Defending children on the digital frontline

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

With more and younger children online, the fight against child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has become increasingly urgent. While the internet has provided countless opportunities for positive connection, it has also facilitated the rapid spread of exploitation.¹

To detect child sexual abuse, innovative technology and digital tools have been deployed as a force for good. This technology works by assimilating vast reserves of data to label an image or video with a unique digital fingerprint. Whenever imagery that matches the digital fingerprint reappears online, it can be quickly identified, removed, and reported.

Three of our partners are using such tools to defend children on the digital frontline. Thorn, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) are leading the fight against child sexual abuse by using innovative technology, conducting awareness campaigns, and helping to remove CSAM from the internet, thereby creating safer digital environments for children.

Despite the enormity of the challenge, Thorn, NCMEC, and C3P have made a profound impact in the fight against CSAM. By identifying and removing existing material, they break the cycle of abuse and empower survivors on their path to recovery. The technology employed by these organisations also enables them to detect emerging trends and protect more children from harm:

Thorn
Thorn is a not-for-profit organisation that creates products and programmes to empower the platforms and people who have the ability to defend children. The organisation’s tools have helped law enforcement agencies worldwide identify over 27,000 child victims whose abuse has been circulated online, which has led to them being removed from harm. It has also helped the tech industry find and remove over one million child sexual abuse files from the open web, and has reached millions of parents and youth directly with prevention and support programmes and messaging.²

“Each of us has our reason for sticking with this work – something we can always come back to when things get hard,” says Thorn CEO Julie Cordua. “For me, that’s our shared vision of a world where every child can simply be a kid. Where they can live connected lives without being sexually exploited or re-victimised.”

Since 2016, Thorn’s technology has helped identify CSAM as well as find and rescue victims of child sexual abuse faster. To date, Thorn has identified more than five million CSAM files on various platforms.³

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC)
The (NCMEC) is the biggest clearing house for child sexual abuse material in the world. NCMEC works to provide the digital solutions and staffing levels needed to stay at the forefront of eradicating CSAM from the internet – and helps identify and rescue the children it depicts.

NCMEC’s CyberTipline allows members of the public and electronic service providers to report incidents of child sexual exploitation. In 2023, NCMEC’s CyberTipline received more than 36.2 million reports,containing more than 88 million images, videos, and other file. ⁴ NCMEC provides CyberTipline reports to law enforcement in more than 160 countries and territories, and helps prioritise urgent cases where children were most at risk.

“Every child deserves a safe childhood. At NCMEC, hope drives us and fuels our promise to never stop,” says President and CEO, Michelle C. DeLaune. “The threats our kids face are constantly evolving, and we work hard every day to identify those threats and figure out how to better protect children. And while the way we do our work is ever-changing, our commitment to children will never falter.”

Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P)
C3P combines the detection, removal, and reporting of CSAM with robust challenges to tech companies who are not doing enough to combat this abuse. It also provides education and resources for families, young people, and survivors.

“Technology has been weaponised against children,” says Lianna McDonald, executive director for C3P. “Unlike other offline spaces where governments have rules, regulations, and expectations of companies and spaces that serve children, online guardrails and interventions simply do not exist.”

Among many projects in this field, C3P has its own tipline, survivor advocacy groups that bring forward voices to call for change, and Project Arachnid – technology that processes 10,000 images per second, and has removed more than six million of them from the internet.

Oak supports Thorn, NCMEC, and C3P as part of our Prevent Child Sexual Abuse Programme. Child sexual abuse is preventable. This fact drives and inspires our support to end child sexual abuse online and offline. Our partners are survivors, advocates, and researchers working to accelerate action at the community, national, and global levels. Two of the themes that inform our grant-making are: investing in innovative research and supporting promising solutions, and ensuring digital environments are safe for children.

References

[1]National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (n.d.). Child sexual abuse material (CSAM). https://www.missingkids.org/theissues/csam

[2] Thorn. (2024). 2022 impact report. Retrieved from https://www.thorn.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2022-Thorn-Impact-Report.pdf

[3] Thorn. (n.d.). Our impact. Thorn. Retrieved August 9, 2024, from https://www.thorn.org/about/our-impact/ [1] National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (2023). Our impact 2023. Retrieved from https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/2023-ncmec-our-impact.pdf

[4] National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (2023). Our impact 2023. Retrieved from https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/2023-ncmec-our-impact.pdf