OUR STORY
Seventeen years. One mission. Until they are home.
For 17 years, the Child Rescue Association has worked to protect children from exploitation. Today, through Child Rescue University, we put the tradecraft of former intelligence and special operations professionals in the hands of the officers fighting the organizations behind it.
WHERE IT BEGAN
It was personal.
In 2009, husband and wife Jess and Stephanie Larsen founded the Child Rescue Association of North America. For Stephanie, the fight began at home. Her family had been trapped in this kind of exploitation for four generations, until her mother, Lorrie, a survivor herself, broke the cycle.
Stephanie became the first woman in her family in a century who was not sold as a child, and she set out to protect other children the way her mother protected her.
Read her story in Glamour“Girls are being purchased in our own neighborhoods, but no one sees them.”
Stephanie Larsen · Co-founder
17 YEARS IN THE FIGHT
From one family's fight to an international mission.
SURVIVORS WHO FIGHT BACK
Courage is contagious.
THE MEETING
Except this time, the product was our children.
Almost a decade ago, while posing as a money launderer, I sat in a meeting with senior members of a Mexican cartel at one of the most expensive hotels in North America. Most of it was numbers: how much bulk cash would move over the coming months.
Then the conversation shifted. They started comparing the penalties for trafficking narcotics in the United States with the sentences for trafficking women and children. Their point was blunt: cocaine or fentanyl gets used once. A person can be used again and again.
It didn't feel like a gang meeting. It felt like a Fortune 500 company hearing a risk analysis and a corporate pivot to a new product. Except this time, the product was our children.
THEN I MET JESS
After my career as an intelligence officer, I told that story to Jess. His answer: “Yeah, I know. Why don't you come over here and see how we're fixing it.”
Here's what I found. Across the country, officers and federal agents desperately want to fight child exploitation, but almost none of them receive advanced training in how these criminal organizations actually operate. Their agencies want to act, but budgets are tight and the highest levels of training are out of reach.
That's the gap Child Rescue University closes.
CHILD RESCUE UNIVERSITY TODAY
Tradecraft, mentorship and boots on the ground.
We take the tradecraft and lessons learned from decades of working against cartels and terrorist networks and put them in the hands of the officers fighting trafficking today. Then we stay with them.
THE TEAM
The people behind the mission.
There are people who see a problem and say, “I hope someone does something about that.” Then there are people who say, “I am the solution to that problem.”