This morning, I sat down to write you something else entirely. It was going to be about an arrest made in my hometown about a guy who was arrested for generating CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) at a local coffee shop. The person sitting behind him saw what he was doing and called the police. That article will get written (I meet with the reporter next week), but this one needed to come first.

The news comes out of Marion County, Florida.

58 people arrested in a single county, in a single ICAC undercover sting operation.

Parents. Teachers. People who looked, from the outside, like anyone you'd pass in a grocery store. All of them believed they were communicating with children as young as seven years old.

Sit with that for a minute.

Because here's what you need to understand about that number:

• Marion County is about an hour's drive from Orlando.
• I've been to Orlando.
• You've been to Orlando.
• Everyone has been to Orlando.
• Our team at Zero Abuse Project has trained ICAC investigators there more than once, in rooms full of law enforcement officers who are doing some of the most exhausting, gut-wrenching work imaginable. People who show up every single day to fight exactly this.

58 arrests. One county. One operation.

That number should bother you.

What Actually Happened in Marion County

Courtesy of the Office of the Attorney General

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the results of a multi-agency ICAC sting that resulted in 58 arrests for crimes including online solicitation and luring of minors. The suspects believed they were communicating with real children, some as young as seven.

This was not a massive metropolitan area. This was one Florida county.

That detail matters to investigators.

As Dan, one of our ICAC trainers, put it:

“It looks like they were arresting them even if they didn’t meet up. In Arizona, we can do the same, but they never charge it. The county attorney usually drops it unless they actually travel to meet up, because they say the ‘fantasy’ defense is too difficult to overcome.”

That is one of the hardest parts of this work. The law, the evidence, the prosecutor’s threshold, and the reality of online exploitation do not always move at the same speed.

I want you to sit with that scale for a moment.

When 58 people in a single county are willing to solicit a child online, that tells us something critical: this is not a rare, isolated behavior happening in the shadows. It is happening in neighborhoods, in schools, in homes. It is happening everywhere.

The investigators who cracked this open? They are trained in the exact frameworks my team supports through the ICAC Training Program at Zero Abuse Project .

We work with 61 task forces and more than 5,400 agencies nationwide. Those investigators in central Florida are part of that network. That feels personal to me, and I make no apology for that.

**Another thing I won't apologize for - asking for help. Despite our program's incredible reach, training deliveries, and technical assistance we've provided to the ICAC task forces over the last 3 years, we unfortunately didn't win our ICAC grant funding this year, a fun problem we're currently tackling. Anyone looking to support this work, feel free to DM me. *

The Profile Problem We Have to Stop Ignoring

Here is the thing that should rattle every single community educator, social worker, and nonprofit leader reading this newsletter.

The suspects arrested in Marion County were not a monolith. They were not a type. They included parents. School teachers. People in trusted roles.

We have a deeply human tendency to build a mental image of what a predator looks like. We want the image to be identifiable, a stranger, someone who reads as "wrong" from across a room (like the guy I'll show you next week from the coffee shop...yikes).

That instinct makes sense. It's protective. But it is also dangerously incomplete.

When prosecutors and trainers present the diversity of professions among these 58 individuals, they are doing something critically important. They are dismantling the false safety of the profile.

They are saying: the person you trust may also be the person who poses the greatest risk.

I think about this constantly in my work with SurvivorSpace, our digital community for adult survivors of child sexual abuse. The stories that exist inside that space are not stories about strangers. They are stories about coaches, cousins, clergy, neighbors. People who had access, authority, and the trust of a child's community.

Technology does not create predatory behavior. But it does create scale and anonymity. And those two things together are extraordinarily dangerous.

What ICAC Investigators Actually Do

I want to give you a real window into this, because I think most people do not fully understand the sophistication of this work.

ICAC investigators are not just "doing undercover chats." They are trained in digital forensics, behavioral analysis, OSINT methodologies, legal evidentiary standards, and trauma-informed interviewing. Our NOVA Tool, the OSINT platform we support at Zero Abuse Project, helped one investigator close 30 active child abuse cases. Thirty. One tool. One investigator.

That is what happens when you put the right technology in the hands of a well-trained professional.

The work is relentless. The tools have to keep up.

And the arrests in Marion County are proof that when you resource investigators properly, when you train them well, when you give them the technology they need, they deliver results that protect children.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

If you work in a nonprofit. If you build technology. If you are a parent. If you are a human being who interacts with children in any capacity, this is relevant to you.

Here is what I want you to take away from Marion County.

Talk to the children in your life about online safety, not once, not as a scary warning, but as an ongoing, low-pressure conversation. Children who know they can come to a trusted adult are far less vulnerable.

Stop assuming you know what a predator looks like. The evidence keeps telling us, over and over, that they look like the people already in our lives.

If you build digital tools or platforms used by or for young people, trauma-informed design is not optional. It is a baseline. The decisions we make in architecture, in privacy settings, in moderation policies, those decisions have real consequences for real children.

And if your nonprofit does any kind of community education work? Get connected with your local ICAC task force. Seriously. These investigators are a resource most nonprofits have never tapped.

I Keep Thinking About the Drive

I keep thinking about that drive. Orlando to Marion County, about an hour on the interstate. I've made drives like that to get to training rooms, to sit with investigators, to understand their work better so we can build better tools and training courses.

The same geography where our team has trained law enforcement is the same geography where 58 people thought they could get away with this.

They didn't. Because investigators showed up and did the work (along with like 12 other agencies that it required to pull off this sting).

But the next sting, in the next county, in the next state, that work depends on continued investment. Continued training. Continued development of ethical, powerful technology in the hands of people who know how to use it.

That is what Zero Abuse Project does. That is what this community is about.

If any of this resonates with you, I'd genuinely love to know. Comment on this article. Tell me what you're sitting with after reading this. These conversations matter, and this community is a space where we can have them.

The work continues.

Stephanie