How Facial Recognition Is Fighting Child Sex Trafficking

Wrongly assessing risks for children in potentially abusive or dangerous homes has dire consequences, but a new predictive analytics system is assisting screeners to help those who need it most.

Cece Yara Child Advocacy Centre Foundation provides comprehensive care, protection and legal assistance to youth who suffered sexual abuse or are at risk. So far, they’ve helped reach eight convictions and have about 57 ongoing cases. The Foundation also emphasizes the importance of psychotherapy and education, empowering youth to learn about personal safety, boundaries and age-appropriate sex education in an effort to prevent reoccurring abuse.

Hennepin County implemented a comprehensive overhaul of its child protection system, implementing a multi-pronged approach including increasing the staff and budget, splitting caseloads more evenly among workers, and instituting a two-month training program for new hires with ongoing education throughout their careers. The overhaul ensures families receive more comprehensive support, including therapy and addiction treatment services, reducing repeat cases and improving family outcomes.

Jewish Family Services (JFS) has been delivering the Child Abuse Prevention Program to local schools for 30 years. JFS presents the program at 150 area schools, curating age-appropriate presentations for each grade level. The program covers examples of safe and appropriate touching, as well as what to do if the child finds themselves in an unsafe situation and how to tell an adult.

The Uganda Child Helpline is a 24/7 toll-free line, whose goal is to encourage children and adults to report cases of child abuse. The Helpline then links at-risk children to support and protection through case management services. Currently, there are call centers in 68 districts and the line receives an average of 9,509 calls a day.

Miami is home to a special type of child welfare program called CHANCE (Citrus Helping Adolescents Negatively Impacted by Commercial Exploitation) that is designed specifically for youth in foster care that have been trafficked. CHANCE has an intensive curriculum that educates foster parents and clinicians about child sex trafficking and child trauma, and families are only allowed to take in one child at a time so that they are prepared for the child's unique health needs. Studies done on the program have found that the youth have significant improvement in many emotional and mental categories.

In Colorado, a state law requiring the use of a screening tool is being used to combat sex trafficking at the individual level. The screening tool identifies and offers support and protection to victims of sex trafficking – many of whom are runaways from the foster care system – and has led to multiple prosecutions of sex traffickers.

In order to address child abuse and neglect community members got together to form: R.O.C.K Mat Su, a collaborative organization composed of several organizations that has “teamed up with government agencies, schools and judges to develop a comprehensive solution.” So far, they have been able to train 10 schools to become trauma informed schools, trained over 2,000 people in the community, and created an alternative judicial court for children that prioritizes family reunification.

A rural village has instituted several WhatsApp groups to communicate and help find children when they go missing. Each ward has a WhatsApp group and a system in place to care for children until they are reunited with their families, all for free. From January 2024 to May, over 20 missing children have been found and reunited with their families.

For all the positive tools and platforms the internet has helped create over the decades, it can also be an extremely dark place, and has unfortunately enabled the horrific and wide-spread sharing of millions of images depicting child abuse, including of rape and torture. Artificial Intelligence - specifically the Arachnid web crawler launched by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection - is proving the most efficient and effective weapon in shutting down these abominable sites, combing through scores of data at a speed no human or government can match, and issuing takedown notices.