Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: Children as young as a few days old, male and female, and from all socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds are vulnerable to violent crime.

To keep them safe, the FBI leads many different types of task forces across the country and beyond to eradicate the production of pornography, abductions, and sex trafficking of children. 

One such task force, the Southeast Michigan Trafficking and Exploitation Crimes Task Force, or SEMTEC, marks its 10th anniversary this month and is celebrating the lives of the more than 600 child victims it has rescued over the years.    

Michael Glennon: First and foremost, we want to make sure that the victims are taken care of. We take that victim-centric approach in our investigations as a whole. We have an actual embedded child forensic interviewer and victim specialist in our group for every operation. 

Halpern: That was Supervisory Special Agent Michael Glennon, who oversees the task force. He attributes much of its success to the collaboration among all levels of law enforcement and community organizations.

Glennon: There is no way that we can address this unless we really pool our resources together and work together as a team to address the matter.

Halpern: The FBI provides information about how to protect your children from threats on our webpage at www.fbi.gov. With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.