Sex trafficking is a disturbing, digitally powered underworld that many avoid thinking about. Often sexual exploitation is overlooked because staring straight into the dark reality of it can be unbearable -- especially when it involves children. It is estimated that there are 20.9 million victims of sex trafficking worldwide and 1.5 million in the U.S as of 2012, and 50 percent are children. However, we can rest easier at night knowing that a fairly young company is leading the charge against child sex trafficking in the U.S., and its fearless leader is not who you’d expect.

In 2009, Ashton Kutcher co-founded an anti-human trafficking foundation called Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children. Kutcher and his ex-wife Demi Moore founded and currently run Thorn, an innovative organization that creates technology to fight the sexual exploitation of children. Over the past years, Thorn has invested in research on sex trafficking patterns and worked to create technology that can identify victims and their predators.

This work is groundbreaking and has received an overwhelming amount of support from individual donors, company partnerships, and the U.S. government. Sex trafficking practices have grown and adapted to the limitless possibilities of the modern technological age, so Thorn has grown and maintained a global team determined to identify emerging trafficking trends. Moore and Kutcher’s shared website states: “As these crimes are increasingly facilitated by technology, we invest in and deploy the latest technology as part of our ongoing fight to end child sexual exploitation.” More than 20 tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft lend their knowledge, time and resources to Thorn’s cause.

After researching trafficking trends, Thorn employs the help of their partnerships and innovation lab to complete three objectives: identify victims, deter predators and disrupt trafficking platforms. Of course, the organization’s main goal is to recover and save as many victims of human trafficking as possible, but they also aim to capture predators, dismantle sites and platforms that conduct trafficking practices and remove child pornography from the Internet.

In a recent interview, Kutcher claims that Thorn has identified and safely recovered 6,000 victims and recovered 2,000 sexual predators. In recent years, Thorn has primarily focused on recovering victims and deterring predators, but Kutcher claims that his goal for 2017 is to completely eliminate child pornography from the Internet.

The work is far from over. Trafficking is rapidly growing and threatening to surpass the illegal sale of drugs worldwide. The immense scope of the Internet still has its dark corners and plays a vital part in this appalling network. 75% of underage sex trafficking victims claimed that they were advertised or sold online, and the average age of entrance into the U.S trafficking world is 12-14.

There is still hope. Thorn is a beacon of light in this black hole; they need help and support from people like us. To learn more information about the fight against sex trafficking and child pornography, please visit https://www.wearethorn.org/

You can also donate to help Thorn conduct research and create technology.

We all have the ability to take back the Internet: to use it to spread knowledge about ending the sexual exploitation of children.