Protecting the Innocent

National organization moves to Knoxville with help of an anonymous donor

Election news has filled the airwaves for the past few months and though most people heard Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s name on a daily basis, many were likely unaware of the Senate bill he co-sponsored that was signed into law Oct. 13. That bill, called the PROTECT Our Children Act, authorized more than $320 million through the next five years for additional law enforcement to fight and investigate child exploitation. 

Another little-known fact: That bill has local ties. On Oct. 29, the bi-partisan, pro-child, anti-crime association known as the National Association to Protect Children, instrumental in introducing the PROTECT Our Children Act to Congress, moved its headquarters from Asheville, N.C., to Knoxville, thanks to the help of local donors.

PROTECT is a relatively new organization, founded in 2002 by a small group of concerned individuals including actor David Keith, Grier Weeks and others. The founders wanted to address the lack of protection children were offered by the law against sexual predators — particularly if those predators were members of the children’s families. Weeks now serves as executive director of the four-person staff, but says the group really runs on volunteer power. 

“We came together to support the idea that we ought to fight for children the same way we fight for any other interest of ours,” Weeks says. “If you think about it, every interest group in the world has a lobby except abused kids. Most people think the normal rules of child abuse don’t apply when it comes to politics.”

In 2002, PROTECT began fighting laws that provided “incest loopholes” in child sex abuse cases. Weeks says in many states, if a child is abused by a member of his or her own family, the punishment is less than if the perpetrator is a stranger. And, as Weeks points out, the majority of child abuse cases occur within families, not by strangers. In some states, Arkansas being one example, incestuous rape of a child was treated with a monetary fine instead of jail time.

“There were two types of laws we were battling,” Weeks says. “The first were very antiquated laws that were never designed to protect children in the first place. Other, more troubling laws were created very intentionally in the early ’80s and tried to essentially decriminalize child sex abuse in the family. The logic was that these were social problems that shouldn’t be treated as crimes. Those laws reward people who grow their own victim.”

PROTECT's efforts managed to overturn such laws in California, New York, Arkansas, North Carolina, Illinois and Virginia. Today, in Arkansas, child incest rape is equivalent to 1st degree rape. Now PROTECT has set its sights on similar laws in Tennessee, Minnesota and Michigan. But members have also continued work on a campaign to stop child exploitation in the form of child pornography, which is where the PROTECT Our Children Act comes in. According to Weeks, in about 30 to 40 percent of U.S. child pornography cases, police find a local child victim.

“It’s given us a situation where we don’t have to just tie blue ribbons on trees and tell people not to hurt kids, we know where the kids are and we could stop it, but we’re not,” Weeks says. “In every state in the Union, law enforcement investigators who try to combat this modern exploitation are completely overwhelmed.”

Weeks says PROTECT staffers are spending the next several months getting funding for the PROTECT Our Children Act and building online activism as well as focusing on reversing lenient legislation. They’ll also be working with local law enforcement officers in Knoxville, trying to make Tennessee a “model for the rest of the nation.”

“We had a major anonymous donor in Knoxville,” Weeks says. “He came forward to support our work and asked us, ‘What would it take for you to move to Knoxville?’ We decided that with that sort of support, it made sense to put roots down here.”