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. Spotlight has been used in 21,044 cases identifying 12,328 adults, 5,791 children, and 6,553 traffickers in the past two years. Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results. I started by conducting a competitive and stakeholder analysis to help with the overall discovery of where we were with our current process. To find children faster, they have created two online tools, Spotlight and Solis, for law enforcement agencies across the world, for free. Spotlight can connect contacts in minutes where it would take me weeks, if not months to do the same thing. Please check your inbox in order to proceed. Our programs and products find child abuse victims faster, make online environments safer, and deter criminal behavior. 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. In 2012, we learned that 75% of child sex trafficking victims were being bought and sold online. | Photos Copyright Kay Chernush, ArtWorks for Freedom. This was meant to identify areas in which we could make the tool more intuitive, to minimize obstacles to adoption. 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). This year, Dressember is proud to partner with Thorn, an organization that uses technology to combat child sex trafficking. Outcome - describing the effects on people or issues. A GuideStar Pro report containing the following information is available for this organization: This information is only available for subscribers and in Premium reports. An infographic detailing the reach that Spotlight has gained, since its national roll-out in February 2015. Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? I agree to the terms of use, privacy policy and agree to receive promotional emails, reminders and updates from Thorn Email or Username. 6 0 obj Leadership Spotlight: Leading At-Risk Employees - Law Enforcement and the Addiction Crisis. <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> How does this organization measure their results? This is me at a conference booth, preparing to hold several usability testing sessions with human trafficking investigators. 3 0 obj "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 . 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. Sign In. AWS Lambda functions orchestrate Amazon Simple Queueing Service (Amazon SQS) to queue new ads for processing by the app's analytics engine, Digital Reasoning Synthesys. Spotlight is a web-based application that helps law enforcement prioritize leads in their sex trafficking investigations. Please continue to fund this very important resource; it saves lives. 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. Spotlight has been used in 21,044 cases identifying 12,328 adults, 5,791 children, and 6,553 traffickers in the past two years. Kelbi Ervin, Development Associate at Thorn, works with a team to develop partnerships and identify funding opportunities to sustain Thorn's work. As Thorn started work on a tool that could help investigators identify children being exploited, more than 150,000 new escort ads were being posted online every day in the United States. <> We can use this tool to gather intelligence and plot trends prior to conducting an operation, during the operation we can allocate resources effectively and tighten our investigative vision to have the greatest immediate impact, and following this operation we can couple Spotlight with information gathered in interviews to develop a more complete picture of the scope of Human Trafficking in our area.. Spotlight takes this massive amount of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. Register now. x nH@ \ $120/yr. from UCLA and an M.B.A. from Northwestern. stream "Our law enforcement partners say Spotlight helps officers identify child sex-trafficking ads much faster than the old paper-and-pencil methods," says Brooke Istook, director of strategy and operations at Thorn. To request technical assistance, training, or other resources through this initiative, agency POCs shouldemail usor call 202-833-1460. We believe that every child has the right to be safe, to be curious, to be happy. Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Building is a core value that informs every strategy in our organization. She shared, "Maintaining any technology product is always challenging because technology is constantly changing. 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. 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 flexibility and easy integration of AWS, we can experiment and prototype new products like Spotlight that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive to develop. We'll keep it out of your inbox, promise. All of our technology partners are making crucial contributions to this fight. The Amazon Rekognition team has been very responsive in helping us address any challenges we encounter.". Spotlight is invaluable as a tool/resource. <> Journey map of users navigating htspotlight.com. 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. Julie holds a B.A. 7 0 obj A verification email has been sent to you. We found that sixty-three percent of underage sex trafficking victims reported they had been bought or sold online. 2 0 obj Registration is open for Dressember 2018 and fundraising has already started! Most Popular Stories. At Dressember, we release a line of dresses each year, but those products are sold. Forgot your username or password? 8 0 obj Here are samples of the Spotlight product website: home page, request access page, and request demo page. 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 . Its a neuralnet, it gets smarter over time, it gets better and it gets more efficient as people use it. Editor's Pick Leise Hook / For Spotlight PA Our tool Spotlight accelerates law enforcements ability to identify victims of child sex trafficking. The software, called Spotlight, is now used across all 50 states by more than 4,000 law enforcement officers, according to Thorn's website. The genesis of Spotlight started after we conducted a sex trafficking Survivor Survey in 2012, seeking to learn directly from victims how technology was used throughout their trafficking situation. endstream Share it with us and well add it to the database! 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. "When I asked if Spotlight was available to law enforcement in other countries, Kelbi said no, not yet, "But were constantly evaluating the landscape to understand where it can have impact internationally as well.". Spotlight is a web tool used by law enforcement agencies to more efficiently search the internet for victim and trafficker information. There are more than 150,000 escort ads posted every day in this country. According to our most recent survey, it is helping find more human trafficking victims, faster. 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. s#fDr$G#;3s/U@q~}NHO. Our tools take massive amounts of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement. AWS support for Internet Explorer ends on 07/31/2022. endobj The bad news is that law enforcement just doesnt have the time, energy, or manpower to efficiently pursue the information available online. All rights reserved. Washington D.C. tax attorney Kevin E. Thorn, Managing Partner of Thorn Law Group, explains. Thorn was founded in 2012 to build technology to defend children from sexual abuse. I also conducted guerrilla usability testing to learn about the major pain points of the product itself. Finally, we designed marketing collateral to drive further customer acquisition. Leadership Spotlight: Leading Through Tragedy. 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. My background in law enforcement and anti-human trafficking was well suited for the needs of Spotlight when I first joined the team. Used by officers in all 50 states and Canada, our web-based tool has helped in identifying 17,092 child victims of human trafficking in the past four years. But Thorn stays positive in the midst of engaging directly with such data. I cant begin to tell you how appreciative myself and the victim's families are that we have people that support a worthy cause such as this. Our team built and launched Spotlight in 2014 to improve investigator workflow to find child victims faster. Kevin E. Thorn, Managing partner of Thorn law Group, explains founded 2012. 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Amazon EC2 C5 instances offer memory-to-vCPU. 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