The actor, who is a father of a daughter, understands that women and children across the world stuck in horrible conditions need to be saved.
Actor Ashton Kutcher is a man of action. He lets his work do the talking for him. People might remember him only for his romantic-comedy roles but he is a person of immense depth. Father to a daughter with Mila Kunis, he knows that there are many many more daughters around the world who need someone to help them from a life of modern slavery. So he formed a nonprofit organization with ex-wife Demi Moore, which has already helped thousands of children.
His organization, Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, has assisted law enforcement in identifying 5,894 child sex trafficking victims and rescued 103 children from “situations where their sexual abuse was recorded and distributed”, according to their impact report. The organization was started back in 2009 with Moore to stop child sex trafficking. Back then, it was called the DNA Foundation, according to People.com. The organization has stopped 6,608 perpetrators, encouraged over 140,000 individuals seeking child sexual abuse material to get help, and educated 3.5 million teens through its Stop Sextortion campaign. Actress Shay Mitchell had also teamed up with Thorn to share the message about sexual extortion in 2017.
Kutcher spoke to CBS about his work, "I have a hard time talking about this issue without being emotional." He explained that his organization builds "technology to help fight sexual exploitation of children." “You can roll up your sleeves and go try to be like a hero and go save one person, or you can build a tool that allows one person to save a lot of people," he added.
“We’ve identified 6,000 children that are being abused,” he said, according to Global Citizen. “We’ve identified 12,000 adults that are also being abused.”
In 2017, he gave an impassioned speech for 15 minutes on modern-day slavery while testifying in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He wanted Congress to act to save women and children from trafficking across the world.
“I’m here today to defend the right to pursue happiness. It’s a simple notion: ‘the right to pursue happiness,’” said he, according to People.com. “It’s bestowed upon all of us by our constitution. Every citizen of this country has the right to pursue it. And I believe that it is incumbent on us as citizens of this nation, as Americans, to bestow that right upon others, upon each other, and upon the rest of the world. But the right to pursue happiness for so many is stripped away ... it’s abused, it’s taken by force, fraud, or coercion. It is sold for the momentary happiness of another.”
If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of the technology, you should know that in one instance the organization became the "last line of defense" to save a 7-year-old.
“I’ve been on the other end of a phone call from my team, asking for my help because we had received a call from the Department of Homeland Security, telling us that a 7-year-old girl was being sexually abused and that content was being spread around the dark web and she had been abused and they’d watched her for three years, and they could not find the perpetrator, asking us for help. We were the last line of defense—an actor and his foundation were the potential last line of defense. That’s my day job, and I’m sticking to it," he said.
His work has given him a better understanding of how traffickers work. "Traffickers prey on people and they know exactly what's going to turn their trigger," Kutcher told CBS.
Despite his deep commitment to the cause, people have criticized him and told him to stick to his "day job" as an actor. However, he has fought back against that unilateral idea of him. He defended himself against the "trolls" saying that Thorn was his day job. He explained how he saw a horrific story in a documentary where a two-year-old was molested by an adult and the child thought that they were only playing.
“I’ve seen video content of a child that’s the same age as mine being [abused] by an American man who was a... tourist in Cambodia, and this child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play,” he said.
For more information, visit the Thorn website.
References:
https://www.thorn.org/impact-report-2017/
https://people.com/movies/ashton-kutcher-saves-6000-kids-human-trafficking-thorn-organization/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ashton-kutchers-mission-to-save-children-from-sex-trafficking/
https://www.globalcitizen.org/es/content/ashton-kutcher-sex-trafficking-victims-tech-compan/
