WASHINGTON – A bill known as H.R. 4472 was passed on July 27 to help protect children on the Internet from sex offenders.
The Children’s Safety and Violent Crime Reduction Act of 2006 creates a national Internet database of more than 100,000 convicted online child molesters.
The information will be available to the public through a searchable ZIP code database to alert people of sex offenders in their area. Under the new law, convicted child molesters will face felony charges for failure to update their whereabouts in the database.
H.R. 4472 states the Internet content viewed must have the ‘intent to deceive’ in order for the offender to be jailed up to 20 years. The mandatory minimum sentence for raping a child is 30 years.
Global Positioning Systems (GPS) provided by federal funding will be used to help states track pedophiles and convict them.
