COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA JOINT COMMITTEES ON PUBLIC HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES AND CHILDREN & YOUTH Room 400, City Hall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Friday, April 24, 2026 10:20 a.m. PRESENT: COUNCILWOMAN NINA AHMAD, CHAIR COUNCILMAN ANTHONY PHILLIPS, CHAIR COUNCILWOMAN CINDY BASS COUNCILWOMAN KENDRA BROOKS COUNCILWOMAN JAMIE GAUTHIER COUNCILMAN JIM HARRITY COUNCILMAN NICOLAS O'ROURKE
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Philadelphia City Council's Joint Committees on Public Health and Human Services and Children and Youth Committee. I now note that the hour has come. Mr. Sham, would you please call the roll.
I note for the record that a quorum of the Joint Committees is present and the hearing is called to order. This is a public hearing of the Joint Committees of Public Health and Human Services and the Children and Youth considering testimony on Resolution No. 260150. Mr. Sham, would you please read the title of the resolution.
Resolution 17 No. 260150, authorizing the Joint Committees on Public Health and Human Services and the Children and Youth to hold hearings to raise awareness regarding the role of gaming platforms and social platforms, and their use in the grooming, recruitment and exploitation of minors, including conduct that may lead to human trafficking.
Before I call up the first panel, I would like to recognize myself for some opening remarks. Once again, good morning. Thank you to everyone who has come out today to testify and make your voice heard during Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which is in April. This, as you heard, is a joint hearing with the Committee of Children and Youth. And I thank Councilmember Anthony Phillips, who is chair of that committee, for joining us to hold this hearing with me today. I also want to thank the Attorney General's office for working with us to draft the resolution to hold this important hearing. Partnerships like this make our legislation more effective. Today we bring the dangers of grooming on social media and gaming platforms to light. Every day Philadelphia youth log on to social media, messenger apps and gaming sites. According to a study from a child safety nonprofit, 97% of children aged to play 10 video games and 95% of youth ages 11 13 to 17 use social media. That is 12 nearly every young person in this 13 city. And where our children are, 14 predators follow. 15 Last year the National 16 Center for Missing and Exploited 17 Children received 1.4 million reports of online enticement of children. That is a 156% jump from the year before. In just the first six months of 2025, reports nearly doubled compared to the same period the year before. Research also finds that 40% of kids online have been approached by someone trying to befriend and manipulate them. in teens has already experienced sextortion, which is when a predator threatens to release intimate images unless the child sends more images, money or gift cards. 1 in 6 of those victims are years old or 10 younger. The first time it 11 happened, and since 2021, at least 12 36 teenage boys across this country have taken their own lives after being targeted in these schemes. Predators do not need much time. Research shows that they can push a child into a high-risk sexual conversation in as little as 19 seconds after the first message. And this is not a distant problem. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania high school senior was charged with more than 300 counts for running a catfishing and sextortion scheme that targeted dozens of underage victims. Online grooming is often undetectable. It happens at home where our children should be safe, while we're cooking dinner, and our children are on their phones. It happens when they log on to the video game and chat with other players, thinking they're speaking to another young person when they're actually speaking to a predator. The reason we are holding this hearing is simple. With so many of our young people on these platforms, the dangers are unavoidable and they are growing. It is critical that we hear from Philadelphia's youth as we explore this subject. I want to thank everyone who is here today to provide testimony or to stand in solidarity with those testifying. This is not an easy subject to talk on, and I am grateful to you for sharing your experiences with City Council today. Today I look forward to hearing from everyone in attendance to give us a clear picture of what is happening in our city right now, and to communicate what are the gaps that we are facing. I wanted to know what is getting worse and what might be working. I want to know what comes. How do we keep our children safe? That's what we're here about. So as you testify today, please let us know what the city can do to actually make a difference in your lives. This is the first step towards creating a Philadelphia where young people can be safely online. I want to thank all of you for taking the step with me, and I look forward to your testimony. Before we call up the next panel, I would like to recognize State Representative Regina Young for some opening remarks. You may come to the -- State Representative Regina Young has been fighting the good fight with us at the state level of addressing human trafficking. (Witness approached witness table.)
Please state your name and begin. STATE REPRESENTATIVE YOUNG: I am Regina Young. I am the State Representative of the 185th District, which covers Philadelphia and Delaware Counties.
Please proceed. STATE REPRESENTATIVE YOUNG: So I want to say thank you for allowing me to come here and just say a couple of different words as it relates to keeping our children safe. I come to you -- I know I was invited because I'm a legislator, but I also wear the hat as a mom and as a cousin and as a daughter. And one of the things that helps me make sure that I am very intentional in this space is ensuring that we're keeping all people safe because public health is a people's issue and it's a people's concern. So regardless of the roles we play in society, we all have a responsibility to keep everyone as safe as possible. And so, I want to encourage everybody here, including those who may be listening in the future, to understand everybody can be impactful in some way. And if we're not supporting parents, if we're not supporting schools and systems, then it's really difficult for us to legislate in the healthiest way. So collaboration is key, and the more we work together, the better we can be as a society. Those would be my opening remarks.
Okay. Thank you very much. We really appreciate that you took the time to be here. And I want our city to know that we have intergovernmental cooperation. And here is a great example of that. Thank you so much. STATE REPRESENTATIVE YOUNG: You're welcome.
And I wanted to open the floor to my colleagues. We'll first go to Councilmember Anthony Phillips and then to Councilmember Bass.
No, you're good. I just want to also provide remarks as well and just say thank you to Councilmember Dr. Nina Ahmad for organizing this important session. As the Chair of Children and Youth, it's really important that we find ways to keep our young people safe. Unfortunately, there are many avenues in which young people are connecting with people who are not going to be individuals that are going to keep them safe. And so, we as Dr. Nina Ahmad said today it's really important that we find out from those who are experts, who are consistently working in this particular field, what can the City of Philadelphia do more of to protect young people in this regard. So thank you so much, Dr. Nina Ahmad. I just want to share that. And thank you all for coming to Council to share information with us. Looking forward to it.
Thank you, Councilmember Phillips. We will go to Councilmember Bass.
Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanted to start by thanking everyone for being here today. And I want to give a special shout-out to Rep Young, who's just so dynamic and does such a fantastic job. I'm a big fan of the work that you do. I just want you to know that because you're out there hitting the ground and being very serious and intentional about the work that is ahead of us. And as the mother of a 16-year-old female, it's really quite terrifying that this sort of lurks behind the scenes, you know, that there are people who have found another way to try to infiltrate systems that we thought were safe and put themselves in those spaces and try to influence our children and really take away their innocence. So as a parent, it is particularly terrifying that this could happen. I'm just like every other parent and I think, oh, you know, it can't be my daughter, it wouldn't happen to my daughter. But I also know very much it could be if you're not vigilant. It could be even if you are vigilant and paying attention. So we all have to just really pay attention to this issue. And I just really wanted to say thank you so much for being here and for your work on this very important issue.
Thank you, Councilmember Bass. Mr. Sham, would you please read the written testimony submitted by First Lady of Enon Baptist Tabernacle Church, Dr. Ellen Jo Waller.
I'm writing to express my strong support for Resolution 260150, which calls for hearings to raise awareness about online grooming among our youth. This initiative is both timely and necessary. Our children are navigating a digital world that offers incredible opportunities but also carries serious risks. Young people are especially vulnerable to online grooming where trust is built and boundaries are broken for the purpose of exploitation. With advancing technology, these dangers are widespread and often hidden. Recent lawsuits involving platforms like Roblox and Snapchat highlight the urgent need for better protections. We cannot rely solely on digital systems to safeguard our youth. We must also educate and empower families and communities. This resolution focuses on awareness, accountability and action. The proposed hearings will help us understand the scope of online grooming in Philadelphia, evaluate current responses and explore policies to strengthen prevention. This effort aligns with movements like Wait Until 8th, which encourages delaying smartphone access until children are developmentally prepared. We must prioritize safe, age-appropriate communication and equip caregivers with the resources needed to protect our children. It is our responsibility to ensure that systems entrusted with their safety are held accountable. Our children deserve to explore the world safely. For these reasons, I urge your full support of Resolution 260150.
Thank you, Mr. Sham, for reading that testimony. Would you now please call up the first panel to testify on this resolution.
Frank Vanore, Deputy Police Commissioner, Philadelphia Police Department; Larry Krasner, District Attorney of Philadelphia. Stephanie Snyder, Assistant Special Agent-In-Charge, Homeland Security Investigations; and Angela Sperrazza, Chief Deputy Attorney General, Office of the Attorney General Child Predator section. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Before we start, I wanted to recognize that Councilmember Kendra Brooks has just joined us. Thank you so much. Okay. So we'll start with Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore. Please state your name and begin your testimony. DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Good morning. My name is Frank Vanore. Good morning, Chairpersons Ahmad, Phillips and other members of the Committees on Public Health, Human Services and the Children and Youth. My name is Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore. I supervise all investigations for the Philadelphia Police Department. I am joined today by subject matter experts from our Special Victims Unit and the Federal Bureau of Investigations, who are able to assist in answering any questions. First, on behalf of Commissioner Bethel, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today regarding Resolution No. 1 260150 to discuss the work, our Special Victims Unit and our efforts to investigate and combat online crimes against children. The Philadelphia Police Department Special Victims Unit plays a critical role in investigating online crimes against children through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's Cyber Tip Line. This system serves as a national centralized reporting mechanism for suspected child sexual exploitation and receives tips from both members of the public electronic service providers, including social media internet companies, which are legally required under federal law to report such activity. Once the tip is submitted, it undergoes a structured review and triage process at the national level. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children analyzes the information contained in the report, determines a probable geographic location associated with the incident and forwards the cyber tip appropriately to the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force in Pennsylvania, and ICAC is the acronym for it in Pennsylvania. The ICAC Task Force is led by the Delaware County District Attorney's Office, which coordinates closely with local law enforcement agencies, including the Philadelphia Police Department, to assign and investigate these cases. The Special Victims Unit receives every cyber tip assigned to Philadelphia as well as any updated information related to a previous assigned cyber tips through a standardized, formatted email that contains all the pertinent investigative information. In the case classified as a Priority or 2, the Pennsylvania ICAC Task Force also makes direct contact with the Special Victims supervisor through a phone call and a separate email to ensure immediate awareness and response. Upon receipt of a cyber tip, it is entered into an internal database under its assigned hybrid cyber tip number. From there, each tip undergoes a detailed and deliberate triage process. Detectives assigned to the ICAC data system, which is a secured platform that is highly restricted access due to the sensitive and often graphic nature of the material involved in these investigations. Within ICAC data system, detectives review full content of the cyber tip, which may include digital files such as images, videos, account information, internet protocol data and records of communication. Based on the review, the ICAC-trained detectives assigned to the Special Victims Unit determines the appropriate investigative steps and proceed accordingly. The results of each investigation are documented both within the ICAC data system and within the internal One Drive-based data system to ensure proper tracking, accountability and case management. Each cyber tip is prioritized based on the level of risk posed to the child. Priority cases involve situations where a child is believed to be in imminent or immediate danger, requiring urgent intervention.
Lower priority classifications include time- sensitive cases and reports submitted by electronic server providers, which often involve identification or distribution of child sexual abuse material. The prioritation of this -- prioritization of this process includes the most critical cases which receive immediate investigative attention. Philadelphia continues to experience a high and increased volume of cyber tips, reflecting both heightened and reporting requirements for online platforms and the growing demand for investigative response. In 2021, the department received 1227 cyber tips that include -- that number increased to 1398 in 2022 and declined to 1010 in 2023, and then rose again to 1165 in 2024 and 1355 in 2025. The increase observed in 2024 and 2025 represents a notable upward trend in the 2025 approach prior to peak levels -- started to approach prior peak levels. This data reinforces that online child exploitation remains a persistent and evolving threat, requiring sustained investigative focus. The majority of the cyber tips involved in child sexual abuse material, including possession, distribution and production of offenses, which continues to represent a large category of the reported incidents. Large social media and technology platforms remain primary sources for these reports to undergo a digital nature of these crimes. In alignment with the Philadelphia City Council's Resolution No. 260150, increasing attention has been placed on the role of gaming and social media platforms in grooming and exploiting of minors. Children are spending a significant time in interactive online environments, including gaming platforms which allow realtime communication through text, voice and video. These platforms are intentionally designed to encourage engagement and interaction, often connecting minors with individuals they do not know personally. Law enforcement and child safety advocates have identified consistent patterns in which offenders use these platforms to initiate contact, build trust over time and gradually groom victims. In many instances, these conversations are then moved on to applications where oversight may be more limited. The integration of artificial intelligence technologies, including fake profiles, generated images, voice replications have further complicated detection and investigation, allowing offenders to scale and conceal their activities more effectively. At the national level, civil litigation and enforcement action in 2025 have raised broader concerns regarding the adequacy of the platform safeguards intended to protect children. As a result, cyber tip investigations increasingly involve multi-platform digital ecosystems where initial contact often begins in a gaming environment and continues across social media messaging applications and other online services. Based on a cyber tip data, ICAC casework and national reporting trends, most platforms most frequently encountered in these investigations include popular online gaming environments with realtime communication features, the large youth user bases such as sandbox-style building games, battle royale shooters and large multi-role playing platforms. In addition, dedicated communication applications are frequently encountered as a primary means to continue contact with the initial interaction, particularly those that support these private servers. Direct messaging, voice chat, file sharing, ephemeral messaging apps with disappearing content are also commonly observed, along with widely-used social media platforms that facilitate direct messaging and account discovery. Encrypted messaging services are likewise encountered, especially in more advanced or organized cases where the users seek increased privacy and security to address the evolving digital landscape. The Special Victims Unit continues to expand its investigative capabilities through technology, specialized training and enhanced resources.
The Philadelphia Police Department has integrated an electronic detection dog, his name is Cash, into our cyber tip and ICAC investigations to improve the recovery of digital evidence. The electronic detection dog is trained to detect electronic storage devices, including cell phones, USB drives, hard drives, SD cards through chemical detection. The dog is deployed during search warrants, arrest operations, consent searches and is capable of locating devices hidden in walls, furniture, vehicles, and outdoor environments, including intentionally concealed by the offenders. This capability improves the evidence recovery, strengthens case development and prosecution reduces search time and manpower requirements and support victim's identification efforts by ensuring that the critical digital evidence is not overlooked. In conclusion, the sustained and increased volume of cyber tests demonstrates the expanding scope and complexity of the online child exploitation investigations in Philadelphia. These investigations require significant resources, specialized expertise, and strong coordination across local, state, and federal partners. In light of the increased volume and complexity of cyber investigations, Philadelphia Police will continue to prioritize and expand resources as available, dedicated to the combating of online child exploitation. This includes sustaining and enhancing staffing levels within the Special Victims Unit to manage the growing cyber caseload and ensure timely investigations and response. It also includes continued investment in digital forensic technology and tools, including software, hardware, data analysis capabilities necessary to process increasingly complex digital evidence. The Philadelphia Police Department will also continue to support and maintain specialized resources, including our Electronic Detection Dog program, to improve evidence recovery and investigative efficiency. Strengthening partnership with ICAC Task Force members, federal agencies, and advocacy organizations remains essential to improving coordination, intelligence sharing, and victim services. As threats continue to evolve, the Philadelphia Police will focus on emerging risks associated with gaming platforms, social media and advancing technologies, including artificial intelligence. Ongoing specialized training for investigators will remain a priority to ensure proficiency in digital investigations, awareness and emerging exploitation trends, and the use of advanced investigative techniques. These efforts require a sustained investment in personnel, technology and partnerships. Such investment is essential to effectively respond to the evolving threat of online exploitation, protect vulnerable children, and ensure the successful, investigative, prosecutorial outcomes. Thank you for your time and attention and I'd be happy to answer any questions along with my team. And I just real quick want to give you who's here with me today. I have Captain Trina Pendleton, Lieutenant John Hewitt, Sergeant Brian King and Detective Stephanie Rosenbaum, and her partner Cash is here, along with Supervisory Special Agent Glenn Booth from the FBI.
Thank you so much. Are we going to have our Cash come through here? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: He's here.
Oh, he's right here. We just wanted to give him a moment in the sun to thank him for -- it's a he? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Yep.
All right. I want to acknowledge we are joined by our Councilmember Jamie Gauthier. Thank you so much for being here. Before we just go on, I want to pet him. We will ask questions when all our witnesses have testified. If our District Attorney would go next please. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Good morning and thank you. Good morning, Councilmembers Harrity, Brooks, O'Rourke in spirit, Bass, Chairwoman Ahmad, Chairman Phillips and Gauthier. I just want to make sure everybody is clear that the hardest working law enforcement official named Cash is the one we just saw today. So I will try to keep my comments fairly brief. I don't want to go over what the Deputy Commissioner just covered, because I agree with every word of it and I don't think it benefits anyone for me to repeat. I also see a tremendous list of subject matter experts who frankly know a lot more than I do about some of the details. Our best subject matter expert is a woman by the name of Katrina Wadas, who is the head of our Family Violence Sexual Assault unit and would be here. But for the fact she's presenting right now on two fatalities that have occurred. I'm sure you're familiar with that process, but I have had the chance to speak to her and there are two things I would like to do so as not to be repetitive and to be helpful. The first is I want to tell you a true story about a case because I think it illuminates. And the second is that I would like to make some big-picture comments having crossed the threshold of my 65th birthday. That means I've been around for a while and I've seen some societal changes. So let me go to that first. One of the things that I've certainly seen in my nearly 40-year career is that as society changes in significant ways, laws tend to chase that change, not always quickly enough. And law enforcement entities tend to chase that change, not always quickly enough. Consider, for example, that in European countries internet platforms have a duty of care to their consumers, which is enforceable. And what we have is the Wild West, and we have a lot of oligarchs who want to keep it exactly that way, because the use of hate and fear and the allowance of criminal activity on these platforms, they find to be profitable. That's the truth. And that is one of the things that we confront in this situation. Another thing that we have to face is that what we are experiencing, not only in this context, but also with seniors who are being scammed and college students who are now one of the prime victims of scams is the weaponization of technology against human emotion. The people who fall prey to this are very smart. They're very sophisticated, they're very capable and they're very talented. They're also often very embarrassed and their emotions are being manipulated. We have to face the reality that our laws and our institutions need to adapt fundamentally to those problems or we're not going to have a society of laws. We're going to have a society run by a rogue tech. We are in a society right now where you can go on IA and you can ask for advice on how to commit a terrorist act and it will answer. Okay. So we have a much broader context here that we need to address as we dig into some of the details. Collaboration is absolutely key here. I can tell you that my office has enjoyed an excellent relationship with other entities. It does not make sense for this to become siloed and separated. For example, I did a brief review with Katrina Wadas, our head of Family Violence Sexual Assault, who off the top of her head could name four cases she is supervising now that fall within this category. Frequently the way this goes is that we are down in the FBI office and we are looking at discovery in the FBI office. That discovery is there. It has been located, thanks to the work of Philadelphia police officers who are cross-designated to the FBI and have some very specialized skills.
And they also have some specialized technology that allows them to look at the activity. Without repeating once again what Deputy Commissioner Vanore mentioned, I think that the collaboration is absolutely essential. My office obviously stands ready to continue with what has been a successful collaboration because that's the only way that this is going to get done. Now, let me shift for a moment, if I may, and talk about what collaboration means in a time when the President of the United States is under suspicion of being a predator himself, which he is. When the President of the United States has selected the people who are supposed to be in charge of the Department of Justice, the Department of Justice that historically has been very good at going after things like tech crimes, white-collar crimes, predation against juveniles, what does it mean for him to surround himself at the highest levels with loyalists who are being repurposed for things like going after his enemies, going after journalists, and throwing hard-working immigrants out of the country? Well, the good news is it doesn't mean as much as he would like because the hard-working professionals in these institutions are continuing to do that work as much as they are allowed. And no, they're not able to do as much in terms of white-collar crime as is before. Every time this man takes office we see historic lows in prosecution of white-collar crimes because he is, in fact, a white- collar criminal. If you have any questions, ask me about his 34 felonies. But I will tell you this: The hard-working professionals that we deal with every day in these federal entities are not giving it up. They are not turning away. They're doing everything they can to keep these kinds of crimes under control. It does nevertheless mean that at the state level we have to be responsive and we have to be helpful to our federal partners, not the leadership, but the people who are the regional leadership and everybody below that who are continuing to try to do the right thing. We have to fill a gap that is created by a president who is too willing to allow and participate in this kind of activity himself. That's real, and we need to recognize that as well. The story that I want to relate to you is actually a case that was prosecuted by Katrina Wadas. I think it's illustrative of some of the challenges that we face. This is a devastating crime. Any crime that causes children to take their own lives is devastating. It's devastating to agents, agents who have to look at this material, which is often interconnected with child pornography. They require counseling, as anybody would. It's devastating to prosecutors and lawyers who have to deal with this. I can't think of another area of discovery that requires the involved defense attorney to go and see it in person, because it is illegal to even transmit it. This is devastating activity that is destroying the lives of lots of young people. And we have to understand that its devastation makes it an incredibly high priority. The case I want to talk to you about, and of course there will be no names, involved a 13-year-old who was on one of the popular platforms that attract kids. Unfortunately, people who want to prey on kids figure out where these platforms are. They include some of the ones already mentioned, but also Kik, Telegram, Discord session. A 13-year-old girl was on one of these platforms. She had a deep interest in Japanese art, meaning anime in particular, and there are groups and subgroups within these platforms where people gather. A couple of adult men, sadly teachers from a different state, found their way into this platform and found ways to try to engage in order to evaluate vulnerability and vectors that they could use to try to engage with this child. The good news is they were caught. They were successfully prosecuted.
State law was used when the contact does not actually become direct and physical, one of the common charges that is brought and was brought successfully here is unlawful contact with a minor. But that's ugly, that's really ugly. And there is a lot that can be done with these platforms. And there's a lot these platforms won't do. One common problem we have across the spectrum when it comes to dealing with tech companies is they love to make it really hard to use a subpoena. Sometimes they will make it almost impossible to figure out where you can even serve a subpoena or talk to someone within that entity. And I'm not saying this is true of all of them. Some of them are better than others. In fact, Snapchat is actually pretty good about being responsive to subpoenas. But why this is tolerated, I don't know. To me, this should be a matter of federal law that these tech companies have to actually not just make money off of us, but they have to assist us when we're trying to regulate what they should already be regulating themselves. I can tell you that some of the challenges that we face, and this is actually directly coming from a text sent to me by Katrina Wadas, include evolving technology platforms that require zero verification of age. But then they hide behind their "age restriction" policies, even apps that require you to be or to sign up only 13 make you input a date of birth and 14 do nothing to verify that 15 information. A push for age 16 verification would make some of these platforms safer. Also, grooming goes hand in hand with trafficking. And I know that is a particular interest of Council, especially you, Chairwoman Ahmad. Often child runaways are being harbored by people they meet online. So we cannot fully separate child pornography from this. It overlaps. We cannot separate trafficking from this. It overlaps as well. And I have to say I really do commend you as I look down this list and see these names, some of which I know well and some of which I don't know at all. You have brought together a lot of subject matter expertise that I think can be of assistance. And I have seen this process, this hearing process by Council works and benefit all of us in terms of gun violence, that got us all in a better place in terms of domestic violence, that is getting us all in a better place. I commend you for doing this and am delighted to answer any questions you may have at the appropriate time.
Thank you. Thank you for your testimony. We have a lot of questions for all of you. We'll go to our next witness. Please state your name and begin your testimony, whoever wants to.
I apologize. I think we're out of order. I'm Angela Suarez. I don't know if you'd like to hear from Ms. Snyder first because she's next on your list.
Yes. Good morning. My name is Stephanie Snyder. I am an Assistant Special Agent in Charge with Homeland Security Investigations here in Philadelphia. I want to thank the Council for the opportunity to be here today. I spent over 15 years of my investigative career investigating human trafficking and child exploitation crimes. I don't want to repeat what many of the other witnesses have already said, but online grooming is the process by which predators use the internet to build trust with children and teens, often with the intent to exploit them. Children and teens are especially vulnerable because their online experiences are frequently misleading, secretive and not always truthful. These relationships often start out as secret and remain hidden, making it easier for exploitation to occur. Predators employ sophisticated tactics to target and reach youth online. They often pose as children or teens, using information gathered from social media posts by other children and teens in order to start a conversation. That conversation may start out innocently asking where the child is from, what school they go to or what activities they're involved in, which is all information that is often posted on social media. By mirroring these interests and experiences, predators make themselves appear believable and relatable and lower the child's defenses. It is crucial for parents and caregivers to be aware of the warning signs that may indicate grooming or exploitation. Some of these warning signs may include a change in behavior, increased secrecy around the child's electronic devices, unexplained new items such as money packages or other items coming into the home. If the child uses payment apps like Venmo, Cash App, Apple Pay or Chime, monitoring their activity very closely is crucial. Regularly reviewing the child's phone, knowing their passcodes, checking all of their apps and photos, including any hidden folders on certain apps and ensuring that the location services on many of these apps are disabled. Platforms like Snapchat and Instagram have geolocation features that can inadvertently reveal your child's whereabouts, so it is important to turn these off. Online grooming is not just a standalone issue, as the District Attorney stated. It intersects deeply with child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking and missing youth cases. Grooming normalizes these risky behaviors and minimizes the trauma that children experience, making them even more susceptible to many forms of exploitation. It preys on their emotions. Many investigations into child exploitation and missing youth reveal that online contact was a key factor. Children in the welfare or juvenile systems are at a particularly high risk, with predators targeting them on common apps like Instagram, Snapchat, some dating sites, chat apps like Kik and Telegram, and gaming platforms such as Discord. These interactions often begin online, escalate into inperson meetings, and involve the sharing of personal information and images. Predators then use this information to manipulate and threaten victims, sometimes coercing them to leave their homes or shelters. Despite law enforcement's ongoing efforts, we continue to face significant challenges in addressing online grooming. The internet is evolving at a rapid pace, with new platforms, technologies and artificial intelligence tools emerging constantly. Predators are often highly skilled and knowledgeable about these technologies, which makes it very difficult for law enforcement to keep up. Predators exploit the anonymity and reach of the internet, frequently changing screen names, emails and even platforms to avoid detection. This makes it challenging to identify and track them. And unfortunately, the number of victims often far exceeds the number of cases we are able to investigate. Underreporting is another major obstacle.
Many children and teens do not disclose their experiences out of fear or shame because they have been manipulated into believing that the relationship is normal. Additionally, the normalization of online interactions and the sheer volume of digital communication makes it harder for parents, caregivers and authorities to recognize when something is wrong. It's akin to allowing a Megan's Law offender to sit in the world's largest playground unnoticed until a concerning behavior is reported. Ultimately, the most effective way to protect our children is through open, honest communication and proactive monitoring; ensuring matter-of-fact conversations with your children is crucial; letting your children know that they can come to you if something feels uncomfortable or wrong. By staying informed, vigilant and engaged, we can help safeguard our youth from online grooming and exploitation. Homeland Security Investigations is committed to combating this threat and empowering our community. HSI leads SPECTR, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Exploitative Crime and Trafficking Response Task Force, in which we partner with the FBI, the Attorney General's Office, the Pennsylvania State Police, the Philadelphia Police Department's Special Victims Unit and many other law enforcement agencies. HIS offers free training and education through the iGuardian program, with different presentations designed for students, teachers, parents and caregivers. These courses are accessible and can be requested through HIS by searching iGuardian or the Know to Protect Campaign. We also partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, ensuring that once a victim is identified, every attempt is made to ensure that any images are removed through the Take It Down campaign. This partnership not only helps protect victims from further harm, but also assists in the identification and apprehension of predators. By combining education, prevention and rapid response, HIS is working to create a safer online environment and empower families, schools and communities to recognize and address the risks of online grooming and exploitation. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for your testimony. We'll go on to the next witness and then we'll do our questions. Thank you.
Thank you. My name is Angela Sperrazza and I'm the Chief Deputy Attorney General of our Child Predator section. The Child Predator section of the Attorney General's Office started in 1995 as an Exploitation Task Force, and they were created to arrest those creating sexual abuse material as well as investigate and capture child predators using proactive undercover operations. By January of 2005, that became a dedicated child predator section that was a group of specially-trained agents and prosecutors. I want to thank you, Councilmember Ahmad, for convening this hearing on an issue that absolutely requires attention. On behalf of the Attorney General, I want to be clear. Attorney General Dave Sunday has made it a priority that we remain on the front lines of combating exploitation of children online. That commitment is reflected in the work our office and our team does every day. I do want to start by saying that the abuse we're seeing today is not new. What has changed are the tools and nowhere is that more evident than online. And one of the clearest examples of that is online grooming. Gaming isn't just entertainment. Online gaming is not what we remember. These platforms are now social ecosystems. Children are not just playing. They're interacting. They're building relationships. They're communicating in realtime with other users. And those users can be anyone. And I want to say kid-friendly does not mean kid-safe. So a kid-friendly gaming app is not a kid-safe gaming app. On a single platform, you can have a 10-year-old child interacting with another 10-year- old child. You could also have them interacting with a 25-year- old, a 35-year-old or a 50-year- old, and all interacting in the same way, often without even knowing it. In many games, there's no visual cue, there's no reliable verification and there's no 15 meaningful barrier for entry, for who can have entry to these games. Gaming itself has even changed. These platforms are designed to encourage connection. Players are incentivized. They're incentivized to communicate in order to advance their game, complete missions, create groups, and/or access rewards. In-app purchases can also be used to build trust and create a sense of obligation. Grooming is creating an environment that normalizes abusive behavior. Online gaming can be that environment. With live chat, whether text or voice, sometimes those conversations are often happening, often in realtime, encouraged in gameplay and without a record for parents to review later after gameplay is over. That combination, constant access, mixed-age users and unmonitored communication create an environment where grooming can happen quickly and very quietly. Offenders are able to exploit those exact features. They insert themselves into games, build rapport under the guise of a shared interest. It's built in, and then gradually shift conversations into something harmful, even shifting to different platforms once trust is established. And from the child's perspective, they're just playing a game. That's why conversations matter. That's why conversations like this are preventative education. And I want to say it's not just bad kids or at-risk kids. All kids, by nature of the fact that they are children, are at risk. We need awareness that reflects how children are actually using technology. We need policies that recognize that these platforms are what they are. They're not just games. They're access points and they're large access points. And we need continued collaboration to ensure that we're identifying risks early and responding effectively. Because while the method has evolved, our responsibility to protect children also must remain the same. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your testimony and all the testimonies. We will go into asking some questions. I'll start by asking Deputy Commissioner about the timeliness of the ICAC process. Thank you for elaborating all the steps involved. Just a side, preparing for this hearing, I went to my 25-year-old's apartment and had her walk me through a gaming platform. And we'll come to this to the point that the DA made about verification of age issues. That all came up as I was watching what she was doing. So the information load is heavy for older people like me and others who are trying to catch up. So this catch-up is inevitable, right. Because children are far ahead and those who are monetizing that are far ahead of us. So we will have to work furiously to get there. So if you could comment on how quickly you are able to respond in realtime from the tip line that happens, the warning that -- or the report that comes in? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: So as I said, I'm going to defer to Sergeant Brian King who does this every day. I'm going to ask him to step up. And he could tell you exactly how long --
Please, thank you. Please come on up. (Witness approached witness table.)
Please state your name. SERGEANT KING: Sergeant Brian King, Philadelphia Police Department Special Victims Unit. I received the tips for the City of Philadelphia. I believe last year, 1300 of them came in. They come in via email. I receive the emails daily. I get to them as soon as I can, as soon as I come to work. I created a database. I put the number in. I review the cyber tip, the files in the cyber tip and the content of the cyber tip. And then I will gather a report number and assign it to one of my detectives to investigate.
So there's only one of you doing this, right? SERGEANT KING: Yes. Due to the --
Do we need more of you to do this? Just 1300 tips in what time frame? SERGEANT KING: A year.
A year. So the reason I ask about how timely are we able to intercept something that's happening in realtime was really what I'm trying to understand or these are after- the-fact kind of reports that are sent to you? SERGEANT KING: That's what the Deputy said. The tips come in on Priority 1 to 3s. And then we have an ESP, which is the large amount of the tips, which is just a regular tip that comes over to us. or will require a phone call from the Delaware County ICAC commander. He'll give me a heads- up that a 1 or 2 just came over. They're the ones that are actively going on. They do not come over that often though. When they do, I will contact whoever I need to contact and we'll handle the job.
So the reason I ask, if somebody is a child, and I'm thinking of a scenario, and they feel that somebody targeted them like they themselves got an alert or a parent came in or somebody came in and saw this happening and this is happening online as they're speaking, right, is there an immediate response to this anywhere that can say we're sending in -- again, I'm not sure how geographically this is done because those people can be anywhere. The child might be in Philadelphia. And is there a tip line they call to say my child is right now encountering this person, we can probably catch them now kind of thing? It's like having a shooting and our police cars driving over there. I'm just wondering what that looks like. Because what we're going to tell our public is to say, watch this and report this. So I wanted to make sure we understand if they did report it, it would not be like, oh, we're going to do a report in a month but we could lose that predator, right. So I'm just trying to understand how immediate and responsive the process is for somebody who would complain about it, being a victim or watching somebody being victimized? SERGEANT KING: If it's a parent just watching a child talking to someone at that point and they feel like they're being enticed to leave the house or enticed to send some kind of CSAM over to them, then if they call 911, then obviously it's an immediate response in Philadelphia. If they decide not to call 911 and they go to the hotline number, which they can call, then their analyst will get it, generate a report as fast as they can and then they would call us. That would probably come in as a Priority 1 or Priority 2.
Okay. So they have an option to do 911. Does 911 then call -- how does 911 process this then? Because it's online so that man or woman or somebody might be in Missouri while we're sitting in Philadelphia. Do we have a network of alerting people elsewhere, knowing how to do this? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: I think you hit it on the head. The geographic location is key. So if someone calls 911 in Philadelphia, we're going to know where they're at because it comes right up and we'll send somebody to investigate whatever they're saying. So if they're in Arkansas and they call 911, their police are going to respond. When it goes into the National Victims Exploited Children Hotline, they have to determine that and that takes some technology. Sometimes it takes some legal paperwork to be done for us to get the geographic location.
So we have an immediate and a potentially longer-term response to really drill down on that. But if we are to have a campaign to inform Philadelphia about this, right, and we say here's a hotline number for you to call and here's an immediate -- if you're finding your child slipping away right now, what do you do -- so we can talk more offline about what that could look like to be very specific about what we are telling adults and parents and children to do when they're getting targeted so we can prevent something else happening. That's why I'm asking. This is not after the fact, but prevention. So we know there's a predator prowling on this platform. And if there's a way to geolocate the predator and to triangulate and get that predator wherever they are, and that's why this rapid information system is really critical. So thank you for all the information. I'm happy to let -- yeah, go ahead. Councilmember Anthony Phillips.
Thank you so much, Dr. Nina Ahmad. I just wanted to raise a question that was raised by one of our organizations. I believe WOAR brought this up as well as -- I think we have all of them -- Covenant House. And then also we have -- oh, here it is right here. It says key systematic grant gaps, and I'm just pulling it up now from their testimony. They'll be testifying soon. Oh, Half a Million Kids and Leah Stauffer. So she mentions that one of the key systemic gaps include lack of standardized screening tools, grooming risks, fragmented data systems across agencies, limited training for frontline professionals and insufficient youth-focused prevention education and inconsistent reporting mechanisms, right. She says that these gaps create an environment where traffickers can operate with minimal early detection. So from the police department's standpoint, is there a strong standard operating procedure when it comes to reporting mechanisms, Deputy? And thank you for your testimony, by the way. Is there a strong, consistent reporting mechanism that the police department use really to let people know about this? DEPUTY COMMISSIONER VANORE: Well, anything that will come through our 911 system or go anywhere else in the police department is going to get referred to Special Victims. That's our key. So when it mentions this type of crime, Special Victims handles, you know, all our crimes against children. They handle obviously sexual assault crimes and other crimes that require the work with DHS. They're co-located, as you know with DHS. So they're there. We also have Children Alliance do interviews of children, which is really key. We do forensic interviews of children. So everything we get is co-sent to them and be able to be tracked and we'd know where it was.
So what she's saying, which I think is profound, she'll talk about it more, she says cross-system communication, the systems that touch the children, child welfare, education, health care, law enforcement are not sharing information together in realtime. So maybe the solution that they're offering is that when you first get a report about this, is this something that you could do like have a communication with the District Attorney's Office, and you also communicating with the educators, child welfare providers, just like there's an automatic alert like system, standard operating procedure, where basically even if it's not unfound, if it's not founded or whatever it might be, the investigation is happening, at least people are being notified somewhere that, hey, we may need services, we may need support. Is that something that's happening right now or we're all operating in our own silos? SERGEANT KING: No, any time there's a juvenile trafficking victim in the city that I find out about, we're co-located. Like the Deputy said, we have a multidisciplinary team inside our own unit at the Special Victims. We have a forensic interview team through the PCA and we have DHS that are just there, and they have certain social workers that I'm in contact and my detectives have contact with, that just do human trafficking. It's a supervisor over there. And also, Alicia Solomon is the director of that organization, DHS. I have direct contact with her. As a matter of fact, she just called me the other day about a job. So we always are communicating with DHS when it's a juvenile victim.
Gotcha, yeah. I recognize there's a range of different people that do these types of services. I just learned about Half a Million Kids, which was new to me. I did hear about -- I do know about the Children's Alliance and so forth. And then it's Homeland Security connected to all this as well. Immediately, what is it like when a report comes in, do you all jump in right away?
So two of the Special Victims Unit detectives are task force officers with us as well. And several of the other detectives in the Special Victims Unit are task force officers with the FBI. So we are all partnering as these leads and investigations come in.
Thank you, Councilmember. Okay. I wanted to just wrap up this line of questioning. I think we have very similar questions about responses. I want to ask the DA actually. Have you prosecuted any cases which have generated out of a tip line that resulted with somebody in Philadelphia being involved? DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, we prosecute cases. I mean, we have four active cases right now. The case I described earlier was one that was successfully prosecuted. As for the specifics about each one of those cases and how that all happened, I don't want to guess. I could certainly obtain that information from Katrina Wadas. And frankly -- I hope because I do hear this real spirit of collaboration here, I hope that the subject matter experts and the members who are presenting here will understand that she is available at any time to get into those details.
That's great to hear. So we're trying to get an idea of -- I mean, you mentioned the specific case and you were able to actually apprehend the people involved. You went all the way and you were able to prosecute them. I don't know if you have that information with you. I know she's not here, but how did that happen? I'm trying to understand a timeline and how quickly this occurred. And one of the things is we want our community to see this happening. So if we're trying to be preventive, I need them to know what that whole thing looks like. It ended up in somebody getting prosecuted and were they sentenced? If you can just give us a little detail about what will happen if you are caught doing this and this is how we will catch you and this is what will make you accountable for, and these are the consequences? I just wanted to get a sense of that. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: Well, certainly I can speak in general terms and I'm happy to make Katrina Wadas, who's currently presenting, but available today to speak to you directly, if that's of help. But I can tell you that we have found the FBI to be very vigorous in pursuing matters that fall within their lane, matters that involve pornography, for example, fall within their lane. And we are sometimes called in by the FBI because they have a situation that doesn't meet their criteria for actual prosecution, you know. And this is also true in other contexts, such as terrorism involving a juvenile act or things of that sort. So sometimes we are called in by the FBI. To the extent what is happening is an investigation through PPD or at the state level that's in contact with our office. Because the crimes we're discussing today involve tech, there are often warrants. We play a role, whether it's a homicide case or any other kind of case or a tech case in warrants, scrutinizing them and approving them so that they can be pushed out. That means of course in a tech case where frequently you don't have a case, unless you're able to identify who is the actor at the other end of that activity online, so we aren't necessarily involved in the process of those investigations. But once again, I don't want to state more than I know. What I know is that we're ready, willing and able to assist. But the good news is that you have very capable people with SVU, very capable people with the FBI, obviously with the Attorney General's Office and Homeland Security as well as they sit next to us. Any specifics that you need in that regard, I'm happy to direct Katrina Wadas to contact your office.
Thank you. We'll follow up to do that. Because if we're going to make a case for deterrence, we need to actually frame out what it looks like so people can wrap their head around what happens in this case. So thank you so very much. DISTRICT ATTORNEY KRASNER: We do. But let me just give you one more comment. We try very hard to communicate to the public our activity because it does have a deterrent effect on people to see that someone is actually caught. That is the best type of deterrence by all criminological standards. There are unique challenges though when you are dealing with victims of sexual assault and you're dealing with victims of sexual predation around their privacy. Sadly, we aren't always able to put it out there to the public because the details that we provide, we would never provide a name, but the details we provide may lead back to that person's identification. So I'm just telling you that I share with you the importance of that deterrence. We've done it many times and I know you've seen us do it, but there is a unique challenge here that we all have to address.
Yeah, I think that's important for the public to know what are those challenges, because then they say we're not doing anything, but we are. And I think we need to tell them what those privacy concerns are and what can inadvertently be exposed by doing X, Y and Z. It's just making sure we are communicating effectively what we do, what we can share, what we cannot share to make sure we can also not share all these techniques you guys use, right, to do this. Because then you're also informing those who are using those techniques. So we understand that. I think our job is to tell our constituents that we hear you. We know this is happening. This is what's going on. This is the level of work going on and this is what we can share. And then we can share some things. But I think we need to have a more clear -- there's a lot of intersection with all of you, which is wonderful, which is great. People need to know that people don't think there's a lot of intersection going on. Once in a while we'll hear about these things. But I want to commend all of you. This is a very difficult terrain. As the DA said, it is very traumatizing, not just for those who have been victimized, but those who are investigating this. And I'm glad that I hope we have mental health resources for everyone involved in this process up and down across the board. But in terms of the actual -- like other places like age verification and things of that nature, where are we on the technology side of being able to really maybe separate it? This could be a federal issue, not a state, you know, municipal level, but we just need to know what can we kind of legislate around. What is the ripe, low-hanging fruit for us to say, you know, we could do age verification and triangulate? If I look at a shoe somewhere, I get an email about the shoe. I get it on my social media. They're triangulating me all the time. And so, I'm just wondering how well can we catch people with all this triangulation process that happens on the internet and where we are with that. If either one of you could answer that.
Just real quick, I think one of the things that you mentioned was immediate response. If I'm a parent and I see something and I call and 911 shows up because we're lucky enough to live somewhere that 911 shows up when you call, right, and then you expect an immediate response. One of the things that needs to be understood about these cases is a lot of it's about preservation, right. So though you may not think, oh, I didn't get an immediate response so I can wait to call, right, I can wait to highlight that something's going on, all of that evidence though, you don't realize it can be gone, right. So I always tell parents immediate response makes our job easier for evidence preservation. And you might not know how to do a lot, but you know how to screenshot, you know what I mean. If you're seeing something that's visibly in front of you, you can document it as well or take notes. But the big thing is immediate response can lead to evidence prevention. That may not feel as immediate, but that's what's going on. That's what law enforcement is doing while you make that initial response. And I think having conversations about that also bleeds into age verification, right. Age verification is only as good as how it's implemented. So if you have parents that see age verification on a website, you just assume that it has age verification. Age verification may mean that I, as a 14-year-old, just have to make two email addresses, one that I claim is my mom's and one that I claim is mine and I have access to both. I know Ms. Snyder talked a little bit about watching your child's devices. So if your kid has two email addresses, then they might be duping age verification. So I think conversations and knowledge, and I think that also leads to a space where preventative conversations can happen. I can't say it enough that sexual extortion and sexual exploitation also come from a place of victims feeling like they have to do it on their own, that children feel as though they're in this space and they have to come up with a way to answer the threat that's happening. So having these conversations, I think, is an important way to start that prevention education.
We have a lot to delve into. I thank you all for your testimony. We got a lot of information. We'll be circling back to many of you to kind of see if our thinking is actually useful and worthwhile. We might think of something. Obviously, we're going to be talking to advocates and actually impacted communities, community members as well to come up with something. But first, what we're doing right now, what you shared right now, especially your detailed testimony about step by step, what this looks like is really, really helpful. So I thank all of you for your testimony. Do you have any more questions?
Thank you. Okay. Mr. Sham, if you would call the next panel.
We have virtual testimony from Bryn Pfeiffer, who is reading on behalf of Diane Melley, U.S. Board member Stop the Traffik. We also have Leah Stauffer, founder of Half a Million Kids; Laquisha Anthony, Executive Director, Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence; Benita Williams, Chief Executive Officer, Philadelphia Children's Alliance, who will be sharing an image; Hugh Organ, Chief Program Officer, Covenant House. And last but not least, Jasper Liam, Executive Director, the Attic Youth Center. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
We have a big panel. Thank you everyone for being here. We'll start just any order you would like, but we will start from -- yeah, sorry. I didn't even see that. Thank you. Please state your name and begin your testimony. Bryn, would you please proceed?
Okay. Great. My name is Bryn Pfeiffer and I'm a Prevention Program Manager at Stop the Traffik. We're a global organization based in the UK dedicated to preventing human trafficking by stopping exploitation before it occurs. Our work focuses on understanding how traffickers operate, then using data and survivor insight to design interventions that protect vulnerable individuals and strengthen communities. I'd like to highlight the critical intersection between online grooming and trafficking. Online grooming is a manipulative process where predators exploit young people, often through social media and gaming platforms. It has become one of the most serious and underrecognized threats facing young people globally, including here in Philadelphia. Grooming involves individuals or organized networks building trust, dependency and control over children through digital spaces, often long before any physical harm can take place. These platforms provide constant private access to young people, allowing recruiters to identify and exploit vulnerability. This activity largely takes place beyond the view of responsible adults and safeguarding systems, making it harder to detect and easier to scale. I want to be clear. Online grooming and trafficking are not separate issues. Grooming is often the first stage of exploitation. How many children are drawn into sexual, criminal and financial exploitation? Recruiters blur the line between friendship and harm, offering belonging, money or status before shifting to manipulation and control. What may appear to be a supportive or exciting opportunity can quickly become coercive. Many young people do not recognize what is happening until they are already in these exploitive situations where they may be facing threats, violence or debt bondage. Through our intelligence, we know children as young as are being targeted in 11 this way. While many platforms have introduced safety measures, significant gaps remain. Grooming often takes place in private or encrypted spaces, where detection is much more difficult. Existing systems tend to focus on harmful content. Yet grooming is built through relationships and trust, which is of course much harder to identify. Reporting tools are also underused, particularly by young people who may not recognize the warning signs or may fear the consequences they face for speaking up. So how do we protect young people from these risks and stop the traffic we deliver? Geo-targeted prevention programs that reach at-risk individuals directly in the online spaces that they use every day. Our campaigns are rooted in research and survivor insight. And over the past eight years, we've reached more than 28 million people globally. We focus on the platforms most used by young people, recognizing both the safety measures in place and the gaps that remain. Technology plays an important role in this work. Of course, artificial intelligence is being used to target young people more precisely, but it can also help detect grooming patterns and identify risks earlier. When designed with safeguarding and privacy in mind, it can strengthen prevention efforts. Our programs are designed to empower young people with clear safety information and access to support, support organizations and secure a way to report concerns through our anonymous reporting tool, our Stop app using peer-led and survivor- informed messaging. We explain grooming tactics, highlight red flags and connect young people with local support. This approach achieves engagement rates more than six times higher than social media industry standards. Building on this, our current initiative Safer Futures, focuses on disrupting the online recruitment of young people into exploitation. It combines data-sharing technology and targeted outreach to identify risks earlier and help young people recognize manipulation. We are actively exploring how to bring this model to Philadelphia in the coming months.
Looking ahead, stronger platform safeguards are essential, including more behavior, more effective age verification, safer default settings and better detection of grooming behaviors. Reporting tools must be easier to access and understand. Improving data collection and sharing will help cities better understand local risks. Young people, parents and educators need clearer guidance, and the technology sector must continue to design with safety in mind. As AI develops, it's important to balance protecting young people with protecting their privacy through transparent and accountable systems. In closing, online grooming is not only about harmful content, it's about relationships built for exploitation. Addressing it requires early intervention, informed collaboration and systems designed to keep young people safe. At Stop the Traffik, we believe prevention really is possible. By combining data, technology and survivor insight, we can disrupt exploitation before it happens and create safer futures for young people. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Are you able to stay on while we hear the other testimonies or do you have to leave? We'll ask our questions of you -- you can stay on?
Okay. Because we'll then do the other testimonies and have some collective questions. All right. Leah, would you please state your name and start your testimony.
Yes. Hi. Leah Stauffer, founder of Half a Million Kids. So thank you for teeing up what I have to say before I even start my statement. And I'm sad that law enforcement isn't here, so I'll reach out to them. But to your words the easiest, low-hanging fruit, is fighting the most advanced technology being used and weaponized against our children. We need to fight it with the most advanced technology on our side. And we're working off antiquated, siloed systems. So until we fix that, we can have all the communications and emails and meetings we want, but the low-hanging fruit, it exists, we're building it. So it's called Traffic Shield. I'll say that. But my statement, now to my -- and I do have a description of the tech that I can read at the end, a very abbreviated highlight what it does. There's a child protection layer and an intelligence layer.
Right. Thank you so much. I almost jumped to -- but if you could, if there's any part in your testimony, you could clarify based off of what they said, that'd be great too.
Yes. Hopefully it's covered, but please ask me if I don't hit it. I felt like you teed it up perfectly.
First of all, thank you, Councilmember Ahmed and all Councilmembers who are here. I appreciate very much the opportunity to talk about this critical issue, which I feel is the issue of our time. We're talking about online grooming, but a couple people already said that this is not a standalone issue. We have to look at it in totality in order to solve the online grooming aspect. It's just the latest weapon. So I do want to restate something. We all know online grooming is not just a digital safety issue. It is the front door, the gateway to child exploitation and child sex trafficking, which I'm sorry, get ready, it's going to be a little strong wording, but child sex trafficking is actually child rape. So let's confront what's really the truth of it. For one population, so Half a Million Kids is dedicated to foster and trafficked children. So a lot of where I'm coming from comes from protecting that population. But I care of course about all children. So for one population in particular, children in the foster care system, it is not just a risk. The system responsible for taking care of them is the most major pipeline for child sex traffickers. The good news is we have solutions, so I'll save that for the end. But there's good news. It's not all the problem. Every year in the United States more than 20,000 foster children in care go missing. Although I will tell you there is no realtime data, so I suspect that number is much higher. That's the reported number. But the data is not real. It's two years old, so we really don't know how many children are going missing, but that's a whole other topic. Many of these children are not simply runaways. They are actively being targeted, groomed and exploited. S. Department of Health and Human Services and CSEC, the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, reports that more than 60% of children rescued are coming from the child. They have a history in the child welfare system. Hence, why we make the claim it's a major pipeline for child sex traffickers. So before we can even deal with the online grooming aspect, part of what needs to happen for foster children is we need to get them in safe, loving homes because we need to reduce that extra vulnerability that they have. And again, we bring solutions. We don't just bring problems here. These data points indicate that foster care involvement is not incidental. It is a key risk factor in trafficking pathways. It tells us something very uncomfortable that we have to confront. The system designed to protect vulnerable children is in many cases where the traffickers are finding them. Why is that? Because foster youth often experience instability, isolation, unmet emotional needs and they may lack consistent adult connections. They're searching for belonging, and online groomers and traffickers know this. They are pros. We are up against $150 billion global industry, with the United States being the number one consumer, and we're the sixth largest city. So we've got a lot of that consumerism going on in the sixth largest city. They don't start with force. They don't start with connection. They start with the tension to the children, and it starts online. Everyone's already said it, through the gaming platforms and social media, etc. I don't need to repeat that. The highest risk population is already known to us. Yet we're not protecting them early enough. So we're very committed to prevention, and that leads us back to the technology. Why are foster youth disproportionately targeted? We know that their vulnerabilities are predictable to the groomers. They know that they have placement instability. They know that there's a disconnection from caregivers. They know that the caseworker crisis, that caseworkers are overloaded, the trauma histories of the kids and the lack of trusted adult relationships, so they are prey. We need to recognize foster children have an additional vulnerability that happens even prior to the online grooming.
According to the FBI -- I think they are no longer here -- over 50% of the victims of online sexual exploitation are between the ages of and 15. We know that. 8 An estimated 80% of the advances 9 will result in the predator asking 10 the child for sexually explicit 11 photos of themselves that lead to 12 sextortion, predators demanding funds to keep the photos away from their parents or their caregivers or their schoolmates, their peers. While using social media, 40% of children remove privacy settings in order to attract more friends and followers. So that's another topic. Current systems -- sorry, I already said that. Okay. Current systems are structured to respond to exploitation after it occurs. Reporting tips, you know, we need to be preventative, rather identifying and disrupting grooming behaviors early. I am so happy and grateful to this committee for this hearing and your leadership in understanding this as well as your previous two hearings on the foster care system because it all goes hand in hand. The intersection is real. And I appreciate so much your understanding of that intersection. From HMKs, from Half a Million Kids -- so if you hear me say HMK, that's Half a Million Kids. From our perspective, there are three critical gaps we have to address for all children. Early identification, we do not have consistent standardized screening tools across child welfare, schools and health care systems to identify grooming risk early, especially for foster youth. There's a lack of connectivity. Everyone is working in silos. Although I will say it's heartening that everyone that was up here on the first panel, you can tell relationship-wise they're all working together, so that's great. But without the technology and we're fighting the most advanced technology on the planet, $150 billion industry, these people are not playing and we are working in the Stone Age with antiquated systems like we're the Flintstones, not to date myself. But second, that we are -- a critical gap is cross- system communication. The systems that touch these children are fragmented and antiquated. Child welfare, education, health care, law enforcement, justice are not effectively sharing information in realtime. They might be verbally or through Google or Excel or certain systems, but we will not be able to keep up. Traffickers exploit these gaps. They know -- I swear these traffickers must be laughing at us as we try to figure it out. They've got it down. So not on our watch, everybody. No more. Again, they are pros and they're using their advanced technology. And we are working from antiquated systems. The third is the prevention infrastructure. We are not equipping caregivers and caseworkers or frontline professionals or the youth themselves with the tools that they need to recognize grooming behaviors before they escalate and having consistent reporting mechanisms. If we are serious about prevention, we must treat online grooming the same way we treat other public health threats with coordinated, data-informed, systemwide intervention. At Half a Million Kids, we believe it requires integrated, advanced technology. Number one, bottom line, trauma-informed, stable placements that reduce vulnerability training for all frontline professionals and ensuring every child has a consistent, trusted adult connection and foster children are in safe, loving homes, which is part of our blueprint and Phase 3. In closing, I would urge Council to not view online grooming as a standalone issue. See it as an entry point to trafficking, which I know you already do. See foster youth as a targeted population and recognize their additional vulnerabilities and design solutions accordingly. We already know who is at highest risk. We already understand how grooming works. What is missing is coordinated action. Coordinated action again through technology. I am very grateful you are having this hearing to start the process. I work at a federal and state level.
And it feels, I have to say, I'm so proud to be from this area. It feels like Philadelphia is truly -- it's not window dressing. It's not heavy, heavy bureaucracy. I feel a real commitment to solutions. So I'm very grateful and proud that Philadelphia is where this is going to happen and will serve as a model for the country. I know you're serious about this issue. We're ready to be in action. Half a Million Kids is committed to partnering with the city by offering our preventative infrastructure. And we would be thrilled to architect together an actionable prevention plan which we already have, but we still want to do it together. Our trafficking intelligence technology and the Half a Million Kids interactive system, standardized ID indicator system. It's the key to the whole thing in my estimation. So we have a real opportunity to be a no-trafficking zone. There's an entire program working in Texas and we're in partnership with them. And they bring legislation that has worked. They bring lots of solutions in addition to our blueprint. So I would like nothing more than for Philadelphia to put that stake in the ground and be the first no-trafficking urban city in the country and stand as a model for the country. And if I could just read one brief thing about the technology, and for those I'll be here after. There's a schematic and we can have a separate meeting all about the technology. The trafficking intelligence technology is called Traffic Shield. It is being built as we speak. It is an early warning system for child trafficking prevention, integrating the HMK interactive system against standardized ID indicator system, child protection technology with trafficking intelligence capabilities to identify at-risk youth, detect exploitation patterns, enable coordinated response across child welfare agencies, law enforcement justice. It allows caseworkers, agencies and law enforcement to monitor risk indicators and realtime data and respond quickly when a child shows signs of vulnerability and goes missing. Like I said, there's two layers, a child protection layer and a trafficking intelligence layer. And I'm happy at the end for questions to answer, any more questions about that.
Thank you. Thank you so much for your testimony. We'll go to the next witness. State your name and begin.
Laquisha Anthony. Good afternoon, Councilmember and Councilmembers. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak today. As I said, my name is Laquisha Anthony. I am the Acting Executive Director at WOAR - Philadelphia Center Against Sexual Violence. At WOAR, every day our advocates support survivors through sexual violence across the city, both children, teens and adults who first encounter us through the harm of grooming, both online and in person. WOAR provides counseling, therapy and prevention education services, which covers online safety to children, youth and parents. Child sexual abuse often happens through grooming, and that process involves trust and comfortability that is built in order to exploit children. Child sexual abuse, trafficking and online grooming are all interconnected. And because we live in a society that is a fast- paced digital society, it leaves our children at prey. Online grooming is not an abstract threat, but it's a deliberate, escalating process in which adults build trust with minors, often through social media, gaming platforms, messaging apps and then isolates and manipulates and exploits that child. We're seeing younger victims, more sophisticated tactics and a troubling normalization of risky online interactions from our direct service data and survivor accounts. Several patterns are clear. First, that grooming often begins in spaces where parents consider it safe or popular apps, such as school-affiliated platforms or games. Offenders use flattery, gifts and shared interests to build rapport. They quickly move conversations to private platforms and private channels where monitoring is limited. Platforms are everchanging, and many parents are unaware of the new methods and the new channels that are fast- approaching and coming up. Second, coercion and control escalate rapidly. What starts as attention becomes pressure, requests for images, threats to share private information and emotional manipulation that convinces a child that they are responsible for the abuser's well-being. Third, grooming is frequently an entry point to more severe forms of exploitation, including sexual assault and trafficking. Once a young person has been isolated and conditioned to comply, offenders may arrange inperson meetings that lead to assault or they may be used to obtain images or personal information towards ongoing exploitation and trafficking situations, rumors or networks they are connected to, leverage this control to recruit, advertise and exploit youth for profit. Survivors often describe the continuing rather than a single incident. Grooming lays the groundwork. Exploitation follows and exiting becomes increasingly difficult as coercion intensifies. For those individuals forced, the harm is profound and lasting. Survivors frequently experience anxiety, depression, self-blame, self-harm and difficulty trusting others. Many do not disclose this immediately, but often times it takes months or years or if at all that they actually disclose that this is happening. We also want to emphasize that children are not to blame for being groomed. Responsibility lies with the offender and with systems that fail to create safer digital environments. Because grooming can open a door to assault and sex trafficking, early intervention is critical. Therefore, specific points along this pathway that we can examine to kind of disrupt that harm. At first, it's the first contact. So what we can do is we can equip youth with skills to recognize red flags, such as rapid intimacy, requests to move platforms and secrecy or gift- giving or disengaging safely. Ensure parents and caregivers understand how to set boundaries and to use safety platform tools. Then there's during escalation.
We can train educators, coaches and youth workers to notice behavioral changes, sudden secrecy online, new unexplained gifts, withdrawal from peers and to respond quickly to supportive, non-judgmental conversations and clear reporting pathways. Before the inperson meetings occur, what we can do is strengthen platform safeguards that detect and interrupt attempts to move minors into private channels or arrange online contact. Encourage trust adult check-ins and verification steps where youth plan to meet online contacts. When coercion begins, we can provide rapid access to confidential support via hotlines or text lines and local advocates so youth can get help before exploitation deepens. Ensure that law enforcement and service providers treat these cases as victimization and not delinquency. At the signs of trafficking risk, we can coordinate across schools, child welfare, health care and community organizations to identify and support youth at higher risk for those experiencing housing instability, prior abuse and involvement in systems before traffickers can exploit those vulnerabilities. So based on what we're seeing right now, I urge Council to consider the following actions. One is to invest in prevention education, which is something that WOAR does every day, but to fund age-appropriate, trauma-informed digital safety curricula in schools starting in elementary grades. Within schools, youth programs and city services, and that staff are trained to respond without blame or delay. Support a coordinated response protocol among schools and law enforcement and victim service agencies such as us. Two, we can strengthen reporting, ensuring that there are clear, well-publicized pathways for reporting suspected grooming within schools, youth programs in the city services, and that staff are trained to respond to that as well. Three, we can expand survivor services, increase funding for counseling, advocacy and legal support specifically for minors impacted by online exploitation. Survivors need timely, specialized care, including help navigating evidence preservation and platform reporting. Four, partner with technology platforms. Advocate for stronger safety by design standards, default privacy protections for minors and limits on adult-to-minor direct messaging and robust age verification and rapid take-down processes. And I'm going to say that, again rapid take-down processes. So when we do identify that these sites are not following the proper rules, that we can do something immediately about it. Five, support community- based outreach, invest in trusted messengers, community organizations, libraries and afterschool programs to reach youth who may not engage with formal systems. Peer-led initiatives that can be particularly effective. Six, trained professionals, provide ongoing training for educators, health care providers, law enforcement and youth workers to recognize grooming behaviors and to respond in a trauma-informed manner. Seven, collect and use data responsibly, improve local data collection on online exploitation while safeguarding privacy so policy decisions are grounded in evidence and resources and directed where they are needed the most. Our center stands ready to collaborate with schools, city agencies and community partners to implement these solutions, preventing online grooming and its progression to sexual assault and sex trafficking, which requires a whole community approach that prioritize safety, accountability, and survivor support. I'll close with this: Behind every statistic is a child who needs an adult to notice, to believe them and to act. With thoughtful policy and sustained investment, we can reduce risks, interrupt harm earlier and ensure that young people reach out and that someone is there to help when they do. Thank you for your time and your commitment to this process of protecting children in our community.
Thank you so much. We'll go to our next witness, Hugh Organ from Covenant House. Oh, sorry. Okay. You'll be next -- actually, before we go to Benita.
Good afternoon, Madam Chair, esteemed members of Council. My name is Hugh Organ. I'm the Chief Program Officer for Covenant House Pennsylvania. Covenant House is the largest shelter provider for runaway homeless and traffic youth in the region. We provide over 100 beds a night across our continuum of services to youth. In addition, we lead the Philadelphia Anti- Trafficking Coalition. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about this issue that affects every family in our community, the safety of our youth online. The internet can be an extraordinary tool when used properly. The youth today are navigating a digital environment that was not designed with their well-being in mind. They face exposure to harmful content, cyber bullying, online predators, scams and increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation. Gone are the days of stranger danger. I recently provided a training on human trafficking for a group of 7th and 8th graders. When I asked how many used social media platforms or played video games online, every single hand went up. When I asked to drop their hand if they knew who they were encountering online, only two hands went down, only two. Everyone else assumed they were talking to someone like themselves, a youth. The sad reality is many of them are wrong. The internet has become the new street corner, where youth are not only being recruited, but bought, sold and advertised online. In my years 8 of working with trafficking victims 9 across Philadelphia, I have 10 encountered two too many youth who 11 were recruited, advertised and sold 12 online. 13 One of the most 14 concerning aspects is the 15 subtleness of these dangers can be. 16 Harm doesn't always come in obvious 17 forms. It can appear as a helpful 18 stranger who slowly builds trust 19 under false identities and who then 20 pressures youth to share images or 21 to meet in real life but let's keep 22 this our secret. 23 Parents and caregivers 24 are doing their best, but many feel overwhelmed by how quickly technology evolves. Often young people being targeted by traffickers have little or no 5 parental involvement. Schools are trying to respond, but they often lack the resources or the clear policies guidance to address these issues efficiently. There are several practical steps Council can consider. First, provide digital literacy and online safety education within our schools. Students need age-appropriate guidance not just on how to use technology, but how to recognize risk, set boundaries and seek help. The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is a great resource. I've included in my testimony as www.icactaskforce.org. Support parents and foster parents and guardians with accessibility to workshops and resources. Empowering families with knowledge is one of the most effective ways to protect our young people. Third, partner with law enforcement to improve awareness reporting mechanisms for online exploitation. Shift the paradigm. Instead of waiting for reports and tips, proactively go after traffickers and predators online. Pennsylvania has the Internet Crimes Against Children Unit in Delaware County that proactively goes after traffickers and predators online. Imagine if we could arrest the traffickers and predators before our youth are traumatized. Fourth, strong protections and accountability for technology companies, particularly around data privacy, age verification and harmful content moderation. Finally, ensure that all the mental health, medical and housing resources are available and accessible to youth who fall prey to traffickers and predators. This is not about fear or restricting opportunity. It is about equipping our young people with the tools and support and safeguards they need to thrive in a digital world. We cannot eliminate every risk, but we can build a community that is informed, prepared and proactive. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.
Thank you so much. If you wouldn't mind having Jasper come up. I'm sorry we switched you before, I needed to, and we're saving Benita for the last because she will need use of the technology. Please state your name and proceed.
Good afternoon. My name is Jasper Liam. I'm an LCSW. I go by they and he pronouns and I am the Executive Director at the Attic Youth Center, which is Philadelphia's only LGBTQ- only youth center here in Philadelphia. So the Attic Youth Center's mission. Our mission is to create opportunities for LGBTQ youth. We serve youth who are generally 14 until they're 24, with some exceptions for our counseling department with parental or guardian consent. I'm not going to belabor a lot of the excellent points that have already been put forth. I will take a hot take in that a lot of the things we're talking about are not actually prevention. In the sense that we are talking about monitoring and we're talking about assessments, we're talking about how do we get police or law enforcement or other agencies involved, and that's amazing and important work. But it's not prevention. It's early intervention. It is saying, oh, let's nip this in the bud before it becomes a larger problem, before physical harm is done. If we really want to talk about prevention, I want to talk about policy change. And I want to talk about how we teach our young folks, who in an ideal world all of them become amazing adults and contribute to our society. We are not teaching consent at its root. When we talk about rape culture, we're talking a lot about how do we support victims. We're talking a lot about how do we go after and persecute, rightly so, rapists. We're not teaching people not to rape. We're not teaching people not to commit sexual assault. We're not teaching them how to have these conversations. And we all like to assume that this wouldn't happen to our kids. We all like to assume this wouldn't happen to the kids in our lives. We'd like to assume that our best friend or our neighbor or whoever it is that we see every day at the grocery store isn't someone who could be a predator online. We'd like to think those things. We'd like to think that this exist outside of our personal bubbles, but real prevention starts at the beginning. So I have two wonderful, amazing children, 5 and 8. And one of the first things that we talked to them, as soon as they're communicating with full words, is how to say no and what is okay and what's not. And that's not just about private parts or what, you know, goes under your swimsuit. We're not talking about that. We're saying, hey, would you like carrots or peas? And you get to decide. I still win as a parent because you're still eating a vegetable, but you get to choose. We're teaching them choice. We're teaching them consent. We're teaching them boundaries. And that starts at a very young age. I absolutely agree that we need to be talking about how to have these conversations in school because unfortunately, we are also looking at a place where the policies and the capitalist society that we live in, it is incredibly hard to be a parent. I am very grateful to have a lot of resources and it is still hard to be a parent, right. I know I do not represent the majority of Philadelphians or Americans as a parent. I'm very grateful that I have a partner that I can parent with. I have amazing friends who come in and we have our village. We have this amazing, like, I don't know, at least 4 or 6 adults to 2 kids. Those kids are good. They're going to be great. And they still need to learn how to say no. So I was just having a conversation with my 8-year-old last night and saying, hey, if you were -- she was wondering why I was getting dressed up this morning. And I said, if you were in an uncomfortable situation, maybe it's on the playground, you know, we don't let her have a phone yet, but if you're having a conversation with someone and you don't feel safe, what do you do. And she froze. I know she knows the answer. I would like to think actually that she would do the right thing. And so, we actually practiced. So first thing you can do is you can find a trusted adult. Let's talk about who the trusted adults are in your life.
Let's talk about who they are at school, who they are at home, who they are out on the playground, at ballet class, whatever it is, who's the trusted adult that you can identify in each of these areas of your life. We don't have enough of these conversations with our kids. And when we have these conversations with our kids, we're also teaching them, because God forbid, none of us know, but every single perpetrator and molester and terrible person that we are vilifying also at some point was somebody's kid and who knows what happened to them that got them to the place where they did what they did. We have an opportunity to prevent that because I hope that it's not any of our children, but I'm sure that their parents also hoped that. So I want to say that we cannot think of this as an issue that happens to other people. It's not an issue that we wait until they have a phone or a device. We don't wait until they're on a gaming platform. We start with teaching them early. I had to do this also as education with my parents. My parents said, oh, your kids -- like their grandparents are so excited about it -- come give me a hug, give me a kiss. And my kid would be like no 2 thanks, and they got offended about it. And I was like, okay, you're going to have to learn to be okay with that because my kid, especially as a girl, gets to say no. And we're going to teach consent from the beginning. And I know that's a hot take. A lot of people have feelings about it. And I told my parents, you can take your feelings and deal with them somewhere else. They lovingly accepted. We are also living in a society where being a parent is hard because you are fighting all of these larger narratives, right. You're fighting it in the media. You're fighting it on the radio, in music, in art, in TV shows, right. We are constantly talking about how do we protect our kids from something that is everywhere. It's easy when we think about it just in terms of an online platform or chatting, but it's harder when we're talking about how do I talk to my kids about something that a friend of hers is watching, right. And I'm not okay with it. And we have these hard conversations. And that's assuming that any of us have the time, energy, resources and language to have that conversation. So I do think moderating is important, but it doesn't actually reduce risk. If we don't change our behavior, it's hard to expect our children to do it. Prevention starts with teaching each other and our children about consent, about trusting relationships, how do we define that trust and about how to say no and about you all. I didn't learn how to say no until I was a full-grown adult. I'm still learning. I'm still holding on to that no is a complete sentence, right. My kids don't have that problem because they learned it young. The same way that if I had learned French when I was young, I would be much more fluent in French. I am not fluent in French at all now, right. It's a lot harder to learn these things. So I want you to think about someone in your life that you care about and have you talked to them and had this conversation. If there are children in your life, whether they're grown or young, have you taught them the specific actions and phrases that they can use to approach you or another trusted adult if something happened. We're seeing this not just online, but we're seeing this also on college campuses. We're seeing this among adults. We're seeing this in workplaces, right, where something happens and the reality is that the most marginalized people are the most vulnerable to this. Grooming happens in lots of ways. And what I see with LGBTQ youth going back to the addict's mission is that we have youth who are not able to talk to their parents about who they are. They are young. They're 12, 10 sometimes. Most of the folks we see are in their teens and early 20s, and they don't have a trusted adult to talk about something. And so, they're talking to strangers online.
They're vulnerable because they are marginalized. So how do we help those families have those hard conversations in a way that actually feels safe for children. So thank you.
Thank you so much. I was remembering me raising my little girl. Could have done better with some of this information and thinking. Before we go to Benita, we want to go to our witness online, Bryn, because we need the technology for the next testimony. I don't know if anybody has questions for her. I have one question and then we'll open it to my colleagues. You talked about using geolocation in terms of doing prevention. Could you explain that a little bit more?
Yeah, absolutely. So at Stop Traffik, we're not a frontline organization. So because of that, we rely really heavily on collaboration with other frontline organizations, whether that be law enforcement or other NGOs in the space. And essentially what we do is we gather intelligence around the communities that we're going to be targeting with our advertisements that we run. And so, we're able to leverage technology on spaces like Meta and TikTok to really dial in on the exact demographic that we're looking to target. So we've run campaigns in the past where we had intelligence that there was trafficking within one specific postcode in the UK. We were able to then use that technology on social platforms to drive that, that prevention campaign in that exact location. So that's kind of the idea of geo-targeting in that space.
Thank you. And the last question I have for you is looking at these platforms and being very difficult to create laws for them to follow, right. In terms of what age verification looks like, what actual tools they can do? Do you have a very quick soundbite? What are we asking them to do that is doable?
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that, you know, we want to make sure that there is policy that follows the expectations that we're setting for these platforms. If we're expecting that young people are going to be on these platforms, we want to make sure that the practices that they're putting into place, you know, they're kind of walking the walk and talking the talk in that sense. I think that's something that we need to continue having conversations, you know, especially across -- I'm based in the UK, but this can vary from geography, but making sure that we're, I guess, advancing those conversations with the social platforms in that sense, with the intelligence that we already have.
Thank you so much. Anybody else? You have any questions?
The other one, okay. Bryn, are you calling in from the UK?
You are, okay. Well, we're across the globe. Thank you so much for joining in. We have to let you go because we need to use our archaic technology to have someone else use it. Thank you again and we'll be in touch. Appreciate it.
All right. Bye. Okay. Our next witness, please state your name and tell us how we should engage this.
Good afternoon. My name is Benita Williams. I am the CEO of Philadelphia Children's Alliance. I'm joined today by our Child Victims of Human Trafficking Assessor Lori Carpenter, who is sitting behind me. Thank you, Dr. Ahmad, for having me today, and other members of City Council that are present today. For nearly 40 years, Philadelphia Children's Alliance has defined how child sex abuse is confronted, supported and managed in our city. The current rise in the distribution of child sex abuse materials and images, also known as pornographic images and child pornography, can truly be categorized as an explosion. As the lives of our children become not only integrated but dependent on digital media and internet communication, prevention becomes more and more critical every day. According to a report published in January of this year, 86% of sexual image-related abuse episodes involve content produced by youth, either as victims or perpetrators. So we're so used to talking about the older man in the closet with a camera stuff that we might see on SVU, but 86% of sexual images related to abuse episodes have been produced by youth, either as victims or perpetrators. Many of these images are born from peer- to-peer messaging. Some of you joined us for our legislative breakfast in October, where we shared this map, which we have up here. Each red dot here represents a unique digital location where child sexual abuse materials, videos or images were shared or downloaded over a period of just 30 days. This map includes over 111,000 red dots. Experts estimate that most of the offenders represented here have at least 13 victims a piece. This is just one way to show you why education and prevention is non-negotiable. This epidemic is fierce. It is ever expanding, and the only way we can truly combat it is from all angles and if we are all working together. I support Dr. Ahmad's advocacy and Resolution 1 260150 and feel honored to bring Philadelphia Children's Alliance and our expertise to this conversation. Thank you.
6 Thank you so much. Such important 7 testimony from all of you. You 8 know, different facets of what we 9 need to do. And I will start with 10 the questions and then I'll pass it 11 over to my colleague. 12 There was a lot of 13 suggestions and recommendations 14 from all of you that we are going 15 to -- some of them are similar 16 across the board. But starting 17 with very early on, this ability to 18 have agency to say no is really 19 very important in ending rape 20 culture, right. So I think we have 21 to call it what it is. 22 And so, this is sort of 23 from birth kind of education around 24 prevention. So we need every partner in this space, which means having conversations, starting with parents how to parent. And we need -- everybody who interacts, whether it's after the fact of a bad outcome of something and now you're meeting them or you're meeting them in a preventive space in school before anything happens, I think we have to always have that messaging for caregivers and guardians and parents. I think we need everybody, regardless if you're a technology person or you're something else in some other part of the continuum, we need to embed how guardians and parents can be responsible. What does it look like, because they might not have had that in their life. In fact, I know I didn't have that in my life. For sure, we didn't have that conversation with my parents. So I know there's a -- it sounds like, oh, this is loosey- goosey. It's really important, and I thank you for bringing that up to really underscore that is the basis. If we can do it there, we don't have to worry about all of it downstream. But even when we do it there, peer pressure and, you know, you just spoke, so many of their peers are involved in doing this. So I want to think of a scenario for Philadelphia. If we were to embark on some kind of a campaign, right, to bring all of this and what are the steps to it, there are clearly segments to this. And I'll start with Jasper to say, because we're starting at the very beginning, how do you embed this and how do you have awareness of what happens when you're becoming an adolescent and your parents mean less, your guardians mean less, peers mean more, the outside world is coming into your sphere? How do we create either a curriculum or support, very briefly? There'll be more discussion about this, but just briefly so our listening public can already start this process without us even putting out a campaign, the fact that we're talking about it.
Absolutely. I think one of the things that's especially been hard, let's say in the past year and a half, has been that it is very hard to talk to parents or folks who are expecting what do you do if your kid is gay or trans or how are you going to have these conversations, right. Because we are also right now very much targeted and, unjustly so, as being groomers. If you look at so much of the comment sections, whether it's things that happen at the Attic on our comment section for Pride, for any of you all, anytime there's an LGBT resolution that's posted, there is often just one person, probably not from Philadelphia, saying groomer, right. And I don't know about y'all. I don't have time for that, right. So one of the things that's really hard is to say, how do we even then have that conversation with folks who are expecting with young parents and also deal with all of that hate that comes from the outside? So I think one of the places we start is to say that, you know, there's no I mean, there are plenty of books out on parenting. There's not enough support. Parenting can be incredibly isolating for whether you're a single parent or you have multiple adults helping you. It is very isolating. And one of the things that we see often is that parents, especially young parents, because we have a few, is that they turn to the internet, how do I deal with this, does anybody know Pampers isn't working, is Luvs any better, right. Those are the conversations they're having, right. And then there's no handbook for say, hey, as your kid is growing up and your 3-year-old says they want to wear dresses and you're like, oh, I don't know because the doctor said you're a boy and I have feelings about that, right. And there's not enough support. There are not enough safe places to have that conversation with other parents. So I know our long term is that we would love to have those kinds of supports, both for kids and for parents and caregivers. So there's not enough parenting support in the city. There is also frankly not enough to talk about what consent looks like. The sex ed that we provide in our Philadelphia schools is, for the most part, solid, but it is a weak curriculum. Any curriculum is only as good as you deliver it. So I could tell folks, hey -- I could tell my kid even, hey, if something happens, go to a trusted adult. But if she doesn't actually go through the process of identifying who that is, it's not going to help in the moment.
All right. Thank you. We'll go to our comments from our witnesses. Benita, please.
Thank you. I just wanted to highlight one of the programs that PCA is doing is that we are doing a project with the school district doing Project Safe and Smart for Children from kindergarten to the 3rd grade. And it's an actual puppet show that we do in the schools to teach kids about safe touch. There's also a component, a parent component with that, called Safe for Parents where we educate the parents on what to look for in preventing child abuse and child sexual abuse with their children. We have reached about 1500 children since last June when we started the program, and we are already booked out to the fall for other children to go present this program to. So it's really, really been a gamechanger for PCA to be able to start that young with children in kindergarten. We're talking 4 and 5 to be able to bring this message to them.
Laquisha Anthony. I'll also add that we also have a similar program using the same curriculum. But I also wanted to add that when we do go into schools and we have conversations with youth about a safe adult, we also allow for them to rate safe adults because often times they might be in a situation where they go to an adult that they deem safe and that adult does not respond in the way that it is needed and they need to go to another adult. So to begin to really categorize who are the safe adults in your life by category and by scale of specific types of incidents, so we do encourage and have those tough conversations. And the other thing I wanted to say is just to add and to build a consent culture. And that's what we do by talking to children as young as PreK all the way up to professional level, continuing to have conversations about consent and what that looks like beyond sexual assault but in everyday interactions, as he talked about.
Absolutely. A bill of rights, I'm hearing a bill of rights to kind of start the conversation. But we'll get to it some more. I wanted to ask Leah about understanding where -- so things are happening as we're speaking, right. So we can't go tabula rasa and start fresh. There's no starting fresh. We have to kind of catch the train as it's going along. This whole consent conversation, having autonomy, all of that obviously is age-appropriate. But when you're talking about our teenagers or just adolescents, what is the best practices, because you're looking at things not just in Philadelphia? Can you give us any kind of best practice that you've encountered in understanding peer pressure in how we allow, you know, we want our children to create their relationships and build their community on their own without what they have at home. How do you help them navigate similar to what Laquisha said about understanding some guardrails around that? What are you looking for? Because I've watched children become friends and then use each other to bully other people. And all of those things, all are part of the continuum. And that can go into the sextortion all the way. So I just wondered if you have any sense of best practice on that.
Well, I don't know if I can identify a best practice. But what I can identify, much like the work that's being discussed around education, this peer-to-peer education I think someone from the other panel also spoke about it. I think it's the most powerful because it's what's cool. You know, that's from time from forever, right. And so, educating the peers and doing campaigns with people they look up to, people they follow, culturally relevant, people to the youth, getting them engaged in the conversation so that it becomes a cool thing. So I think your concept of looking at it with the continuum, with education being the first part and then architecting like what is internally, how is everyone being connected on that continuum, but also then public-facing. So when it comes to best practices for peer-to-peer, I really think it's got to be made kind of a cool thing and kind of uncool to be part of that. And sadly, I think it's going to come from the influencers and the people these kids follow. I know there's such a huge focus on the parents, but some kids -- not everybody's as committed to parenting as the next person.
And some people don't have parents. But I think it's all needed. So to your word, the continuum and to look at the big buckets and I agree, starting with the education and what can be happening there. And then, you know, we're talking about the education. We have to work collectively, and there's a collective impact model that has five tenets. And I think to build that continuum with the internal workings around collective impacts so missions are aligned and work is -- people are coming together to work together at this and then doing it in a targeted way, like I said the City of Philadelphia and the four suburban counties actually as a pilot region, I think we can pull this together. I think there's so many good people doing so much good work with the different -- so it really just needs to be architected and designed.
All right. Well, thank you for that. Last question for Covenant House. You spoke about the intersection of foster care, you spoke about it and so did you, foster care in this space. I chair Public Health and Human Services, so we're looking very actively into how do we improve our child welfare system. What do you think we need to do immediately? Because we're in budget talks and we're going to give our -- we've already had DHS come through, but that doesn't matter. We can still send our recommendations and questions. What do you think right now with the way everything is, we haven't gone this -- we haven't made this collective impact model yet. We're all working on that, right, to have more intersection. What do we do now because we have children in the system now who are vulnerable, so vulnerable for so many reasons and then they're targets. So what could you give me as a best practice or recommendation?
I don't know that I have the answer you're looking for. But part of it for me is, you know, we've said this a lot today, a lot of people said it, it starts with prevention. When I made my remarks, I talked about parents, guardians because it's not just parents. It's like you said, foster parents need to be aware of these things, educating them around these issues as well and what to look out for, because our kids in the child welfare system are going to be targeted. They're going to be targeted just because they're the most vulnerable, but also looking at how the current system is set up. I spoke with a young lady who had been trafficked and she was in a group home and she was trafficked via the group home online. The predator contacted her via online. There was no firewall set up. She was able to have chit- chats on this platform because the group home did not have protocols set up to block those things out, you know. So those are just some simple things you can do as far as firewalls and making sure certain things are unavailable to you as far as within the system again, but it's also about educating them about what's safe. Because when I talk to young people, everybody nowadays wants to be a creator, a content creator, right. So they're going to continue to want to do that. So how do we do that safely educating them about what's the best way to go about this. Because I think as parents and staff, everyone's afraid like, oh no, we don't want them doing content creation. It could absolutely lead to something else. But if we're educating them what to look out for and we're engaging in the conversation and having the same conversation as opposed to, oh, no, don't do that. As a teenager, the first time you tell a teenager don't do that, what's the first thing they're going to do, right.
Listen, I'm not a teenager. That's still red meat for me. You tell me not to do it, I'm going to do it.
Having those open conversations. Because again, we want the youth to have someone to come to. That's the number one preventer of a young person being caught up in trafficking is a positive adult role model who's engaged in this young person's life. Number one thing to prevent it.
Well, thank you all. Thank you, panel. We have a lot of meat to bite into here, and we will do follow-up with all of you because you're the advocates in this space. And as we said, there's the prevention, education, there's the after the fact. We heard from people and during the fact, all of the entire continuum has to have an overhaul and we have to have focus on it. So thank you very much for your testimony. Mr. Sham, if you would call the next panel. We are actually doing not bad on time.
Dr. Bren Elliott, Associate Superintendent of Student Life, School District of Philadelphia; Dr. Fran Newberg, Deputy Chief Education Technology School District of Philadelphia; Tyisha Godwin, Deputy Chief Office of School Safety, School District of Philadelphia. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
Good afternoon. Please state your name and start your testimony.
Good afternoon. Thank you for this opportunity. I am Dr. Bren Elliott. I serve as the Associate Superintendent for Student Life and Innovation for the School District of Philadelphia. And thank you so much for this opportunity to bring testimony. The School District of Philadelphia greatly appreciates this opportunity to testify today about the risk of an education for students about online grooming and safety. Today we will discuss the district's curriculum around digital safety, esports, extracurricular activities, and policy and reporting of online threats and grooming. Notably, all school district personnel are mandated to report incidents of suspected child abuse, including abuse that may occur through online connections. The school district provides, as part of the health education curriculum, a focus on internet safety for students from kindergarten through high school. The school district also provides an elective course on digital and media literacy and internet safety at 135 schools for students in 8th grade and beyond. Finally, the school district also hosts the esports clubs for students, which includes a safety education component to support health and safe engagement with online gaming. The school district also provides multiple reporting channels for online abuse and threats that may occur. Happy to now just share a little overview about these different initiatives. K-12 general education, education and internet safety. Health education across Grades K through 12 prepare students to make safe, informed decisions in both physical and digital environments. Internet safety is embedded throughout the curriculum as a core component of the student well- being, reflecting how deeply technology is integrated in students' lives. Rather than being taught separately, it is woven into lessons on personal safety, decision-making, media literacy, and peer influences. Early grade instruction focuses on foundational awareness in Grades K through 2. Students learn about basic safety concepts such as identifying trusted adults, recognizing safe and unsafe situations, and protecting personal information. These early lessons emphasize prevention, awareness, and simple decision-making strategies to help students begin using technology safely. In Grades 3 through 5, students expand their understanding of online behavior and media influences with dedicated instructional time for internet safety. They learned that online actions can affect themselves and others. Students begin to recognize that not all online content is trustworthy and develop early media literacy skills. Students are also encouraged to question what they see online and think critically about the messages designed to influence them. In middle grades, Grades 6 through 8, instruction becomes more focused on independence, peer influence and real-world consequences. Students examine how social media and online environments can shape behavior, contribute to risk-taking, and impact relationships. Internet safety lessons reinforce decision- making and risk prevention, including how online interactions can lead to conflict or bullying. This stage supports students in connecting online behavior to offline consequences and outcomes. In high school, internet safety becomes more complex and directly tied to students' lived experiences. Lessons include cyberbullying, online harassment, and the influence of digital media on identity and relationships. A key focus in grades through is 7 information literacy. Students 8 learn to evaluate the credibility 9 of online sources by assessing 10 accuracy, bias and intent. These 11 skills are essential as students 12 increasingly rely on the internet for health information and decision-making. Instruction also explores how online environments can reinforce peer pressure and contribute to risk-taking behaviors, including substance use, and students are taught strategies to resist pressure and make informed and independent choices.
Across all grade levels, the curriculum emphasizes the influence of social media and digital environments on behavior. Beginning in the upper elementary school and continuing through high school, students learn how online platforms shape norms, encourage comparison and influence decision- making. And as students mature, they develop stronger skills to recognize these influences and respond thoughtfully, supporting responsible digital engagement. Teachers are supported throughout professional development and access to high-quality instructional resources. Partnerships with organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children provide up-to-date, research-based tools for instruction. Kids support young students and learning personal safety boundary and how to seek help from trusted adults. Netsmart extends this learning across all grade levels, addressing topics such as cyber bullying, online enticement, gaming, social media usage, and emerging digital risks. These resources ensure instruction remains current and relevant in this K-12 approach to internet safety is grounded in the belief that students must learn how to navigate digital environments responsibly and safely by integrating online safety into our health education. Schools provide a consistent developmental progression from foundational awareness to critical thinking and responsible decision-making. And through this approach, students build the skills needed to protect themselves, evaluate information, manage peer influence, and engage online safely. This foundation supports both immediate safety and long-term well-being in an increasingly digital world. I'm going to talk now a little bit about our esports programs, our afterschool -- I'm sorry.
Yeah. Go ahead. I just want to say we're going to ask you to summarize quickly if you've already submitted, only because we have a panel of young people here and they have a little bit of a time- constraint. If you would summarize and then if you've already submitted the testimony with this, if you wouldn't mind. Thank you so much.
Absolutely. I'll turn it over to Fran now, who will speak a little bit about our digital literacy.
Wonderful. Please state your name and begin your testimony.
Hi. Good afternoon. My name is Fran Newberg, Deputy Chief in the Office of Educational Technology. Thank you for the opportunity to highlight this very, very important topic and our work connected to this topic. So I'll speak a little bit about esports. It's offered in some of our schools. And most notably, we review the companies, we review the games and then we restrict any chat rooms, and the games are played after school with an adult present in the club. So it is in a very controlled environment. In terms of the digital literacy course that we offer, it is offered as a supplement to the K-12 curriculum that contains internet safety in every single school. In the digital literacy course, we work with students in Grades K to 8, and we focus in kindergarten through 3rd grade about online strangers. We talk about online and real safety. They're connected. You wouldn't talk to a stranger outside. You should not talk to a stranger online. In 3rd through 5th grade, we focus more on privacy, safety and risk awareness. We start talking about distinguishing safe and unsafe friends, and we talk about the risks of sharing information online. When we get into grades 6 through 8, now we start talking about online red flags, managing risks, comparing the risks and benefits of disclosing private information. We talk about managing privacy settings on devices like when you are on a social media platform, how you can manage your privacy settings. And I would say most notably in the School District of Philadelphia, we are bound to protect students. CIPA, the Children's Internet Protection Act, requires us to have filters. Therefore, when you are in a school, in the school district building or at home using a school district-issued device, we are bound to block social media, chat rooms. I'm going to name a few other things that we block: Streaming media, instant messaging. So we are protecting our students. And post the pandemic when we send devices home, when students log in with their district username and password, all of those restrictions are in place.
Okay. Thank you. Please state your name and begin your testimony.
Tyisha Godwin. I'm the Executive Director for School Safety. And just briefly, I just wanted to go over our policies and procedures and training that we offer for online safety. Our office, the Office of School Safety, handles all situations where crime or abuse is suspected. All School District of Philadelphia employees are mandated reporters, and when the district becomes aware of any online abuse of a student, personnel makes a direct report to Childline. The Office of School Safety also notifies and works in collaboration with law enforcement in these cases. Whenever there is a report that involves online threats, grooming or concerning digital behavior and there is a potential risk of violence or harm, that incident is also escalated to our threat assessment team. That team works collaboratively with the school administrators, counseling staff, school safety personnel and, whenever necessary, law enforcement. A threat assessment is completed. We determine the threat level and develop an appropriate safety plan for all students that are involved. In addition to our standard reporting procedures, we also utilize supplemental reporting tools. Safe2Say is a big one that's available to all staff, students, parents and community members and allows for anonymous reporting. Those reports can be submitted via a hotline, website or a mobile app. Those reports are triaged by the crisis center and then sent to the school district's response team, and all life safety threats are immediately escalated to school officials and law enforcement. Any threats that are nonlife-safety concerns, they are reviewed and addressed by school- based teams. So that's an overview of what the Office of School Safety does. And of course we also have a 24-hour hotline. That can be called at any time for any suspicious activity, emergency safety hotline. The threat assessment has a hotline. And then we also have the Office of Safe Schools advocate that offers victim assistance as well.
Well, thank you for your testimony. I'll ask some quick questions. One is you had said 135 schools have this programming that you were mentioning. We have more than 135 schools. I was trying to understand how to compute that.
All of our schools are offered health and safety curriculum in Grades K to 12. The digital literacy curriculum is supplemental and extra in 135 schools. So all of our schools receive internet safety lessons in our health curriculum K-12.
So they don't have this enhanced one that you talked about?
We would like it enhanced everywhere. What do you need?
Yes. So I would just add interim schools, you're able to have a prep class. So a prep session or prep teacher. So digital literacy is one of those sessions. Art might be one of those sessions. So we have 135 schools who have intentionally decided this is going to be part of their prep session.
I see. So we'll talk more about that, because this is such an insidious threat. And our children spend the most time of their day in school. And that is the best way to connect with them. The last question I'll have is about -- I know you're giving a lot of information. Do you have a sense of what is the positive impact or do you have a sense of how many of these issues have arisen in your school population? Meaning, do you have the data of children being impacted or being targeted or having had negative experiences that have escalated potentially to a law enforcement level? Do we have that data coming back to where in the school district it happened, who it happened to without disclosing obviously any information that would violate privacy? Just to understand all this training, is it actually having impact because you were able to reduce between this year and that year some sort of data evaluation?
So for the school district, when it's dealing with sensitive natures like this, it's usually redacted. But from the Safe2Say reports, we do have -- I believe I was able to find at least 10 or 11 Safe2Say reports that kind of led to online grooming or some internet inappropriateness. But when we have incidents, especially with our young kids, those incident reports are usually redacted, so we don't have those exact numbers for you.
The reason I ask is you learn from those, right, that how did that happen in the or cases and 9 how can we have learned lessons 10 from that to read feedback into the 11 training you're doing, to know 12 there's a gap somehow and this child was still somehow targeted or got engaged in this. So that's what I was asking really of how do we improve the training that you're giving on a regular basis?
I would just add two things. One, when these incidents are happening, they're either happening on student cell phones or on their own personal devices at home, because we have created the systems and structures that prevent any of those interactions between students on the devices that we own. I do believe additional support in outreach to families. We could look at providing some sessions through our Parent University to families. That may be something we could do as a next step to ensure our families understand ways that they can prevent their children from being victims of these very atrocious crimes.
Well, thank you for that because I was actually going to go there to say how do we supplement our parents, the continuum that we talked about? We would love to see it in the school district as well. So that's where the parents are coming from kindergarten to high school, right. So thank you all very much. We will have some follow-up. We will check back with you because we're trying to have some outcome after doing some more due diligence of what would work for our children in our city and it would be a work-in-progress. But we need all your -- and you see our children, as I said, longer than anybody else. And so, we really depend on you to be the conduit to reach our children and to help shape their view of the world and how they interact. Thank you very much for your testimony. And now, for the piece (inaudible) we have our next panel, please, Mr. Sham.
Yep, come on up. You have to come around. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
All right. Good afternoon. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for being here. I mean, I loved all the panels, but let me say this is the most important panel for me because this is who we're talking about. I appreciate all of you being here. Please state your name and begin your testimony.
Sure. Thank you for having us. Pastor Aaron Campbell, founder and CEO of Level Up Philly. And I just want to thank you just for having this hearing today on such a pressing issue. We stand in agreement with you, Dr. Ahmad, that youth well- being is a public health issue and that their well-being must extend to the online world as well. So again, we just tip our hat to you and thankful for other members of City Council as well. Resolution 260150 asks a serious question at a serious and most timely moment: What can Philadelphia do to protect its children from online grooming and exploitation? Level Up Philly is here. We got part of our army here. To answer part of that question from the grassroots ground level, my contribution this afternoon will revolve around the crucial role of consistent, daily safe spaces for our youth in academic research language. We're talking about what's now referred to as third places, meaning it comes after home first and school second. So when it comes to youth community centers and afterschool programs, you'll see them referred in academic language as third places. Level Up Philly is a holistic afterschool mentoring program in Philadelphia that hosts over 2000 young people weekly from 151 different elementary, middle and high schools. In our 12,000 square foot safe space in West Philadelphia, our emphasis at Level Up Philly is anti-violence, anti- retaliation negotiations, mental health, food insecurity, academic support, college and workforce development, life skills and soft skills mentoring and STEM education and digital navigation. At Level Up, we serve some 800-plus gourmet cooked meals daily, and I'll get into that point in a little while. The necessity of building trust and food is not only the main draw, it's the backbone of Level Up, but very much in securing that trust factor. When you are feeding kids daily gourmet cooked meals, you earn a place in their heart that perhaps only grandma, you know, a sacred level where grandma is there with her meals. And that's very crucial with the trust. The city's torn by neighborhood beefs and gang wars, Level Up is considered the only neutral place in the city where every neighborhood can gather and peacefully coexist. So all of the youth know Level Up. No matter what gangs are rivaling, Level Up is known on the streets as neutral territory. My staff and myself take very seriously the task of ensuring that every young person at Level Up feels seen, heard, valued, equipped, and most of all, protected. And this protection extends to the daily and very real danger of online grooming and exploitation. At Level Up, we have a STEM lab, a state-of-the-art large room with Alienware gaming 6 computers, 16 VR headsets, six 3D 7 printers, one pair of Apple Vision 8 Pro goggles, and she's looking at 9 us now. 10 This is augmented 11 reality. We'll get to that in a 12 moment. She can see both the 13 digital or the virtual world and 14 you at the same time. So 16 VR 15 headsets, 26 Alienware gaming 16 computers, six 3D printers, two 17 unitary robotic dogs from China. 18 One of the robotic dogs is here 19 today and will perhaps run a lap 20 around this area. Our STEM lab was 21 built and opened in Q1 of 2024, and 22 the goal was to give our 23 underserved Philadelphia youth 24 something more state-of-the-art and more aesthetically beautiful than even the neighboring affluent suburbs offer their own youth. Online grooming, it's the diabolical funnel feeding, the growing pipeline of sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. Furthermore, studies show that the children most at risk are those in foster care, as has been shared earlier, those experiencing housing instability and those in underresourced, high-risk neighborhoods. This accounts for far too many of our precious Philadelphia youth, and these are precisely the children Level Up Philly regularly hosts, nurtures, supervises and serves every week.
Our STEM lab is not only considered a second home, it's actually considered home itself to many of our youth who regularly experience housing insecurity, but it's considered their exciting window to the fast-paced global world of technology. So you just imagine 151 different schools that are in our building weekly, and they all have access to this state- of-the-art STEM lab, where we are just ready to just teach them how to engage the world and with workforce development to find their place in this fast-paced global tech world. In 2025 alone, our STEM lab had 6162 total visits from youth and 1286 unique visits, so that doesn't even count the children that walk in and walk out of the room. We had 6162 logins last year and 1286 unique kids logging in. So what I'd like to share, Dr. Ahmad, is just some evidence-based solutions that we found to be effective in safeguarding our kids against this real danger with online grooming. The first is trusted adults who come alongside the home. What we offer as a safe space, as an afterschool program, is we can come along the home in a unique way, where sometimes the parent is not comfortable sharing things with the school for fears and ramifications, whether real or imagined. The afterschool program offers that safe space where parents can confide in us with things and we can come alongside to help, mostly just having that trust. Research shows that no 18 single intervention works alone. The children who are best protected are the children surrounded by multiple overlapping protective factors. A lockdown parental control app is far less effective than a child who has three different trusted adults that they could talk to about anything that feels wrong online. As an afterschool program, while school offers structured time, the unique feature that an afterschool program offers is that though we have structured activities, we also have unstructured time because our children need to be educated on how to behave during unstructured hours, because that's when they're susceptible, not during the English lecture, not in the charter school where the kids have the technology where the bag, magnet locks. They need to be taught how to behave and how to navigate the world and even know danger during the unstructured time. So in our STEM lab, we're very careful and very intentional on having structured activities and unstructured time and we navigate that. Peer-led interventions. Research consistently shows that peer-led interventions where trained older youth -- and Chris is going to have a moment to share and you're going to get to ask him questions. Research consistently shows that peer-led interventions where trained older youth deliver prevention content to younger peers, it produces better outcomes than identical content delivered by adults. So at Level Up, we're very big on peer-to-peer mentoring. We mentor and empower our young people to then mentor and pour into our younger people. So peer-led interventions is very big and what we do in our gaming space, in our lab. And so, we're open Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There's free time on the computers outside of STEM classes. But Wednesday is our esports day, where kids come from all over the city. Kids come from Chester, commute from Willow Grove, and Abington High School even to come down and compete in seven different sports games, seven different esports games and even academic games. Now, the kids are wanting to compete with Big Brain Academy. So while the Fortnite and the Roblox is popular, we found that they're just as excited to do Big Brain Academy together, so definitely changing the narrative with our Philadelphia youth creating. And this is a very important point, probably the most important point I'll make today. What we found effective at Level Up is by creating a fun, consistent, physical, safe space. It organically translates into a safe, digital safe space.
So again, when you have these kids that are gathering weekly and daily and they're gaming and competing against each other, they're all exchanging their gaming information. So when they go home, they already have friend groups and an online groomer trying to come in laterally is going to stick out like a sore thumb. And the kids are not thirsty for that because they have already formed an identity in a physical safe space, namely Level Up and the STEM lab, and it organically translates into them gaming. So they're all meeting one another at Level Up and they're gaming together, hundreds of youth, and that creates a buffer where there's no need for a friend in the guise of an online groomer and the guise of a friend and they're not thirsty. They found an identity. Then the last point, and then I'd like to open it up to them because I'm always a big fan of kind of putting the youth in front of me, not reducing screen use but shifting the nature of it. When a young person is taught to use the screen for entrepreneurship, for robotics, for developing, and we even have a board game that one of our young people developed in our STEM lab. Where's the children's book? One of our young people actually designed her own children's book. When we're showing them entrepreneurship and how to use technology to create, some have even designed their own video games at Level Up, they begin to see online no longer as an identity, but as a tool. And actually, we would like to give this to you, Dr. Ahmad, so you're receiving the first gift. And I wish we had two, Councilmember Gauthier, But I promise we have one for you. So again, we're teaching them to use this as a tool and no longer to see online as their identity. And then what happens is their profile changes. So when a young person now is an entrepreneur, an author, robotics, one, developing programs and navigating their profile looks different to an online groomer. Even the conversations they now want to have with someone coming online and wanting to engage in very superficial fake conversation, our young people, their vocabulary and what they consider interesting is now at a threshold where they're not even hungry for that. It will have no place there. It would be like oil and water, you know what I mean. And then lastly, digital citizenship. That's got to be part of our lingua franca as we're going to talk about protecting our kids, is really teaching them digital citizenship, how to view themselves as a digital citizen. So just as they know how to protect themselves in the physical environment, with their data, with wallet in the front pocket, not the back pocket, what a pickpocket is, not to drop your headphones, not to leave stuff laying around, teaching them digital citizenship so that they understand how to protect their data, their name and what have you. So much more I can share. I could even provide the sources on the data because I know you're very big on evidence-based solutions and just how Level Up fits in so many of these evidence- based solutions as an afterschool program, that is, because we're all in this together. We're just answering one part. I would like to now just provide a space for them to share.
Absolutely. Thank you so much for this really critical testimony. And I know we're going to do much more with what you just told us. But I am so excited to hear from our other witnesses. Please state your name and say what you have to say. We are so eager to listen to you.
Hello. My name is Christopher Ellison Owens, and today I'm going to talk about something that's really important, how people online can try to take advantage of kids and teens and how we can stay safe. First, it's important to understand that there isn't just one bad app or a bad game. People with harmful intentions can go wherever young people are. That includes games like Roblox, Fortnite and Minecraft and Among Us, and also apps like Discord, Snapchat, TikTok or Instagram. What matters more than a platform are the features like private messaging, voice chat, and friend requests from strangers. For example, now, I want to talk about something positive. Programs like Level Up Philly help create safe spaces for young people. When kids build real friendships in places like that, whether it's in person or through trusted communities, they're less likely to look for random connections online. That matters because a lot of times people with bad intentions take advantage of lonely people that just want someone to talk to. But we are already part of a strong group of friends and support. It becomes a lot harder for someone like that to get close to you. Being part of a positive community helps you feel supported, make real friendships and be more confident to say no to strangers. Staying safe online isn't just about avoiding danger. It's also about having the right people around you in real life and online. To stay safe online, don't share personal information, be careful who you talk to, watch out for red flags like secrets or moving through more private apps, and always talk to a trusted adult if something feels off. Online games and apps can be fun, but staying safe and connected to the right people makes all the difference. Thank you. (Applause.)
And this is young Riqy. He's going to share about a very unfortunate instance where he was being groomed. And then he was saved by his older brother, who was also one of the original 10 founding kids of Level Up and how by mentoring Bakir, who's now in his third year at East Stroudsburg College, Bakir turned around and knew what to do and jumping right in with his little brother. So you want to share, Riqy?
My name is Tariq Kennedy. One day I was playing a game, well, Fortnite and somebody had added me. And I had been playing for a couple hours, and then they asked to hang out. I said, sure. So it sounded like a kid at first. But then after a while, it started -- the voice got deeper and they asked for my address so we can hang out. I was about to give it to him until my brother came in and asked who I was playing with. And I said, my friend. And he said, what are you doing? I said, I'm about to give him our address so we can hang out. Then he said, don't give nobody our address. Now, I did find out it was a grown man. Then my brother help me block him. But then also -- dang. I'm scared.
Take your time. You're doing fabulous. You're doing fabulous. Take your time. Deep breath.
But at Level Up, I feel like the people inside the lab help the other kids to make sure that doesn't happen. So, yeah. (Applause.)
My name is Charlene Owens. And this experience never personally happened to me, but I feel like Level Up is a great experience to interact with real humans instead of having to be online with creeps, especially if they're trying to get your address and stuff so you can interact with people your age instead of having to interact with people that act like they're your age and then try to creep and do stuff they're not supposed to.
And in your virtual reality, what are you seeing right now? You're seeing us and what else?
It's like all the apps. It's just like a regular iPhone. You could do it with your fingers.
You can see when he put his hand up, right. Is there anybody else who's going to testify? Thank you so much, young lady. (Applause.)
And when it comes to the point I shared, the evidence-based solution of giving them -- not turning down the screen time, but giving them alternatives to the screen time, Chris is here and could not get out of school today, but Chris worked with Ian in designing a board game at Level Up. This is a six-player cooperative board game where you're traveling the world to solve world hunger using food technology and currency. And would you like to just share about our independent research programs at Level Up?
Yeah. My name is Christopher Weaver. It's nice to talk to you all today. Our independent research program more like teaches how to navigate, like, navigate the internet and how to make certain things and how to make sure we could make money off our business ideas, which Unc was teaching us. We made websites and stuff with our independent research program. And it was very fun for us to do because we actually learned that we could actually do a lot more with this than just sit down and just stare at a screen all day and just scroll through. I always believed that the research program always helped us ever since Unc started it. And I believe he was always there for us too. Thank you. (Applause.)
That was wonderful. And so, before you go -- we're done with testimony or is there anybody else left?
One more, one more. And then this is Sabre and Sabre actually works in the lab, graduated from KIPP High School and was just admitted for the electro-mechanical certification program at CCP. So this September he'll either be at Lockheed Martin or USPS, but he works our robots and you can just share.
My name is Cyber Brown and what I do is I work with the robotic dogs and it's a great experience. It took me a lot of places that I thought I'd never been, like here. And I'm just blessed. Not many people get this chance, get the opportunities I'm getting. So I'm just here to learn and be able to learn everything I need to know so I could be successful. (Applause.)
Thank you. Congratulations on all your successes. And Unc is really doing a lot to engage with all of these folks. That's how he's known. Pastor Aaron Campbell is known as Unc to all these young people. So everybody's testified?
Okay. So first of all, thank you so much to all of you who are here. I so deeply appreciate it because this whole hearing is about making sure that your world is safe. That's why we're doing this. So for you to be here just gives me so much more pleasure because you're actually seeing all these adults coming in your service to be able to say -- all of us, all of us here are making this world a better place so you have an opportunity to shine. And so, thank you for shining already as we're fixing things. So my question for Unc is what you've created, you know, a safe space and trusted adults, I mean, this was the model everybody talked about before you, that trusted adults and having a series of them seems to be critical because if one doesn't do it, then who's the next in line. You do it in an afterschool space where children come in and out. How are you able to do this because this is what we need to replicate as part of our prevention strategy?
The short answer would be no days off, no days off. It's love, but not a love that's spelled l-o-v-e, but a love that's spelled s-a-c-r-i-f-i-c-e, sacrifice. You know, children don't care what you know until they know that you care. It is earning their trust. It's playing the long game. We have those that come in and I mean, the walls and I even think of some from the LGBT community and those -- I mean, it took me maybe six months to even get, let alone a hug, just an acknowledgement even to take a Pepsi from my hand. And now, these are my babies. So it's playing the long game and that's very important. Long gone are the days where we say to our young people, hey, you know, respect your elders because they know that we failed them, and we have. We can't just demand our respect the way Baby Boomers could to us Gen Xers when we were younger. We have to play the long game. And this generation, because of their survival that they've had to develop, they have an amazing filter for knowing genuineness. So it's playing the long game, it's genuineness. And then us recreating that web of accountability, you know. At Level Up, they know that we work with SEPTA Transit police. They know that we work with University of Pennsylvania police. They know that principals will call me because we suspend youngins, not just for fighting at Level Up, but we'll suspend them if we see them fighting anywhere in the city. If we see a video of them recording a fight anywhere in the city, we suspend them. So teachers will actually tell. And if a mom comes and says her testosterone-driven teenage son is not respecting her, we suspend him and then he has to write a letter to her and do dishes. So it's recreating that web of accountability. And then really just getting intentional people together like this so we could just, you know, fire begets fire, and it will naturally spread as we just continue coming together like this and just letting that cross- pollination and gleaning from each other and inspiring each other.
I have one more question before I open the floor to my colleagues. And that is, how do you have sustainability between your program into the real world where they have to go, right? So in your space with a lot of support, supervision and accountability, then they go into a space that maybe has very little of that. How do we create in them systems that they appreciate that and want to hold on to that?
Definitely. So often it can feel like, you know, we have them three days a week, 4 to 5 hours a day. So often it could feel like just when you're training the hair to be brushed this direction, they go back into a world in a home context where the hair has been naturally going the other direction. It is, one, treating the whole family. So though we serve the young people, moms are invited to come sit and eat, grandmoms come, even dads come. Fathers have come from jail and come straight to Level Up as their first stop just to want to thank me for watching their daughter while they were locked up. So we treat the family. And then as parents watch the way we speak to their children, it's actually caused parents to change the way they speak to their children. I complimented a kid too many of a parent where the parents are like, really. And I'm like, yeah, you have a queen. And then you could see the parent, you know, because people could get caught in a rut and repeated patterns, all of us know that in the home, and it's caused them to even see their child differently because the child is just a walking trigger. The kids are getting triggered all day and parents have lost touch with who their child even is because there's no parental support that they're getting. And I would say the ultimate, you know, is just the necessity of wraparound services, like really having all hands on deck so that wherever all of our youth are gathering in large numbers, we need to have all wraparound services on deck. How to get ID when your mom won't even give you your birth certificate because for some reason she's against you and doesn't want you to succeed, mental health services, expungement work, we need to literally find our safe spaces and just all-hands-on-deck wraparound services. And then all of this helps them go home as a healed person because hurt people hurt people, but healed people heal people. And we do share with the kids it stinks when as a teenager you have to become the parent, but often times that's the case. But when we equip them and we're there for that support system, we tell them you're going home as a healed person, so you're bringing healing to the home.
Well, listen, we could fix society with your answer and we have to work towards that. I misspoke. I have one question for the young person next to you. I'm so impressed with all of you. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. And we are going to, with Unc, hopefully use you to test what we are going to do. Meaning, what we come up with, I want to run by all of you to say, what does this look like to you, how would you experience it, because we were your age at one point but it's been a long time. And the world is very, very different. And so, I thank you for your maturity to understand that you needed to be here. You're sitting here for hours today and you are waiting your turn. I mean, all of the things you're doing sometimes adults are not doing. So you should be very, very proud of yourself. And I want you to be the showcase of what Philadelphia's children are. Look at all of you. If there's a television camera, this is what Philadelphia's children look like. This is where we can say good things happen in Philadelphia. So thank you, young man. Tell me what do you want us to know that we might be able to do something about. What is the one thing or two things that you wished was happening or you wished someone would do that you might not be able to do yourself, because, you know, we don't work alone in the world, we work with each other? Is there anything you might want to tell us that we should be aware of and take into account?
So I think that with kids, I think -- so most kids don't feel comfortable talking about their parents about what's going on online because most parents are so strict these days. That's why kids usually talk to other people online or other people in real life. So that's why they feel comfortable with them. But I think parents could chill out a little bit. That's why my parents -- so. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm nervous a little bit.
Okay. That's good. That's good because, listen, I had to chill out with my children and I know what that chill out is. They told me to. So we'll hear from this young man. And congrats on your board game, my goodness. Are you earning some money with this board game? Are you selling it?
We're not selling it yet because it's still in its testing phase, but I believe we'll make it there someday after we finalize it.
Scan this QR code. You can get on the waiting list for the game. As you can see, the characters in the game are people who look like them which is also very important. It's multicultural too because that's the real world.
So what about -- yeah, we probably should have a separate session to understand the game.
But if you can tell us, like I asked him, what one thing or two things you wished could be different that we may or may not be able to, but it will give us some food for thought?
The one or two things I wish could be different is that certain things about I would say some history to me, certain things, some history could change in a way that we could look back and be like this is what we shouldn't do, and this is what we should look on. Because if we realize that if we repeat the same mistakes, like the same thing is going to happen. So if we look upon that and actually just think about it, we could really just prevent those.
That's a great suggestion for all of us to do to reflect back and see how do we go forward not making the same mistakes. I'll open the floor to my colleagues. This is Councilmember Gauthier whose district Level Up is in.
Yes. I don't have a question. Just wanted to thank you all for being here. And thanks, Pastor Aaron, for all of the work that you do. And thanks to the young people for coming to City Hall and talking to us about what more we could be doing to create a safe space for you all because there's nothing like hearing it directly from young people what young people actually need. And I'm really proud to have you in my district. I visited Level Up several times and definitely think of it as a model for how we create safe spaces where kids can both learn and have fun. Every time I walk into Level Up, it is apparent that everybody's having a ball and that young people really do want to be there. So you've built something special that I hope we can replicate across the city. And thank you so much.
Thank you so much. We're going to have the next panel come up, but I wanted to really thank you from the bottom of my heart. And we're going to have more conversations. I just want to let you know so be ready. Once we've digested this whole hearing, we'll be coming back to have more conversations. So thank you very much. And, Mr. Sham, if you would call up the next and last panel. Thank you.
Dr. Aunshul Rege, Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, Director of CARE Lab, Temple University; and Khari McKie, Program Director, Community Evening Resource Centers, Juvenile Justice Center. (Witnesses approached witness table.)
We want to make sure they want to keep coming back. All right. Welcome. Thank you for your patience. Please state your name and begin your testimony.
Sure. Dr. Aunshul Rege. And I just want to say good morning, Councilmembers. And again, thank you for the opportunity to speak today in support of this important resolution. So I am a Professor at Temple University and I direct the CARE Lab where we focus on cybersecurity and human behavior. And through our partnership with the Juvenile Justice Center of Philadelphia, we work directly with youth through the Community Evening Resource Center, through hands-on cybersecurity and digital hygiene programs at Temple. We're trying to do the bridge the town and the gown divide through our programming. Since spring 2024, we partnered with JJC and have just completed our sixth cohort, working with approximately 80 youth across these sessions. This work is part of a broader, federally funded community outreach and education effort focused on strengthening cybersecurity awareness and resilience among youth. So our programming covers a range of topics, including online gaming safety, cyber bullying, sextortion and the risks of digital communication, deepfakes and disinformation, privacy and surveillance, digital footprints, scams, social media, algorithms and the influencer cultures, and the role of AI in shaping the future of cybercrime. In our work, one of the most important things we emphasize is that online grooming is not simply about exposure to harmful content. It is fundamentally about manipulation. And there's actually a concept for this term in my discipline. It's called social engineering, where you try to manipulate the person in front of you to try to get them to do something that they otherwise would not do. So this is how do we translate this concept into different demographic spaces specifically for the youth. So our goal in this program is to ensure that youth are not just aware of the risks, but are equipped with practical tools that they are armed with information that they can recognize red flags. They have a plan for how to respond and know what steps to take if something feels wrong. In this space, knowledge and preparation become their strongest form of protection. Through our programming, we have seen that when youth are given the tools to recognize these patterns, when they understand how manipulation works, they become significantly more aware, more cautious and more empowered to respond. And importantly, and Mr. McKie will talk about this, they carry that knowledge back to their families and communities. But what I've found particularly useful for me is that these programs are spaces of mutual learning. So as youth open up about their experiences, we gain insight into emerging risks and behaviors that may not even be widely recognized yet. And this allows us to continuously adapt and develop more relevant, customized content when we're hearing it directly from the population that we are creating this content for, which is exactly what you had mentioned a couple of minutes ago. So it also, I think, reinforces the importance of listening to youth and meeting them where they are, because their lived experiences are essential to designing effective prevention strategies. So I'll end with this one critical takeaway: Prevention cannot rely solely on restricting platforms or reacting after harm occurs. It must include education that helps young people recognize manipulation in realtime. Thank you.
Thank you for that. Please state your name and begin your testimony. MR. McKIE: My name is Khari McKie. I'm a Program Director for the Juvenile Justice Center, the Northwest District for our Community Evening Resource Center. Our Community Resource Center is a safe space for young people age 10 to 17. m. , so we're pretty much a safe haven for young people for afterschool time and evening programming. One of the things that we really groomed ourselves on was that we do a lot of gaming, we have a lot of social media activity and we do a lot of computer work at our program. Part of the programming was or some of the critical issues that we faced was that we had a lot of fights and activities that was going on, but a lot of it came from a lot of inappropriate social media activity, things of that nature. But then over time, we figured out talking to our Executive Director was what is a way that we could figure out a way to impact our young people outside of our program and outside of school, that we can prevent some of these issues that they have in their home, in their community, at school. So we came up -- we met with Dr. Rege and then, you know, here we are today with the Temple CARE Lab. So over the past two years, we've partnered with Temple University's CARE Lab to provide digital hygiene and cybersecurity education to our youth. We serve each semester, our young people participate in a six-week workshop series designed to help them better understand how to safely navigate online, the online world under the leadership of Dr. Rege and her students. What makes this program especially impactful is the space it creates for honest conversations. The workshops are not lecture-based. They're more interactive and informative where they can do things and communicate to each other. So while we're trying to educate our young people, they're actually educating us on things that we need to do and how we can be more preventative for the work that we're doing. As a staff member, I think it was great for me to be able to sit in and watch them interact with each other and the staff. But also just like from Level Up, we also get to hear directly from the young people about what's going on in the community and what they're experiencing online. They talk about -- and in those sessions, they get an opportunity to talk about, you know, being approached by strangers while gaming or on social media platforms. And then they also share instances where they're asked for money or their personal information is being asked for, and then even how to move these conversations off the platform and into their regular day. Also through these workshops, you learn how to recognize those warning signs and how to tell if a link is safe, how to protect their personal information, how to disengage from unsafe situations. They also learn the ability about identity theft. Many have shared that someone close to them have been affected, which makes these lessons very real. We also introduced topics that Dr. Rege said with deepfakes and digital manipulation. But the most important part is that after each session and after each workshop that we go to, you participate in an interactive quiz that allowed them to demonstrate what they've learned and what we've talked about. So this reinforces the information in a way that is engaging and helps prevent further activity for things that's going on. One of the most powerful outcomes we've seen is how you take this information home. They talk to their parents, grandparents, friends and other family members, helping them understand risks like scams, unsafe links and identity theft. In many ways, they become educators within their own families and friend circles.
So one of the biggest things for us is that we can talk about prevention, we can talk about all of these different things, but without our young people or going back to their community, I know you referenced how do we work with young people who when they're in a structured environment can excel, but then when they go back home to those environments, how do they be able to be successful. So they will be the teacher, they will be the one who can share the information and share the things that they learned with us to continue to create a safe space in their home, create a safe space in the classroom and then create a safe space online. So I thank you for this opportunity and if you have any questions.
Well, thank you. I believe we have one more witness or she's not here yet?
We'll ask questions all at once and we'll try to be brief. I know the hour is late and our stenographer has been sitting here all day. We'll just take the -- this is our final panel. So we'll take your testimony. (Witness approached witness table.)
Good afternoon. Lisa Barrimond. I'm the Executive Director at the Support Center for Child Advocates. Good afternoon, Chairperson and members of City Council. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here today. As I said, I serve as the Executive Director of the Support Center for Child Advocates, but I am appearing today on behalf of Marcia Hopkins. She is one of our child advocates, social workers and the project manager of Project PROTECT, which stands for Philadelphia's Response Outreach to End Child Trafficking. She's unable to be here today, but I am sharing her words and to offer testimony in strong support of Resolution 260150. The Support Center for Child Advocates provides legal representation and social service advocacy to more than 900 children and youth involved in Philadelphia's dependency system each year. We also are appointed as a child advocate in partnership with the District Attorney's Office for child victims of crime. Through Project PROTECT, we specialize in serving child victims of human trafficking and youth at high risk of exploitation. In Fiscal Year '25 alone, our team represented 21 confirmed child victims of human 22 trafficking. We respectfully 23 submit this testimony in strong support of Resolution 260150, which calls for an examination of the role that social media and gaming platforms play in the online grooming of youth. Online grooming is not hypothetical. It is a rapidly growing and evolving threat. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, reports of online enticement, one of the clearest indicators of grooming, increased from 292,951 to 518,720 in just the first half of 2025 alone. That is a dramatic surge for one year. 3 million reports of suspected child exploitation in 2025, underscoring the scale of online harm impacting children nationwide. org. These figures reflect what we continue to observe in practice. Exploitation is increasingly initiated through online platforms. Social media and gaming environments provide direct, often unmonitored access to children, allowing offenders to build, trust, manipulate and isolate. Youth grooming is a deliberate and calculated process, one that can escalate into coercion, exploitation and trafficking. There is a well- established connection between online grooming, human trafficking and missing youth. National data indicates that more than 500 reports of suspected child sex trafficking were made in 2025, a 323% increase from the prior year, and that in missing children reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were likely victims of sex trafficking. That data comes from Internet Safety 101 and data. Many youth who go missing, particularly those who run away, are contacted and exploited within hours, frequently through online platforms. Certain populations of youth are disproportionately vulnerable. Research and advocacy from Rights for Girls highlights that 60% of child sex trafficking victims recovered in a nationwide FBI operation were children from foster care or group homes, demonstrating the strong nexus between system involvement and exploitation. Additionally, the vast majority of identified child sex trafficking victims are girls, with some data indicating as high as 80% to 90%. Youth involved in child welfare and juvenile justice systems as well as those experiencing homelessness face compounded risks. Prior trauma, instability, disconnection from school, poverty, unmet emotional needs significantly increase vulnerability to grooming and exploitation. Homeless and runaway youth in particular, are at heightened risk, often targeted by traffickers who exploit their immediate needs for safety, housing and connection. For these reasons, awareness and prevention are critical. It is essential that parents, caregivers, educators and professionals understand how grooming occurs, including tactics such as flattery, secrecy, gift- giving and manipulation, and how quickly it can escalate.
Equally important is the need to invest in youth-centered prevention strategies. Young people must have access to developmentally appropriate, culturally responsive education on online safety, trafficking risks and exploitation tactics. They must be empowered to recognize warning signs, understand that exploitation is never their fault and know how to safely seek help through our Youth Survivor Advisory Board. We have observed that peer-led, survivor- informed education is among the most effective prevention strategies. When youth receive information from individuals with lived experience, it increases engagement, reduces stigma, and strengthens their ability to identify risks and seek support. At the same time, we must strengthen protective factors, safe and stable housing, supportive relationships with trusted adults, access to mental health services, and meaningful youth engagement all reduce vulnerability to exploitation. This also requires sustained investment in youth programming and family supports, because when we defund programs for young people and weaken safety nets for families, we significantly increase risk. Young people have consistently expressed the need for safe, engaging and enriching opportunities that connect them to positive peers, mentors, and support healing from trauma. And in the absence of these opportunities, gaps emerge that traffickers and exploiters actively target. When young people feel connected, valued and supported, they are less susceptible to grooming. We must be a city that prioritizes keeping families together, safe, healthy and well. This resolution 6 represents an important step toward accountability and prevention. It creates an opportunity to more fully examine how technology is being used to harm children, while also identifying strategies to strengthen safeguards, enhance platform responsibility and improve coordination across systems. Philadelphia has an opportunity to lead by recognizing that online grooming is not separate from trafficking. It is often the point of entry. We respectfully urge City Council to adopt Resolution 22 260150 and to continue advancing policies that protect the safety, dignity and well-being of Philadelphia's children. Thank you.
Thank you so much. We'll have a few questions and then we are going to break shortly -- for how long a break?