Ashton Kutcher Makes Emotional Appeal to US Senators to Tackle Child Sexual Abuse

Press Association

Actor Ashton Kutcher has given an emotional speech to US senators as he called for more action to tackle child sexual abuse

Ashton Kucher at Senate hearings

The Hollywood star discussed progress in combating modern slavery in a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington.

Kutcher, 39, co-founded the organisation Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, which builds software to fight human trafficking.

The "Spotlight" tool, which Kutcher said has helped identify 6,000 victims in six months, was created after a 2012 sex trafficking survey found that 63 percent of underage victims reported being bought or sold online.

The visibly emotional actor - who has two young children with actress Mila Kunis - said: "I've been on FBI raids where I've seen things that no person should ever see.

"I've seen video content of a child that's the same age as mine being raped by an American man that was a sex tourist in Cambodia.

"And this child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play."

Kutcher said his team received a call from the Department of Homeland Security asking for help to find a seven-year-old girl after footage of her being sexually abused was "spread around the dark web".

"She'd been abused for three years and they'd watched her for three years and they could not find the perpetrator, asking us for help," he said.

"We were the last line of defence. An actor and his foundation were the potential last line of defence.

"That's my day job and I'm sticking to it."

Kutcher's comments to the committee follows heightened scrutiny of classified advertising websites such as Backpage.com for carrying ads that offer children for commercial sex.

"Technology can be used to enable slavery, but it can also be used to disable slavery," said Kutcher.


300,000 American children at risk every year

Each year, up to 300,000 children are at risk of being trafficked for commercial sex in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Most sex trafficking victims are advertised or sold online, according to a US senate subcommittee report that was released last month.

Backpage.com was hit last week with the latest in a string of lawsuits that accuse the company of promoting sex trafficking by running and rewriting ads that offer children for commercial sex. 

In a more light-hearted moment at the hearing, Kutcher blew a kiss towards Republican senator and former US presidential candidate John McCain.

It came after McCain told the actor: "Ashton, you were better looking in the movies."

Watch video on BBC

Ashton Kutcher Rescued 6000 Sex Trafficking Victims

BY CHANTEL 
By IJR

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.

What a blessing to see some actors with real convictions and good priorities. Bless you Ashton and all those involved in Thorn.

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