“That ‘ 70s Show” alumni, Ashton Kutcher spoke out earlier this week about all things sex trafficking while on the Today Show with Kathie Lee and Hoda, a cause he’s deeply invested in, including securing the safety of almost 6,000 victims of trafficking, who the activist and celebrity said have been recruited after being targeted online.
The whole conversation got started during a short segment focused on the daddy’s life and career, host Kathlee asked, “What can we pray for you about?”
Ashton responded and said, “You know what you can pray for me about, I got something. I have been working, when Barack Obama was going into office, I made a pledge that I was going to start fighting human trafficking and I started a foundation.”
Kutcher and his ex-wife Demi Moore started Thorn in 2008, an organization dedicated to fighting sexual exploitation of children through technology tools.
Explaining, “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 providing some quantitative evidence to back up his point.
“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.”
Human trafficking is defined by the United States Government’s Department of Justice, as a commercial sex act that is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.
The recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, it added.
Kutcher is currently on a Netflix series called, “The Ranch.” It debuted spring of this year and part 2 started running again earlier this month.