WhenAshton Kutcherisn’t entertaining audiences, he’s fighting against human trafficking — and he’s got the figures to prove he’s making a difference.
The 40-year-old actor’s nonprofit organization, Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, assisted law enforcement in identifying 5,894 child sex trafficking victims and rescuing 103 children from “situations where their sexual abuse was recorded and distributed” last year, according to the organization’s own2017 impact report. His ex-wifeDemi Mooreis a co-founder.
The nonprofit builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. It also created a Technology Task Force — a group of more than 25 technology companies (including Google, Facebook and Microsoft) that work on software to fight child sexual exploitation.
Its data claimed that Thorn also helped disrupt 6,608 perpetrators, encouraged over 140,000 individuals seeking child sexual abuse material to get help and educated 3.5 million teens through itsStop Sextortioncampaign.
Kutcher started the organization, previously known as DNA Foundation, with Moore in 2009 to deter the sexual exploitation of children.
In March, the actor spoke with48 Hoursabout his advocacy work, admitting, “I have a hard time talking about this issue without being emotional.”
“What we do at our core is we build technology to help fight sexual exploitation of children,” Kutcher explained. “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.”
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Ashton Kutcher
“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 being 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.”
For more information, visitStopSextortion.com, or text “THORN” to 741741 to talk to a trained Crisis Text Line counselor.
source: people.com
