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Biography

Michael Shively, Ph.D., is a Senior Advisor to Street Grace and to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, and previously was a Senior Associate at Abt Associates and an Assistant Professor at the College of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University. He is a researcher whose core objective throughout a 35-year career has been to provide practitioners, policymakers, and advocates with information and tools to support their efforts to prevent and respond to the victimization of vulnerable populations. Between 2002 and 2023, he was awarded a series of nine federal grants for research on the perpetration, victimization, and system responses to both survivors and offenders in human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation. His research on the consumer-level demand that drives all sex trafficking markets includes an evaluation of a program designed to apprehend and deter sex buyers, and he founded Demand Forum, a website documenting demand-reduction tactics that have been used in more than 2,700 communities throughout the U.S. His research includes developing a method for producing valid estimates of human trafficking prevalence; examining the traits and motivations of convicted human traffickers; and conducting a national survey on police responses to human trafficking.

Bob Rogers is the President and CEO of Street Grace, where he led the development of Transaction Intercept, a technology platform designed to deter and apprehend active sex buyers. Previously, he served as the president of Richmont Graduate University, where he launched two university-sponsored mental health trauma centers. He has testified before Congress and has been invited to the White House on multiple occasions to provide expertise on trafficking legislation and demand reduction strategies. He is also the founder of the Freedom Coalition, a collaborative initiative addressing global human trafficking. 

Courtney Furlong, Ph.D., is an anti-trafficking advocate who serves as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. She is a rehabilitation counselor and licensed professional counselor who has assisted tens of thousands of victims of sex trafficking from ten countries in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. She has focused her research on sex trafficking, sexual assault, and gender violence. In 2012, she received Auburn University’s Young Alumni of the Year Award. She is a Research Scholar with the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars and serves on the North America leadership team for the International Christian Alliance on Prostitution.

Brooke Ruffin is a Vice President and Executive Director at Street Grace. She is also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is dedicated to removing the stigma and educating children on how they can protect themselves from exploitation. She is on the leadership team for the Transaction Intercept Initiative at Street Grace, a first-of-its-kind investigatory platform that removes the costly, cumbersome, and time- consuming process of human trafficking operations for law enforcement. Through managing the national expansion of this platform, she has been responsible for coordinating a team of software engineers from around the globe through a partnership with Microsoft’s Hack for Good Program. She has been featured on numerous news outlets, youth conferences, and has advocated for legislation to Congress at a national Anti-Trafficking in Persons Roundtable in Washington, D.C. While at Street Grace, she has also served as Operations Manager and Director of Outreach, contributing to the development of training content, awareness campaigns, and community engagement initiatives.

Abstract

The article examines Transaction Intercept (TI), an artificial‑intelligence platform designed to reduce sex trafficking by disrupting the revenue streams that draw organized crime into the market. Transaction Intercept deploys decoy online ads that appear to offer commercial sexual exploitation or prostitution. Automated "decoy" personas connect to individuals who click on these ads and engage them in text conversations. These exchanges can remain fully automated, ending with deterrence messages, or be transferred to police for potential enforcement action or to trained volunteers who attempt to discourage further attempts to buy sex. Transaction Intercept generates extensive, real‑time data on local demand for commercial sex, including the characteristics of ads that attract buyers, the number of unique individuals who respond, and behavioral patterns by sex. Transaction Intercept generates extensive, real‑time data on local demand, including the characteristics of ads that attract buyers, the number of unique individuals who respond, behavioral patterns among sex buyers, and the outcomes of each interaction. Provided at no cost to law enforcement, the system allows agencies to quickly assess the scale and traits of consumer‑level demand for sex trafficking within their jurisdiction. In its current deployment, Transaction Intercept has facilitated more than 700,000 text exchanges and identified over 25,000 sex buyers across over 75 U.S. cities. The article outlines how this technology can inform public policy, strengthen law‑enforcement practice, and be adapted for use in other national contexts.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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