More From Thorn About the Spotlight Technology. "Abusers had figured out how to use advanced technology to facilitate their exploitation of children," says Sarah Potts, the head of marketing and communications for Thorn, the California-based nonprofit that created Spotlight. Spotlight has been used in 21,044 cases identifying 12,328 adults, 5,791 children, and 6,553 traffickers in the past two years. Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. User research through interviews, personas, and journey mapping of proactive and reactive searches had already been done prior to my start date. Connecticut Institute for Refugees and Immigrants (CIRI) founded in 1918, is a statewide nonprofit human services agency that addresses the need to provide new immigrants and refugees in Connecticut with services to help them become self-sufficient, integrated and contributing members of the community. This organization is required to file an IRS Form 990 or 990-EZ. Kelbi Ervin, Development Associate at Thorn, works with a team to develop partnerships and identify funding opportunities to sustain Thorn's work. Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. Have you recently published a useful resource? Officers who login weekly report a time savings of 60% in their human trafficking investigations. 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. 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. FOLLOW MORE IBT NEWS ON THE BELOW CHANNELS, IBT Fast Start - Let the best of International News come to you. Our product Safer is the first holistic solution for tech companies to detect, remove, and report child sexual abuse material at scale. result in increased adoption of Thorns tools, a reduction in time to stop abuse and an increase in risk for perpetrators. Trafficking in human beings: protect women and children and focus on sexual exploitation, Desperate for Cash, Afghans Toil in Mines That Are Deadlier Than Ever, Forced to Beg: Tanzanias Trafficked Kids. 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. With the approval of the Thorn CEO, I led the design of a Spotlight product website and managed our vendors, Media Cause and Digital Reasoning - who were in charge of graphic design and engineering development. After the 2015 Atlanta ICAC Conference, we quickly realized that we needed a better on-boarding process that no longer relied solely on Google Sheets to manage requests. Viral child sexual abuse material is removed from the internet to end the cycle of trauma. endobj The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorn's website. We hate spam too, unless it's on a sandwich with some eggs. GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader GuideStar partnered on this section with CHANGE Philanthropy and Equity in the Center. Spotlight has been used in 21,044 cases identifying 12,328 adults, 5,791 children, and 6,553 traffickers in the past two years. The Law Enforcement Family. Monthly Yearly One time only. Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? A verification email has been sent to you. Email or Username. Potts adds, "We built Spotlight because we wanted to use advanced technology to help law enforcement turn the tables and find these children faster.". At Dressember, we release a line of dresses each year, but those products are sold. There are more than 150,000 escort ads posted every day in this country. Washington D.C. tax attorney Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains. Sign In. Most locations in the United States are updated every six hours. Leadership Spotlight: Leading with the Pen - The Handwritten Note. Register. The app does this on a serverless Amazon Web Services (AWS) architecture that includes Amazon Rekognition, a deep learningbased image and video analysis service, and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C5 instances. 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). Please check your inbox in order to proceed. Thorn also works to speed the identification of children featured in sexually abusive material. In addition to a powerful team of experts, we work with the sharpest minds from tech, non-profit, government, and law enforcement to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, stand up to child traffickers, and uncover new kinds of abuse. Since 2016 alone, Spotlight has helped officers in the United States and Canada open more than 21,000 trafficking cases and identify about 18,000 victims, including more than 6,000 children. Most Popular Stories. 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 Tennessee Fusion Center may share information contained within THOR with other law . I was given the goal of on-boarding 250 users in the next six months. Commit to wearing a dress or tie every day in December. <> Initially, they had about 100 users from three U.S. states who were using Spotlight for their human-trafficking investigations. Spotlight is used by more than 6,000 law enforcement officers in all 50 Spotlight's machine-learning models are trained and run on Amazon EC2 C5 instances. That's where Thorn comes in. Help us get you more of the nonprofit information you need, including: An email has been sent to the address you provided. Our programs and products find child abuse victims faster, make online environments safer, and deter criminal behavior. in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section. Click here to resend it.). | Photos Copyright Kay Chernush, ArtWorks for Freedom. One of the most significant obstacles is the massive volume of these ads. Spotlight is the #1 investigative tool I have utilized to find child victims and arrest their traffickers in countless cases. It's a hard question but an important one. Lucas Moore is a writer in Los Angeles. Spotlight is like a investigative partner in human trafficking investigations. Similarly, The Tote Project, sells their bags, which helps them pay expenses. The internet has become a widely used place for sex traffickers to advertise. And its working. He also noted that Spotlight is reducing investigation times by 60 percent. $300/yr. stream Kelbi writes, "We are philanthropically funded, which means that donations and grants like yours directly fund our products that we provide to law enforcement for free. Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics, Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools, Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations, Revenue and expense data for the current fiscal year, CEO, Board Chair, and Board of Directors information, *with the ability to download the data for 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016. Registration is open for Dressember 2018 and fundraising has already started! The Amazon Rekognition team has been very responsive in helping us address any challenges we encounter.". Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. xKk@aZp &@z(=6M5h6N0]|V^c DY: $ I~^_az{}n{wN2r0 G$?Df'QK(s[,3o@o Ecw]\Q sIIb4`W*4)zka0Xm?adhga$P0A*+F#JExueU\|%|Q(2TW,+ h[ QFSv`eDShjJ} x|c' $wGdX308@Ng/UTf <>/Metadata 508 0 R/ViewerPreferences 509 0 R>> Research programs to better understand the role of technology in child sex trafficking. Learn more about Spotlight. Identifying the best product and UX design to onboard users, so that Spotlight could become the leading machine learning tool for human trafficking investigators. Email contact available with a Pro subscription. Matt Damon wants clean water for all, Shailene Woodley was arrested protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, and Ashton Kutcher is the co-founder of a tech company fighting human trafficking and sexual exploitation. my.evidence.com. In 2012, we learned that 75% of child sex trafficking victims were being bought and sold online. The exact details of how the software works have been protected by Thorn, in the hearing Kutcher was careful to not go in depth in the interest of making it harder for traffickers to potentially evade the software. $15/mo. Helped officers identify over 10,000 child victims of sexual trafficking and children whose abuse was recorded and distributed. We couldnt recommend it more taking time away from what is hard helps us all sustain our efforts to achieve our goals. We are only one player in a critical ecosystem working on behalf of our children. ", Combating online child sex trafficking is a team effort, according to Istook. " endobj It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. This tool will allow us to conduct faster, more precise investigations that will remove criminals from the street and, most importantly, recover victims. endstream 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. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. Kelbi Ervin, Development Associate at Thorn, works with a team to develop partnerships and identify funding opportunities to sustain Thorn's work. x nH@ \ Click on the link in that email 9 0 obj Spotlights analytics pipeline begins with a third-party solution that ingests more than 100,000 new online escort ads each day, storing text and image data as objects in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets. Equipped more than 8,500 law enforcement officers across 2,000 law enforcement agencies in 35 countries with its tools, Tools speed investigation time by up to 65 percent, 2022 Skoll Foundation. Try a low commitment monthly plan today. 2021 Dressember | Dressember is a 501 (C)(3) | design by anne agency + marrow design, Grant Partners, Dressember2018, human trafficking, modern day slavery, child advocacy, buisnesses ending slavery and trafficking, BEST, Danyella Wilder. ", In a YouTube video describing Thorns use of technology to fight child pornography and sex trafficking, Thorn Co-founder Ashton Kutcher said, We have to stay on the front cutting edge of that technology, because the criminals, theyre on the front cutting edge., I asked Kelbi what challenges Spotlight faces in keeping at the front of the technological curve. 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. You can have your biggest impact in the community where you live thats where you know the most about the environment, the opportunities, the dangers. Our team built and launched Spotlight in 2014 to improve investigator workflow to find child victims faster. Spotlight, which is offered free of charge to law enforcement and allied organizations, uses Amazon Cognito to provide a secure user directory that can scale to millions of users. Hear more from investigators using Spotlight on the front lines. is the CEO of Thorn and has helped grow the organization from inception in 2012. Learn more about Amazon EC2 C5 Instances. Build relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. 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). 10 0 obj The Bureau of Justice Assistance is a component of the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the SMART Office. Thorn was founded in 2012 to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. "Spotlight was designed based on insights from our first survivor survey. The organization's co-leader identifies as: Already have a GuideStar Account? Law enforcement doesnt have enough time to navigate the online commercial sex market to find children and identify their traffickers. After the sting operation, we sat down with FVTC and the DOJ to put together the curriculum for Spotlight Lab. 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. Sign in or create a new account. "Day to day, we strive to balance hard work with care for ourselves and each other so that we have the resiliency we need to keep fighting," Kelbi writes, "At Thorn, we are invested in a team wellness plan where we carve out time to discuss how were feeling and how were approaching our work. For this phase of the project, I used the data I already gathered from Spotlight users to create a journey for those seeking to learn more about Spotlight, request a demo, request access, and to log in. The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. $120/yr. 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. 2016-MU-BX-K005 awarded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. This project was supported by Grant No. $10/mo. All rights reserved. How can law enforcement sift through massive amounts of data to focus their time on the most vulnerable victims? stream ", In addition to the task of staying technologically relevant, Thorn faces another significant challenge: fundraising. Officer Wellness Spotlight: Police Chaplains - An Integral Part of Law Enforcement. <> s#fDr$G#;3s/U@q~}NHO. Here are samples of the Spotlight product website: home page, request access page, and request demo page. To build the world we believe in, we know we must: 1) Accelerate Victim Identification 2) Make Digital Environments Safer and 3) Deter Predatory Behavior. Powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Amazon EC2 C5 instances offer a memory-to-vCPU ratio that is ideal for demanding inference applications. Education and engagement with the public change risky and abusive behaviors. I agree to the terms of use, privacy policy and agree to receive promotional emails, reminders and updates from Thorn With only a 25% average response rate, were confident these numbers represent the low end of our impact. Leadership Spotlight: Leading At-Risk Employees - Law Enforcement and the Addiction Crisis. Thorn is a team of issue experts, business leaders, and engineers who build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. and who do the programs serve? Officers, directors, trustees, and key employees. Facial analysis in Amazon Rekognition helps investigators find photos of the same person that have been edited to defeat less intelligent image-search engines. Based on IRS CI's FY 2021 Annual Report, here are five top enforcement priorities that are likely to carry over into 2022: 1. The internet has made it easier for children to be bought and sold online. The objective of Spotlight is to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of domestic sex trafficking investigations and increase the number of children who are identified and connected with help resources. Spotlight evolved from surveys completed by victims of trafficking that showed 63 percent of underage victims were bought or sold online at some point. It went from beta in Summer 2014, to extended beta in Fall 2014, to a national roll-out in Winter 2015. 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. 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. <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> We do all of this so every child can be safe, curious, and happy. Half of our 26 person staff are engineers and product managers focused on technology innovation and deployment. We found that sixty-three percent of underage sex trafficking victims reported they had been bought or sold online. $25/mo. For more information about the impact of Spotlight, check out the infographic below. Thorn has created a program called Spotlight. country every day, law enforcement cannot manually keep up with the volume of ads as they work to identify and track potential victims. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. Powered by 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Amazon EC2 C5 instances offer a memory-to-vCPU ratio that is ideal for demanding inference applications. Both products had been around longer than Spotlight and had a few hundred more users than us at the time. 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. It is the Google Search for combating human sex trafficking. Kutchers company Thorn developed software to combat this challenge. I was part of the team that was responsible for designing the UX/UI and rolling out the product Nationwide, along with our partners -Digital Reasoning- whose machine learning technology, Spotlight was built on. Already have a GuideStar Account to wearing a dress or tie every day in this country the BELOW,. The infographic BELOW key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar.. 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