN campaign comes after the phenomenal success of the movie “Sound of Freedom” — about rescuing innocent children kidnapped and trafficked for the purposes of sexual exploitation — which has captured the world’s attention.