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While it’s hard to put a face on prevention, I can put a face on the children who suffer harsh realities in the ever-evolving digital world, where evil is often allowed to flourish. Remember the story I shared with you about Liz, a distraught grandmother, who reached out to me for help to obtain justice for her two young granddaughters who had been sexually abused in the most heinous ways -- their abuse said to be streamed on the internet?
The girls are in much better care now, but sadly, Liz's case fell through the cracks within law enforcement. Thankfully, I was able to direct her to multiple law enforcement agencies in pursuit of justice and it looks as if the tide is beginning to turn for justice to be served.
At EIE, we focus on the gaps in national and local prevention efforts that need to be addressed, and fill those gaps with pioneering initiatives to bring wide-spread culture change and meaningful outcomes. We accomplished all you will read about in the Annual Report on a small budget with the generous support of our donors.
A perfect example is our 2019 Starbucks victory; a culmination of a five-year effort that resulted in Starbucks finally implementing filtering on their public WiFi from child sex abuse images and pornography in all 8,500 company-owned stores in America!
This is huge, particularly in light of the pandemic of child sex abuse images online and law enforcement’s inability to prosecute their way out of this sewer. In 2018, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexual abused, double the amount from the year before.The New York Times report "Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way" (Nov. 9, 2019) exposed that the Internet's largest technology platforms, such as Facebook and Google, "are failing to effectively shut down the giant portions of online child sexual abuse material.”
This is why it is critical that EIE continue our momentum to get corporate leaders in the restaurant, hospitality, travel, retail and other industries to voluntarily offer Safe WiFiSM from illegal child sex abuse images and hard-core pornography.
Equally, we must persist in our College Safe WiFiSM Campaign, which gained traction this past year with many universities agreeing to filter campus WiFi from this pornographic content, which according to peer reviewed research, fuels addiction, the objectification of women, and the growing rates of sexual violence on college campuses.
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