Ashton Kutcher took to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, February 15, and for 15 minutes he gripped the room while giving an impassioned testimony on his commitment to fighting sex-trafficking.
"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 seven-year-old girl was 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," Kutcher testified.
Kutcher was sharing the work he's been doing since confounding the human rights tech organization, THORN: Digital Defenders of Children, with ex-wife Demi Moore in 2009. Through THORN, Kutcher advocates the use of technology to combat against what many characterize as a modern form of slavery, in the exploitation of children in the sex trade. The actor/activist cited THORN's identification of over 6,000 victims in the past six months, along with the assistance it has been able to lend 4,000 law enforcement officials across 900 agencies, as a testament to the organization's success. The software responsible for such lofty results is called "Spotlight." Thanks to Spotlight, the investigation time needed to crack down on offenders has been reduced by 60%, he said. THORN also uses a program called "Solis," which Kutcher claims has expedited investigations into "dark web content" so that findings that once took up to three years, now take as little as three weeks.
In addition to sharing THORN's success, Kutcher made a plea for the government to step up its involvement by helping fight against sex trafficking by supplying additional funding for technology. He also pushed for additional enforcement and legislative initiatives, while encouraging greater exploration of agencies in foster care and mental health that have typically served as pipelines for victims. Above any type of technology, the issue must be foremost addressed with the support of the people and legislature, said Kutcher.
"When people are left out, when they're neglected, when they're not supported, and when they're not given the love they need to grow, it becomes an incubator for trafficking, and this refugee crisis, if we want to be serious about ending slavery, we cannot ignore them, we cannot ignore our support for this issue in that space, because otherwise, we're going to have to deal with it for years to come," he said.
Source: instagram.com
