Actor and entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher nearly broke down in a Senate hearing Wednesday testifying on human sex trafficking.
Kutcher opened with describing his fight to protect individuals’ right to “pursue happiness.”
“It’s bestowed upon all of us by our Constitution,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Every citizen in this country has the right to pursue it and I believe that is incumbent upon us as citizens of this nation, as Americans, to bestow that right upon others. Upon each other and upon the rest of the world. But the right to pursue happiness, for so many, is stripped away. It’s raped. It’s abused. It’s taken by force, fraud or coercion. It is sold for the momentary happiness of another.”
Kutcher’s organization, Thorn, uses a web-based technology called Spotlight to combat “modern slavery,” which is defined by the State Department as human trafficking in which individuals are exploited for labor or sex.
He held back tears at various times as he told the committee what he has seen during his fight to stop human trafficking.
“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. This child was so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play,” Kutcher said.
Kutcher again got emotional when describing how he was unable to give technology to the Department of Homeland Security to help to locate a young girl being raped a video on the dark Web.
“It devastated me,” he said. “It haunted me. Because every night, I had to go to sleep every night and think about that little girl who was still being abused, and the fact that if I built the right thing, we could save her. So that’s what we did. And now, if I got that phone call, the answer would be ‘yes.'”
Spotlight is described by Thorn as a software that “takes massive amounts of data and turns it into an asset for law enforcement, improving the effectiveness of human trafficking investigations.”
At least 27 million people worldwide are forced into modern slavery, Kutcher said Wednesday. He said he has seen victims of human trafficking in Russia, India, Mexico, New York and New Jersey, and has also been alongside the FBI on raids.
Kutcher also answered critics who say he should stick to his day job of acting. But he said of his fight against human trafficking, “That’s my day job and I’m sticking to it.”
Kutcher said Thorn — which he founded with his ex-wife, Demi Moore — last year saved more than 6,000 victims and identified more than 2,000 traffickers in the process.
Kutcher said organizations like his own show the success public-private partnerships and investment in technology can have.
“We need government to join us as investment partners and support the ongoing innovation needed to stay ahead of perpetrators as well as invest in the technical support for law enforcement agents that are working to protect our kids,” he said.
