Comments from the 2014 WME Awards Dinner

Written by Ernie Allen

The following is an excerpt of the keynote remarks given by Ernie Allen, President & CEO of the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children, during the March 20th, 2014 World’s Most Ethical Companies awards dinner, following an introduction by Ethisphere’s CEO, Tim Erblich. The awards dinner was attended by more than 400 leaders of companies recognized as 2014 World’s Most Ethical Companies.

Tim, thank you. I have to admit that addressing a room filled with the leaders of the World’s Most Ethical Companies is a little intimidating.

It reminds me of an old story, allegedly true, about the great Governor Al Smith of New York, who wanted to launch a campaign of prison reform and decided that there was no better place to do it than in front of an inmate audience at Sing Sing Prison. So they filled the prison gymnasium. Feeling slightly nervous about the setting, the Governor opened his remarks with his usual, “my fellow citizens.” Immediately he realized that didn’t work, so he quickly corrected himself and said, “my fellow inmates.” Obviously, that didn’t work either. So, flustered and embarrassed, the Governor sighed and said, “Oh well, I am just glad to see so many of you here.”

So, I am truly glad to see so many of you here. Tim asked me to speak to you about how to make a difference. I have long admired the Robert Kennedy line, “one person can make a difference, everyone should try.” Tom Brokaw said, “It is easy to make a buck. It is a lot tougher to make a difference.” With apologies to the legendary newsman, I respectfully disagree. I fervently believe that it is not that difficult to make a difference, but you have to try.

As a local public official I created a unique approach to fighting crimes against children that attracted national media attention. As a result in 1981 the U.S. Department of Justice asked me to go to Atlanta to consult on the investigation of the famous 26 Atlanta child murders.

While I was there, the Vice President of the United States, George H.W. Bush, came to Atlanta to offer the help of the federal government. I seized the opportunity, arguing to the Vice President that this was not about one sick city, that it was happening to a greater or lesser degree in many cities and that somehow America had missed it.

I proposed that the federal government bring together the experts and develop a national strategy.

One always needs to be careful about what one says or proposes, because several months later I hosted that meeting, bringing together members of Congress, law enforcement leaders, victim parents, researchers and others. We agreed to create a national center and build a coordinated national response to the crisis of missing and exploited children.

I suggested that the center be based at the Justice Department or the FBI. But President Ronald Reagan said, “If it is going to work, it needs to be a private organization.” President Reagan was right. I became the Founding Chairman of the new Center in 1984 and then ran it as its CEO before retiring in 2012. I also launched an International Centre, and have run it for 16 years.

Our recovery rate has climbed from 62% in 1990 to 97% today.

What I am going to say to you tonight is derived solely from my own experience, and I am sure many of you can tell your own stories. However, I believe that there are three key principles for making a difference, the “3 Ls.” Leverage your unique strengths. Listen to your people. Lead your industry.

Let me provide a few brief examples:

First, leveraging your unique strengths. In 1984 we worked with the dairy industry to put missing child photos on milk cartons. It worked. However, we were harshly criticized by Dr. Benjamin Spock for traumatizing children. As a startup nonprofit we couldn’t compete with America’s foremost child care expert.

So, in 1985 we ended the milk carton campaign and looked for another way to achieve penetration into millions of homes without targeting children. A direct mail company that sent flyers into 85 million homes each week offered their assistance. The partnership continued for 25 years with 1 in every 6 of the children featured recovered as a direct result of that photo.

It was “win-win.” It saved children and cost us nothing. But it was also good for the company. To many people their flyers were junk mail, but research showed that if the recipient held that card in his hands for 2 to 3 seconds, the value to the advertiser climbed dramatically. Leveraging your strengths.

A second example. In the fight against child pornography, even when an offender is brought to justice, the images of the child stay on the Internet forever. So, we have worked with Internet companies to interdict the retransmission of these images, and to remove them from their servers as violations of their terms of use. Each image has a digital fingerprint, or hash value. We ran a pilot but weren’t getting many matches. As these images move across the Internet, they go through compression technologies or are sized, and with each change the hash value changes.

Microsoft said, “we will solve that problem for you.” They developed PhotoDNA to match and filter out these images. The likelihood of false positives using PhotoDNA is 1 in 10 billion. We are now disseminating PhotoDNA worldwide at no cost.

Another example. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, young children were separated from their parents, often ending up alone in shelters. We sent retired police volunteers into the shelters in four states to take digital photos of these children. Then CNN devoted the left-hand third of their TV screen 24 hours per day to rotating images of these children. Parents and people with information would call our special Katrina hotline. Ultimately, we identified and reunited 5,192 children with their families.

My favorite story involves a 2-year-old in a shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The little girl wouldn’t talk to anybody, but when our volunteer took her photo, he showed her the picture on the back of the camera. She pointed and said, “Gabby.” We had a name.

We searched databases and found a woman in a shelter in San Antonio who had reported her 2-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, missing. We confirmed the identification, and flew little Gabby and our volunteer to San Antonio for a tearful reunion with her mother. The power of partnerships.

My second principle is: “Listen to your people.”

More than 50,000 retail stores have implemented Code Adam, the in-store security system to help parents separated from their children. The use of Code Adam has intercepted abductions in progress and brought comfort to millions of parents. Yet, it wasn’t the idea of a high-priced consultant or some think tank. It was the idea of one Walmart employee in Crawfordsville, Indiana named Bill Burns, who told his manager that parents kept getting separated from their children in their store. He asked, “Don’t we have an obligation to help them?”

I met with Walmart’s CEO who didn’t want Code Adam to be proprietary to Walmart. He challenged us to take to the rest of the retail world. And we have. The CEO also asked, “What more can we do?” At that time, 100 million Americans each week walked into a Walmart. I asked how we could harness that power. We created missing child bulletin boards in every store. Nearly 300 children have come home safely as a direct result of Walmart shoppers.

My favorite example involves two grandmothers in rural Oklahoma who had a rug that was too big for their dryer at home so they went to town to use the laundromat. There they encountered a man with an 18-month-old little girl, and like every grandmother on the planet, they played with her while waiting for the rug to dry. Then they headed home, but as they did, one said, “we have come to town, let’s stop at Walmart.”

As they entered, one heard someone call her name. As she turned to look, she glanced at the bulletin board, where she saw the photo of the child from the laundromat. The little girl had been abducted from the East Coast and taken to rural Oklahoma. The women went to the store manager, who called us. We alerted the FBI and local police, and within two hours they had arrested the abductor and recovered the child.

One other example. Everyone has heard of the Amber Alert, which has saved the lives of more than 700 children. We are taking it global. It is now in 18 other nations. How did this powerful, almost no cost program appear? In 1996, nine-yearold Amber Hagerman was snatched off her bicycle and murdered in Arlington, Texas. The community was outraged. A woman called a radio station and said, “Surely in a country this sophisticated, there is a way that the whole community can help in the search for these children.” The DJ was moved and convened a meeting, which led to the Dallas-Fort Worth Radio Broadcasters Association coming up with the idea of using the Emergency Broadcast System to mobilize the eyes and ears of the public in child abduction cases. Listen to your people.

And finally, lead your industry.

A decade ago, husband and wife entrepreneurs went into the child pornography business. When they were arrested, they had 70,000 customers paying $29.95 a month and using their credit cards to access graphic images of small children being raped and sexually assaulted. I called the major credit card companies and asked, “How is this possible?” They said, “We don’t know what these transactions are for. If you can identify where the account resides, who the merchant bank is, we can stop the payments and shut down the accounts. This is an illegal use of the payments system.” That is exactly what we did. We created financial coalitions on three continents. In 2006, McKinsey Worldwide called this illegal business “a multibillion dollar industry.” Last year the U.S. Treasury Department sent me an e-mail saying that the problem had declined to “effectively zero,” less than $1 million per year. They attributed it to this industry coming together to follow the money and shut down the payment options.

However, we didn’t declare victory, because I concluded that we didn’t end it, we just moved it. So, in partnership with Thomson Reuters we created a new digital economy task force, addressing the migration of this illicit business to unregulated, unbanked virtual currencies and anonymous payment systems.

There are other examples. We launched a Global Health Coalition of pharmaceutical companies and health care institutions to attack child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking not just as a legal and law enforcement problem, but for the first time as a public health crisis.

One company can make a difference. I know it is presumptuous but my message to you tonight is that if you haven’t already, you need to do it. As one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies, you should be proud. But I challenge you to do even more.

Author Biography

Ernie Allen is President and CEO of the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (ICMEC), a leading global movement to protect children from sexual exploitation and abduction.