On August 27, when 6-year-old Jorge “Jo-Jo” Morales never returned home after a visit with his father, his mom, Yanet Concepcion, immediately reported her son missing. Investigators with the Miami police determined Jo-Jo had been abducted and his father, Jorge Morales, had likely been planning the abduction for several months. Jo-Jo’s grandmother was also missing and believed to be helping her son.  

An AMBER Alert was issued. NCMEC created a missing poster for Jo-Jo and featured his case on social media and through NCMEC media partners. NCMEC also worked with law enforcement to release security footage that showed Jo-Jo and his dad at a Walgreens in Houlton, Maine.

On October 30, someone at a Walmart in New Brunswick, Canada – more than 1,800 miles away from Miami – recognized Jo-Jo from media reports. His father and grandmother were arrested. Jo-Jo is back home in Miami with his mom, and they’re both doing well. His mother sent her gratitude to NCMEC in a video message that was shared with staff, saying “Please, take this moment to know that you guys are so amazing and that we owe you so much. God bless you!”  

Investigators knew the little boy whose body was found near a graveyard in 1999 in DeKalb County, Georgia, was African American and had been between the ages of 4-8 years old, but his name and identity remained a mystery for 23 years.

That mystery was solved when a facial reconstruction created by a NCMEC forensic artist was recognized by Ava, a woman who was a neighbor to the little boy. She never knew what happened to him after he disappeared from her life more than 20 years ago and had been searching for answers ever since. Ava said, “When I saw his picture, I screamed and tears just started because I knew that was him. There was no doubt…that was him.”

She called NCMEC and we referred the tip to law enforcement to begin connecting the pieces. By working with our partner, Bode Technologies, DNA was able to confirm that the little boy found in DeKalb County was William Deshawn Hamilton. William was 6 years old and lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. After his identification, law enforcement arrested his mother for his murder, and they are continuing to seek information about the circumstances of his death.

Early in 2022, NCMEC received a CyberTipline report of apparent child sexual abuse material that was being shared online. After our analysts identified a possible location for the person who was posting the images, law enforcement was able to arrest a couple who had been sexually abusing their three children. A few months later, law enforcement asked NCMEC to analyze the couple’s collection of abusive material, which contained more than 1,000 images and 200 videos. Within the collection, there were a few photos of an unknown young girl with an adult man. Again, the analyst was able to refer law enforcement to a possible location, leading to the arrest of a former law enforcement officer who had been abusing his daughter. Ultimately, just one of the millions of reports made to the CyberTipline led to four children being removed from abusive situations and the arrest of three adults who had been abusing them and posting the images online.

Our CyberTipline analysts saw a spike in reports of online enticement. In fact, those reports went up 82 percent from the prior year. This increase was in part due to a form of victimization called financial sextortion (missingkids.org/sextortion). In many of these cases, offenders would lure a child, often a teen boy, into giving them a sexual image and then aggressively threaten to share the image unless the teen paid them. There have been tragic outcomes in some cases, with children ending their own lives after being targeted. After identifying the trend, NCMEC was able to provide critical data to U.S. and international law enforcement, release new prevention resources for schools, and launch a PSA campaign encouraging teens to reach out for help. 

As the instances of self-produced sexual content of minors circulating online continue to grow, we recognized the need to offer more tools to protect children. With support from Meta, NCMEC launched Take It Down, a free service that can help remove or stop the online sharing of nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of someone when they were under 18 years old. If they have the images, a user can anonymously use the service to produce a digital fingerprint called a hash value that is submitted to NCMEC. From there, participating tech companies can use the hash list to scan for the images on their public platforms. If an online platform detects an image or video on its public or unencrypted service that matches a hash value, it can take action to limit the spread of that content.

A concerned social worker reached out to NCMEC in March 2022 to report a missing 16-year-old. The social worker believed the victim traveled to another state with help from an unknown adult. The child, who had previously been identified as a potential child sex trafficking victim by law enforcement, had been missing before. Most recently, she had gone missing from an airport after using a suspected gang reference, saying she “needed her flag today."

A NCMEC analyst scoured the child’s social media profiles, and was able to locate new images of the child. She was being advertised on an online escort site in a different state just hours earlier. With the information NCMEC provided, police were able to set up an operation and recover the child the next day.

Our partnerships help us reach into communities across the country to positively impact the lives of children and families. Through our Community Education Partners program, we collaborate with trusted organizations such as schools, child welfare and law enforcement agencies, and community-based and child-serving nonprofits to provide local delivery of our prevention resources such as NetSmartz, NCMEC’s online safety program.

One of the primary goals for NCMEC’s training efforts is to help build capacity for child protection professionals in regions where there are underserved populations, a high need, or a lack of familiarity with NCMEC. In 2022, NCMEC hosted the first ever NCMEC Summit in El Paso, Texas, to raise awareness of NCMEC and the vital services we provide. The three-day training focused on resources for responding to missing and exploited children and delivering prevention education, and the more than 200 registrants included law enforcement, child welfare advocates, prosecutors, nonprofits, and others. Because of the success in El Paso, we are planning additional deliveries of the NCMEC Summit in other communities in 2023. 

Child protection in the United States has become a global challenge that has steadily intensified. In 2022, 90 percent of our CyberTipline reports were linked to other countries. As the internet has removed borders and barriers to how U.S. children are sexually abused online, NCMEC has stepped up to meet this challenge and to address the global threat of online child sexual exploitation by building strong relationships with law enforcement and leaders around the world. NCMEC’s data, resources, and training are helping shape the global response to these issues. This year, NCMEC hosted or provided technical assistance to more than 100 international guests or participants, and our staff visited more than a dozen countries. 

Photo: NCMEC at a training in Nigeria.

Our first Tribal Fellow was selected to expand our outreach to Native and Indigenous communities by ensuring geographic, tribal, and professional diversity of perspective. Mark Pooley, who is Navajo and Hopi, previously worked as a prosecutor and law enforcement officer. During the year, Mark made strides to strengthen NCMEC connections in Native and Tribal communities and build trust. “These families just want to be heard,” Mark said. “NCMEC gives the opportunity for our Native peoples to be heard when their loved one or their child goes missing, so they know that they’re not forgotten.”

NCMEC staff speak with thousands of individuals every year, offering valuable resources and assistance to help them through one of the toughest times in their lives. In 2022, we responded to 2,042 requests for mental health assistance and crisis support. One of our programs, Team HOPE, is a group of peer support volunteers who have lived experience with missing and exploited children’s issues. Team HOPE was created in 1998 when two mothers of missing children recognized the strength they could draw from each other and wanted others to have access to that support. The volunteers are trained to offer compassionate peer support and empathy to people who are facing the trauma of a missing or sexually exploited child or who were a missing or sexually exploited child.

In 2022, we convened multiple survivor working groups, including survivors of child sex trafficking and child sexual abuse material or other online exploitation. Our survivor consultants are from a variety of backgrounds and experiences and used their knowledge to review and inform internal practices within NCMEC. Ultimately their feedback impacted important areas of our work, such as how we talk about cases of missing or exploited children, our policies for engaging survivors or using survivor stories in messaging, and the training we provide to professionals responding to cases of missing and exploited children.