Actor, activist and businessman Ashton
Kutcher visited “The Today Show” this week to speak with hosts Kathie Lee and
Hoda about the new season of his Netflix original series, “The Ranch.”
But what he was most interested in talking
about was his organization’s work to end human sex trafficking and child
pornography.
In the interview, Kutcher tells the hosts
about Thorn, the organization he began with his ex-wife, actress Demi Moore, in
2008.
Through his work with Thorn, Kutcher has
learned that almost all sex trafficking victims have one thing in
common—they’re targeted online:
We’re building digital tools to fight human
trafficking. Basically, the purchase and commerce for human trafficking is
happening online, just like everything else now, and so we’re building digital
tools to fight back against it.”
Thorn’s self-described mission is “to drive
tech innovation in the fight against trafficking.” On the organization’s
website, it explains just how it goes about its work:
“We partner across the tech industry,
government and NGOs and leverage technology to combat predatory behavior,
rescue victims, and protect vulnerable children. The site also lists 20 members
of what it calls The Thorn Technology Task Force, comprised of technology
companies that lend their knowledge, time and resources to the work that we do.
Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Adobe are listed among the names who
are helping Thorn’s cause.”
So far, Thorn has been a quiet success, with
some impressive, real-world numbers to back up its mission statement, as
Kutcher explains:
“We’ve built a tool to help law enforcement
prioritize their caseload and recover victims and find traffickers. And we’ve
found and identified and recovered over 6,000 trafficking victims this year.
And we’ve found, identified, and recovered 2,000 traffickers.”
But Kutcher says he and his organization
aren’t stopping there — they’re also working towards a truly ambitious
humanitarian goal:
“Our next battle, my next commitment…I’m
going to make a pledge that I’m going to eliminate child pornography from the
internet.”
Thorn’s approach — using internet technology
to find victims and their captors — is apt, because the major threat to victims
isn’t white vans parked on corners with kidnappers awaiting passersby: it’s
online.
Disturbing data which the organization
compiled shows that everyday sites like Craigslist are frequently used as a
means of doing business in the illegal sex industry.
Even more terrifying is that in 2015, 75% of
child sex trafficking survivors Thorn surveyed were sold online at some point.
Asia, a survivor who spoke to Thorn during
last year’s survey, told the organization:
“People are posted and sold online multiple
times a day. As far as the ad that was posted up [for me], there was a girl who
eerily looked like me…just [like] you can go find a car, there was a picture,
and a description, and a price.”
Anti-human trafficking group Polaris reports
that The International Labor Organization estimates 4.5 million people are
currently working against their will for sex traffickers. And the underground sex economy in 2014 was worth $290 million in Atlanta, Georgia, alone, according to an Urban Institute study.
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