USA — THORN — Thorn builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. In partnership with tech companies, government and NGOs we aim to accelerate victim identification, disrupt platforms, and change behavior.

We now house the first engi­neer­ing and data sci­ence team focused sole­ly on devel­op­ing new tech­nolo­gies to com­bat online child sex­u­al abuse. We bring togeth­er a team with deep tech­ni­cal knowl­edge and sub­ject mat­ter exper­tise to inno­vate and deploy new tech­nol­o­gy solu­tions at a much faster rate. We are able to quick­ly assess whether new tech­nolo­gies can be repur­posed to pro­tect chil­dren from sex­u­al exploita­tion through one of our three strate­gic pil­lars: 1) accel­er­at­ing vic­tim iden­ti­fi­ca­tion 2) equip­ping plat­forms, and 3) empow­er­ing the public.

Thorn was born in 2012. Our co-founders Ash­ton Kutch­er and Demi Moore had learned about the issue of child sex traf­fick­ing from a doc­u­men­tary high­light­ing what was hap­pen­ing to chil­dren in Cam­bo­dia. They describe it as this moment where you learn some­thing about the world that you can’t un-know. As they start­ed learn­ing more, they real­ized that it is just as pro­lif­ic of a prob­lem here in the Unit­ed States as it is overseas.

Thorn CEO Julie Cor­d­ua joined soon after to begin to dig fur­ther into the issue of child sex traf­fick­ing. There was a com­mon theme that emerged from those work­ing in the field — tech­nol­o­gy was play­ing a role in extend­ing the crime. How­ev­er, tech­nol­o­gy had yet to play a sig­nif­i­cant part in its solu­tion. Our team start­ed out in this space focused on invest­ing in the inno­va­tion phase of poten­tial tech-led approach­es to end­ing online child sex­u­al abuse. With­in the first two years, we real­ized that we need­ed to shift our mod­el for scal­able long-term change.

In 2014, after our team pro­to­typed a prod­uct to aid in iden­ti­fy­ing child sex traf­fick­ing vic­tims who were sold online, we made the deci­sion to devel­op the prod­uct itself and pro­vide it free to law enforce­ment. This approach broke open the new mod­el for us — one that moved beyond inno­va­tion to include pro­duc­ti­za­tion and rapid scale, bypass­ing exist­ing bureau­crat­ic struc­tures that often ham­per access, data shar­ing, and collaboration.