1.2 million children are trafficked each year to become sex slaves. Global statistics have shown that till this point, child trafficking has surpassed 26 million children.
According to the United Nations, most victims are girls who are forced to live under severe brutality from both their captors and clients.
Statistics keep growing. Undetected deaths keep rising. Severely unrecognised children’s bodies are found molested and dismembered many months after their predators have left them in dungeons, unknown lakeshores, abandoned houses, among other unimaginable places.
Sadly enough, public perception is not even aware of the situation at stake. Media work has not really built on the story as much to showcase the severity of the issue. Public perception lacks both the knowledge and the information to increase the necessary pressure for an earlier and proactive warning, which is a blocking factor, letting predators continue their dirty business – in many cases not getting jail-time or paying for their crimes.
Hope dies last. Researchers have joined forces with law enforcement officials in developing and using AI to find Child traffickers, rescue victims, and significantly lower the statistics that have now hit record high.
This is good news for child trafficking victims like 17-year-old Mary and million victims like her that were promised a better life since they were 3 years old. Instead, for 14 years, they have been drugged, sex slaved, moved from a warehouse in Mexico, to a hotel room in the United Kingdom to a cheap brothel in Tunisia. She has seen no time, no day, no country, no humans. She has seen lifeless bodies, counted the money, and if she was lucky enough – a warm plate was thrown to the floor – laughing at her as if the world has not laughed enough.
At that moment – that plate on the floor makes her smile. This smile quickly vanishes behind a pair of frightened, hungry eyes that no longer shed a tear. Her eyes look at you, but what they are really doing is crying for help – they cannot tell, yell, or write it.
But she calls you with her eyes – asking you and me to bring her back from this horrific reality she has been living…give her back her dreams, keep her close, make her feel safe again…she shows you where she usually crawls at night when another ugly day has passed…dirty sheets, blood, the odour of death everywhere…She shows you around…She smiles back at you…You start feeling uncomfortable…Your heart keeps racing…
Mary is from the Lake Chad region of West Africa, an area where the Boko Haram insurgency has caused terror to millions of families. She has watched thousands leave home daily guided by smugglers who promised them a better life elsewhere.
Mary eventually followed in their footsteps. She was put in contact with a well-known smuggler, Ben. He told her that he would pay for her trip to Italy waiting at tables. She would need to pay him back once she started working. She agreed.
She, along with eight other girls were taken to Libya – a shortstop they were told. Still, they never left. They were drugged. They were sold every night to different men. With no means of contacting anyone back home, they would need to make at least $10, 000 each week. Unless the quota was met, they would be savagely beaten, molested to death, and even killed viciously.
Mary remained alive. She is a survivor of 10 years in this ‘hell on earth’. Her life changed when one night a police officer on duty arrested her for prostitution. She saw that man as the first man she could ever trust. This is how she got to tell her story and escape. She cannot be identified, no family, no legal way to earn a living in Libya. She was asked to cooperate with the investigations, but she was afraid. Investigators work the case assiduously, but much time passed as they were tasked to meticulously gather evidence with sparse resources.
Finding and arresting Child traffickers is always a difficult process. Historically, more advanced societies have managed to place greater priority, backed by resources, on locating traffickers and helping victims escape.
However, for impoverished populations with scarce resources and a collective need for opportunities to earn a living, Child traffickers are prolific.
Experts on the issue agree that the current tools used by lawmakers to locate Child traffickers are woefully inadequate-even in developed countries. They now call for increased use of AI in identifying Child traffickers and their patterns. They believe that using AI to find Child traffickers and save victims will result in solving cases quicker,
But how can AI assist law enforcement to locate Child traffickers? Child traffickers understand the power of social channels to connect and communicate. They have embraced platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram to recruit potential victims and let their customers know whom they have on offer.
Dan Lopresti, professor, and Chair of the Department of Science and Engineering at Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science believes that law enforcement can apply the data mining techniques of social platforms like Facebook and Instagram to track illicit behaviour and behavioural patterns.
Using AI to identify traffickers’ interests and the activities they engage in on social media can help law enforcement build profiles that they can then run through their databases.
Undoubtedly, given the number of victims, this represents a massive amount of data to be sorted into useable reports. If an expert sits long enough and combs through each detail carefully, he/she will eventually start to identify patterns of both traffickers and victims. However, the process is lengthy and could take weeks or months – time that victims like Mary do not have to spare.
Under the umbrella of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), technology has been developed and used by companies like Marinus Analytics to help law enforcement easily identify patterns of human traffickers intending to bring them to justice and return victims to a safe space.
In 2012, Emily Kennedy, CEO of Marinus Analytics realised that AI could be used to monitor the retail component of the Human Trafficking business. She used AI in software called Traffic Jam that searches through thousands of publicly available data throughout the internet to help identify patterns that can be used to find Child traffickers.
The software also matches a suspected victim’s photo from a missing person advertisement or social media to online advertisements for sex. Detectives can identify patterns such as a hotel’s bedsheets to see how many victims were photographed in the same room.
Image-based AI is also used to find Child traffickers and destroy their operations. Delta 8.7 is an organisation that uses Image-based AI in its initiative, ‘Slavery from space’. This utilises satellite technology to investigate countries, industries, and regions where modern slavery practices are widely reported.
Another method of tracking and arresting Child traffickers is using applications. Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, a non-profit organisation, developed one such app that can be used on victims’ cell phones.
Victims can scan QR codes that are placed in the bathrooms of hotels and other public places. When law enforcement receives the data, they can follow up with a subpoena for phone records to verify if criminal activities are taking place. Once there is confirmation, traffickers can be apprehended, and victims saved.
Conclusion:
AI alone will not solve the issue of child trafficking. But when this is combined with training and efforts of experienced detectives, law enforcement agents, and attorneys committed to bring and enforce better ways to improve the regulatory setting will indeed reduce the time it takes to find child traffickers and save victims’ lives.
