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Location
San Francisco, CA
With the help of Spotlight, law enforcement is identifying 10 kids per day on average and those who use Spotlight daily see over 60% in time savings
Technology has made it easier to harm today’s children. Children’s online sexual abuse and online sex trafficking are bigger problems than ever before – challenges too great to tackle without scalable technology. Nonprofit Thorn is on a mission to deliver tools to better identify victims and connect them with resources, deter predatory behavior, and disrupt environments where abuse takes place.
Over 150,000 escort ads are posted every day, among them are children who are bought and sold online for sex.
Thorn builds software to help law enforcement and the private sector tackle child sexual abuse, connecting data globally to speed the process of identifying victims, and supporting small and medium sized companies to quickly identify, remove, and report child sexual abuse material on their platforms. One of these tools is Spotlight, which helps law enforcement across the United States and Canada find traffickers and children being trafficked. By using machine learning to analyze escort ads where children are being sold, elevating the most likely victims, it reduces the time necessary to identify children being trafficked from weeks to days.
Empowering law enforcement to collaborate across jurisdictions is a key to success in identifying victims who are moved frequently.
The expanding reach of the Internet has increased the spread of child sexual abuse material and made it easier for child sex traffickers to access customers. In 2018, more than 45 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse material (child pornography) were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children – an increase of 10,000% since 2004. And today, 75% of victims of child sex trafficking were sold online. There is evidence that the most vulnerable children are most at risk, including those who are homeless, LGBTQ, African-American or Latino, or in the foster care system.
More than 200,000 escort ads are posted online every day, and somewhere in that pile of data are children. That’s a massive amount of data for law enforcement to sift through to find children and identify their traffickers. This market became more fragmented after the passage of US legislation Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) / Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA).
Spotlight aims to minimize the amount of a time a child is in their trafficking situation by leveraging the best technology to support law enforcement investigations. It does this by addressing two gaps in child sex trafficking investigations: proactive identification of underage victims and cross-jurisdiction collaboration. By leveraging the data built into Spotlight over time, Spotlight elevates the most likely child victims out of the sea of data being generated daily. As trafficking does not respect a county, city, or state jurisdiction, it can be difficult for an investigator to get an accurate understanding of the trafficking situation of a potential victim. Spotlight is able to provide information for the whole country, which allows an investigator to see if a likely victim is moving through multiple states and coordinate an appropriate action plan for recovering them.
Spotlight is used by more than 2,000 agencies in all 50 US states and Canada, as well as federal agencies, including the FBI and DHS. Thorn reports that it has helped in identifying 14,874 child sex trafficking victims in the past four years. Officers who use Spotlight weekly report time savings of over 60% in identifying a child victim.
Beyond Spotlight, Thorn’s products are used in 55 countries to help identify children featured in child sexual abuse images and prevent the upload and hosting of child sexual abuse images. Thorn’s product Safer, used by companies like Slack, Flickr, and Imgur, has scanned more than 1.2 billion images since launching in beta in Jaunary 2019 and has prevented the upload and sharing of more than 65,000 known images of child sexual abuse imagery in the last year. Thorn plans to continue to improve detection of known and unknown abuse material, with the ultimate goal of eliminating online child sexual abuse material; dismantling the communities that enable this abuse; and finding child victims faster. Thorn believes in a world where every child can be safe, curious, and happy.
