First Lady Laura Bush Takes on the Fight for Missing & Exploited Children

First Lady Laura Bush has always been a proponent for the literacy of children. Now Laura Bush is helping the most  vulnerable among us  again This time it is the  missing and exploited children of the world. This international effort is to help  aide in finding  missing children and stop the exploitation of children. Especially in the battle against child pornography. Bernadette Chirac, the French first lady,  hosted the one-day conference on missing and exploited children.

The conference was a meeting of the honorary board of directors of the International Center for Missing & Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va. A study by the group examined all 186 Interpol member countries and found that up to 95 of them had no laws on child pornography, while 136 of them do not consider possession of child pornography a crime. (Houston Chronicle)

Laura Bush is now lending a helping hand  to the Missing and Exploited children of the world  by furthering the US Amber Alert system and forward other initiatives to help the exploited children of the world.

International AMBER Alert Plans

Mrs. Bush briefed participants on efforts to protect children in the United States, touting the Amber Alert system that mobilizes TV, radio and highway signs to get word out whenever a child goes missing.

“So far, Amber Alerts have saved more than 300 young lives in the United States, and similar programs are now saving lives in countries across the globe, including France,” she said.

France’s new system, modeled on the U.S. alerts, helped authorities track down three missing children last week.

The women proposed that the system be extended throughout the European Union, so all its member nations are alerted when a child goes missing.

Remarks by First Lady Laura Bush at the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children Conference (Full speech can be read here)

Pornographic images of children are not exercises in free speech. They
are criminal acts of child abuse. The United States is working to end this
abuse through the government’s Internet Crimes Against Children task
forces. With the help of task force members, federal prosecution of child
pornography and abuse has increased from 350 cases in 1998 to more than
1,400 cases in 2005.

Through our national and international Innocent Images Initiative, the
American government works with law enforcement in 17 nations, as well as
Europol, to end the nearly nine million documented global transactions of
child pornography.
     

The abuses of children on the Internet respect no national boundaries.
And we’ve seen that when governments cooperate with other nations, they
keep children in their own countries safe.