Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, had a blunt question for the three witnesses testifying at a Senate hearing Tuesday about evolving threats to children online: "Do you all agree that we've as a nation miserably failed our children -- that we have hearings and we talk, [but] we've done very little to protect them, as of this date?"
All three witnesses -- including a former federal prosecutor and an executive director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children -- agreed.
"That's a damning indictment of all of us," Graham stated.
The hearing, titled "Protecting Our Children Online Against the Evolving Offender," is the latest in a yearslong smattering of hearings on Capitol Hill related to how lawmakers might be able to help stop ever-changing threats to children on social media platforms and online gaming systems.
On Tuesday, the frustration that Congress has not done more to protect children online was bipartisan, especially as the witnesses offered dire warnings about "sextortion" by scammers who trick victims into sending sexually-explicit images of themselves and then extort them for money -- and about online extremist networks like "764" that coerce victims into harming themselves or others for the simple purpose of creating chaos and undermining society.
"This trend has led to the most egregious exploitation that NCMEC has ever seen," National Center for Missing and Exploited Children executive director Lauren Coffren said of 764 and similar networks. "The imagery, the videos, the chats that we are seeing and reading are the most graphic that I have ever seen in my 20-year history."
As ABC News has previously reported, 764 members find vulnerable victims on popular platforms, elicit private information and intimate sexual images from them, and then use that sensitive material to blackmail victims into mutilating themselves, harming others, or taking other violent action --- all while streaming it on social media so others can watch and then disseminate recordings of it.
"They're motivated purely by chaos," essentially "weaponizing our nation's children to be able to create terror," Coffren said.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children says it received more than 2,000 reports of abuse tied to 764 or similar networks in the first nine months of this year -- double the number of reports it received last year. And the FBI, which has called 764 "modern-day terrorism," is investigating more than 350 people across the United States with suspected tied to 764 or similar networks.
Tuesday's hearing included heart-wrenching testimony from Tamia Woods of Streetsboro, Ohio, who said her only son, 17-year-old James Woods, took his own life in 2022 after being targeted for "sextortion" by a group of sadistic scammers overseas.
"I stand before you as a mother whose only child was taken by something so preventable, so cruel and so ignored that it should shake every person in this room to their core," testified Woods, who started the Do It For James Foundation in her son's name to raise awareness and push for change.
Like the other witnesses and many of the lawmakers at the hearing, Woods implored the broader Congress to do more.
"I guess I'm coming from a mom and a naive stance, I don't understand why it's so hard to pass laws," she said. "I just don't understand how hard [it] is to protect our children. We won't have a world without them."
During Tuesday's hearing, former federal prosecutor Jessica Lieber Smolar explained that "existing statutes do not adequately address the full scope or severe harm" caused by sextortion, and there are currently "no federal statutes that adequately criminalize the coercive conduct of 764 and similar groups."
So "right now, when we charge crimes like sextortion or 764, across the country we all charge them differently," Smolar said. "Sometimes we charge them as online threats, sometimes if we're lucky we find [child pornography] and we charge them that way. There's no consistency that allows us to properly address the specific harm that these actors are committing."
In an interview with ABC News last month, the Seattle-area parents of a 13-year-old boy who was allegedly pushed to take his own life by a member of 764 in Germany expressed hope that one day that alleged 764 member could face justice in the United States.
"[In Germany] they were able to charge that 764 offender there, we could not charge him here. That shouldn't happen," Smolar told lawmakers on Tuesday. "We should be able to charge these offenders, hold them accountable, and deter them from continuing to hurt our children."
On Tuesday, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and the top Democrat on the panel, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, took the first step to making that happen, introducing a first-of-its-kind piece of legislation that would explicitly criminalize the intentional coercing of minors to physically harm themselves or others.
Under their proposed bill, those who intentionally coerce someone into even just attempting to die by suicide or who coerce someone into taking action that results in the death or killing of another person could face life in prison.
Grassley and Durbin also introduced two other bills, including the Stop Sextortion Act, which, according to Grassley's office, would amend existing laws to criminalize threats to distribute visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct with the intent to intimidate, extort, coerce or cause substantial emotional distress.
The third bill seeks to hold "accountable" people "who engage in online threatening acts of sextortion towards children" by amending outdated and often-ignored sentencing guidelines, according to Grassley.
But it's unclear if their efforts will be successful.
One high-profile piece of legislation aimed at protecting children online, the Kids Online Safety Act, passed overwhelmingly in the Senate last year -- by a vote of 93 to 1 -- only to languish in the House, largely due to First Amendment concerns.
At one point in the hearing on Tuesday, Woods grew teary-eyed and her voice began to crack as she offered some advice to children who may be targeted by online predators, urging them to be vulnerable "one more time" and speak up for themselves even when they make mistakes, no matter what the mistakes are.
"I would give anything to have my son back," she said. "And if they have to learn, if they have to see James' face, if they have to see my tears, I'm going to make sure that it happens if it means that I can save your grandchildren. I'm going to do it."