HTI Labs

HTI Labs fights human trafficking, sexual violence, and domestic violence by creating sustainable, data-driven research and technology in collaboration with community partners.

Everything we do works toward two goals.

1.  Develop the infrastructure for automated, ongoing data collection for prevalence estimates, trends, research, and evaluation. Many different entities track some facet of domestic and sexual violence, but to date it has been unclear whether and how these efforts come together to create a complete picture. We seek to systematically address this by:

• Linking existing data on known cases. We integrate agency systems to produce reliable aggregate data tracking incidents through the criminal justice system & onto services.
• Measuring & creating data on what we don’t know. Not everyone who experiences sexual violence reports the experience. We create data that doesn’t yet exist to help identify the victim population we’re not seeing.

2.  Build sustainable solutions to identify victims and hold perpetrators accountable. Front-line efforts hit the same walls over and over again – unless victims come forward with a smoking gun, you are often left with a “he said / she said” situation. There are many ways that technology can be leveraged to break through those walls and to assist survivors, whether or not they decide to interact with the criminal justice system.

• Building a better investigative model. We work with law enforcement to leverage forensic and digital evidence in order to shift the burden away from victims.
• Creating more effective victim identification, response, & support. We work on legislation to create protections for victims as they interact with the system and develop software to facilitate and develop better community-wide processes.

We work to make data gathering processes more efficient, to link data to create a holistic picture of the system, and to build tools that make data useful to community partners fighting sexual violence on the front lines. Whether building natural language processing systems that allow us to interpret open-source data, a dashboard to display system-wide data on domestic violence, or frameworks to automatically generate statistics needed for valuable federal grants, HTI Labs builds tools to help connect the dots.