Crimes Against Children Conference Highlights Role of Tech

The Crimes Against Children Conference, hosted each year by the Dallas Children’s Advocacy Center and the Dallas Police Department, brings together thousands of people from around the world who are working to protect children every day. It is an incredible opportunity to learn from experts in this space, employed across a variety of fields, all working to protect child victims from crime.

Focus on Tech

This year, we were excited to see technology play a major role, with many of our Tech Task Force members hosting sessions.

Dropbox held a session to provide insight for law enforcement officials seeking information about Dropbox’s platform in connection with child exploitation investigations. Google spoke about efforts being made by the company to combat child exploitation—including the reporting of content, legal process, product safety, and their policies on data disclosure. Twitter shared how they collaborate with both tech companies and law enforcement to combat child sexual exploitation online, highlighting platform features to help users stay safe. Yahoo gave an overview of their services that may be utilized by those conducting child exploitation investigations. Facebook presented on their efforts to combat crimes against children, including platform safety features to reduce crimes and help keep users safe.

We were also glad to present some of the tech-based programs that we run at Thorn. We joined Microsoft, Facebook and Google, to discuss user education and deterrence campaigns. To learn more about how we deter predatory behavior online, explore our deterrence program. We also presented preliminary findings from our sextortion survey. If you, or someone you know, has been a target of sextortion, please take or share our survey, and help combat this crime.

Beyond the members of our tech task force, there were sessions on how technology can be leveraged to uncover crucial clues in investigations, understanding the technology that is used to gain access to children and teens, where to uncover smartphone data, how to monitor children’s online behavior, and more. At Thorn, we know that technology has enabled child sexual exploitation to explode across the Internet, and we were so glad to see technology as a focus at this conference.

Learn more about the Crimes Against Children Conference here.