Fighting sex trafficking by simply uploading hotel room images

Traffickers regularly post photographs of their victims in hotel rooms for online advertisements. These photographs are evidence that can be used to find and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. To use these photos, however, investigators must be able to determine where they were taken.

I have this challenge

the problem

By having tourists post pictures of their hotel rooms to safe and secure sites, police can help determine where sex trafficking is taking place by comparing these room photos to photos being posted by sex traffickers.

In 2018, Polaris worked on 10,949 cases of human trafficking reported to the Polaris-operated U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline. These cases involved 23,078 individual survivors; nearly 5,859 potential traffickers and 1,905 trafficking businesses. Human trafficking is notoriously underreported. Shocking as these numbers are, they are likely only a fraction of the actual problem.

ideas

TraffickCam enables people to help combat sex trafficking by uploading photos of the hotel rooms they stay in when traveling, allowing for comparison of illicit photos to help put an end to human trafficking.

attributions

Emily Nelson

https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-nelson-bbaba7183/

https://www.socialtech.org.uk/projects/traffickcam/

https://polarisproject.org/myths-facts-and-statistics/

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