stream This website is funded through a grant from the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. These recent survey results confirm our initial hypothesis that Spotlight has indeed been an asset for law enforcement in earlier victim identification, collaboration and productivity. Thorn was founded in 2012 by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to combat online child abuse. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Sign up and stay up to date with our daily newsletter. Technology can be used to enable slavery but it can also be used to disable slavery, and thats what were doing, Kutcher said to wrap up his comments. Lucas Moore is a writer in Los Angeles. endobj Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorns website. An improved product and UX journey delivers a seamless onboarding and training process for our users and admin staff, Streamlining the onboarding process for law enforcement, Designing a user experience for human trafficking investigators to help them solve cases faster than ever. In 2013, we published the first version of The Thorn Sound Practices Guide, which educates companies about proven practices, tools and resources that exist to identify, remove, report and prevent child sexual abuse material and abusive behavior on their platforms. Raise your voice against slavery this December! "Permitted Use" means any use of the Services by an Authorized User for the benefit of Customer solely for supporting his or her law enforcement, social services, academic or other similar professional role, including to detect criminal actions, identify missing/exploited victims, or measure statistical trends surrounding the adult services . Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. x nH@ \ A virtual team based in the U.S., Thorn employs 25 people. We recently asked human trafficking investigators and prosecutors how Spotlight has impacted their investigations within the last 12 months here are a few highlights: It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. All of our technology partners are making crucial contributions to this fight. <> Please continue to fund this very important resource; it saves lives. Register. Furthermore, by making sure users were engaged and properly trained, user surveys have shown that Spotlight has since been able to reduce the time it takes to investigate a human trafficking case by 43%, identified close to 2,000 children, and over 2,000 traffickers. Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? $180/yr. Registration is open for Dressember 2018 and fundraising has already started! <> <> This process was relatively ad hoc, however, with no identified workflow to drive rapid acquisition and adoption. Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader There are more than 150,000 escort ads posted every day in this country. Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. Register now. Stay up to date with our daily newsletter, testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee, evolved from surveys completed by victims of trafficking, Ashton Kutcher Blew A Kiss To John McCain. Kelbi Ervin, Development Associate at Thorn, works with a team to develop partnerships and identify funding opportunities to sustain Thorn's work. Rather, I will be detailing the UX/UI and program management that went behind the design of the on-boarding process, which I led during my time at Thorn. GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center. Empowering law enforcement to collaborate beyond jurisdictions or national borders, is a key to success in identifying victims who are moved frequently, or are broadcast in P2P onthe dark web from a hidden location. x Om7 ' It's a hard question but an important one. I gathered additional information through phone call interviews with customers who were familiar with Spotlight and the other two products to get a sense of what features and design they liked. Spotlight is a robust search tool that uses machine learning to help law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. Learn more about Spotlight. <> Spotlight's machine-learning models are trained and run on Amazon EC2 C5 instances. Email contact available with a Pro subscription. Officer Wellness Spotlight: Police Chaplains - An Integral Part of Law Enforcement. All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, launched Spotlight nationwide in October 2014, Spotlight assisted in the identification of 1,980 children and over 2,186 traffickers. The insights we gained - was not only beneficial for the overall product development - but for the workshop design itself (I would continue to observe Spotlight usage at future sting operations, including Operation Cross Country, in which hundreds of juveniles were identified and pimps were arrested). 8 0 obj Leadership Spotlight: Leading with the Pen - The Handwritten Note. Leadership Spotlight: Leading Through Tragedy. We reached out to her for more information about Spotlight. Our brand NoFiltr reaches youth directly with prevention and support messaging to help them better recognize online grooming. On Wednesday, Kutcher testified before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee along with the CEO and President of the organization Human Rights First, Elisa Massimino, to ask the United States Government for help fighting trafficking and sexual exploitation. With only a 25% average response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Officers, directors, trustees, and key employees. endstream Finally, we designed marketing collateral to drive further customer acquisition. I also conducted guerrilla usability testing to learn about the major pain points of the product itself. You'll challenge yourself, expand your knowledge on modern slavery, and be equipped to lead your community in the fight to end human trafficking. my.evidence.com. Thorn developed Spotlight, an app that helps law enforcement close trafficking cases much faster than by using traditional manual methods. SOURCE: Self-reported; last updated 6/9/2021. endobj We are dedicated to ending child sex trafficking and eliminating child sexual abuse from the internet, and we wont stop until every child can simply be a kid. We choose to use it for good. Spotlight can connect contacts in minutes where it would take me weeks, if not months to do the same thing. $120/yr. in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section. To help investigators overcome these and other hurdles, Thorn collaborated with AWS and Digital Reasoning, a company specializing in cognitive-computing solutions, to build Spotlight. Research programs to better understand the role of technology in child sex trafficking. Dont see a resource that you know exists? A leading assumption was that users wanted to learn by doing, so we used the outcomes from the New Orleans sting operation as a hands-on case study. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. Thorn Helps Law Enforcement Identify Child Sex-Trafficking Victims Faster on AWS Answering the Challenge Using AWS Supported browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. AWS support for Internet Explorer ends on 07/31/2022. Share it with us and well add it to the database! result in increased adoption of Thorns tools, a reduction in time to stop abuse and an increase in risk for perpetrators. Commit to wearing a dress or tie every day in December. Learn more about Amazon EC2 C5 Instances. Need the ability to download nonprofit data and more advanced search options? Be a part of the impact for our local and global partners by creating your campaign page today! Spotlight is invaluable as a tool/resource. The National Policing Institute, formerly known as the National Police Foundation, is an independent non-profit, non-partisan institution based in Arlington, Virginia that has been dedicated to advancing policing through innovation and science for over half a century, and works to translate those findings to practice through technical assistance, training, and dissemination. Candid has made improvements to the race and ethnicity options. Learn more You can view our, Meet the 2019 Skoll Awardees for Social Entrepreneurship. Copyright 2023 IBTimes LLC. Building is a core value that informs every strategy in our organization. Spotlight's sophisticated machine-learning capabilities save time for overworked, under-resourced investigators by automatically flagging ads likely to represent at-risk children and keeping law enforcement agents from getting lost in a sea of online data. ", Combating online child sex trafficking is a team effort, according to Istook. " HTS creates a blog, publishes research, and hosts a global resource database on human trafficking and modern-day slavery. This was meant to identify areas in which we could make the tool more intuitive, to minimize obstacles to adoption. On AWS, we can also respond to feature requests from officers in weeks or daysnot a level of responsiveness public-sector agencies are used to seeing. While learning the ins and outs of Spotlight, and shipping features from our product backlog, I began to focus on ways to improve our on-boarding process for increased acquisition and adoption. Have you recently published a useful resource? We piloted our workshop at the 2015 Atlanta ICAC Conference and received additional feedback on how to improve Spotlight Lab. Monthly Yearly One time only. Viral child sexual abuse material is removed from the internet to end the cycle of trauma. All rights reserved. Through my competitive analysis, I identified two major competing products, Traffic Jam and Rescue Forensics. All Rights Reserved. Eventually, I reached out to them, and we agreed to partner and co-teach a Spotlight Lab workshop at major conferences across the Nation to drive awareness and adoption. Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. $300/yr. Empowering law enforcement to collaborate beyond jurisdictions or national borders is a key to success in identifying victims who are moved frequently, or are broadcast through peer-to-peer platforms (P2P) on the dark web from a hidden location. The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. Armed with this data, we worked with our technology partners and law enforcement to understand how these existing digital footprints could assist law enforcement in faster victim identification. Copyright IBTimes 2023. Technology is a powerful tool. COVID-19 fraud schemes have been a top concern for IRS CI and other . One way for law enforcement agents to catch traffickers and rescue kids would be to identify and investigate escort ads that seem to feature minors, but there are many obstacles to doing this. Thorn's Spotlight tool combines publicly available classified ad and online forum data with smart algorithms to help law enforcement identify an average of eight child sex trafficking victims every day. Our work has three pillars and one guiding vision. Top 5 IRS CI Enforcement Priorities. <> We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. Expanded partnerships with law enforcement. She shared, "Maintaining any technology product is always challenging because technology is constantly changing. In 2012, we learned that 75% of child sex trafficking victims were being bought and sold online. There are over 150,000 escort ads posted daily, and Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Spotlight's machine-learning models analyze new escort ads in real time and use intelligent image analysis and natural-language processing (NLP) to flag those that match risk profiles developed in cooperation with law enforcement agencies. Thorn has worked tirelessly to improve three areas of child safety, finding abused children faster, deterring predators, and creating hostile online environments. Activation of the tech industry helps eliminate abuse content from their platforms. 2016-MU-BX-K005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Additionally, through my stakeholder analysis, I focused on Fox Valley Technical College (FVTC) - a leading law enforcement education center - and the DOJ (both of whom I know, because I currently consult for them on human trafficking). The Tennessee Fusion Center may share information contained within THOR with other law . User research through interviews, personas, and journey mapping of proactive and reactive searches had already been done prior to my start date. 4 0 obj All Rights Reserved, thorn.org, Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines, surveyed underage sex trafficking victims. 6 0 obj Based on IRS CI's FY 2021 Annual Report, here are five top enforcement priorities that are likely to carry over into 2022: 1. More From Thorn About the Spotlight Technology. 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