It might surprise you to learn that Ashton
Kutcher, while famous for shows such as "That 70's Show,"
"Punk'd," and his newest series, "The Ranch," is actually
fairly involved in the fight against human sex trafficking and child
pornography.
In fact, he and his ex-wife, actress Demi
Moore, founded an organization almost nine years ago (called Thorn) with that
very goal in mind: to eliminate sex trafficking and save victims of sexual
abuse.
Kutcher spoke with Kathie Lee as a guest on
"The Today Show" in October, but instead of discussing his new
television series, Kutcher had something else he wanted to discuss.
And that was Thorn's recent
successes--particularly, that they had saved over 6,000 sex trafficking victims
and recovered 2,000 of the traffickers themselves.
What's interesting is that Kutcher and Thorn
have discovered a startling trend seen among the victims: they're all sold
online, as if they were products on any other type of consumer website. So
that's where a majority of Thorn's efforts have been placed.
"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."
And they're cultivating quite the arsenal to fight online sex
traffickers.
