By Demi Moore, Dec. 1, 2014, Ocregister.com
Demi Moore is co-Founder and president, Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children
My eyes and heart were opened to the issue of sex trafficking almost eight years ago when I saw a documentary about children who were forced into sex slavery in Cambodia. I was horrified, and I knew I couldn’t live in a world in which this was taking place without doing something about it. I became even more enraged when I learned that this wasn’t an isolated issue. Millions of children around the world, including children here in the United States and in Southern California, are victims of this horrible abuse.
Over the past several years, I have had the opportunity to meet many survivors and hear their stories. While all of the stories fuel my passion to work on this issue, there is one in particular that I can’t shake. It represents how traffickers truly prey on the most vulnerable and steal the innocence from these children.
I met a young girl from Southern California who was taken in by her trafficker at 11 years old. He made simple promises – McDonald’s and trips to the mall. But, to this child, those were things she had never had and always wanted. To her, it represented someone caring for her. Her trust was quickly betrayed and, soon, her pimp had her given a nightly quota of making $1,500. If she did not deliver her quota, she was put into a tub of ice or beaten with whatever large object was close by.
Her trafficker would often take a group of little girls to another location, and on one particular trip he loaded all of them into the car to drive to Las Vegas. Since there wasn’t enough room in the car, he put the two smallest girls in the trunk. When they arrived in Las Vegas, he posted ads on Craigslist and other escort pages to activate business. None of the customers questioned her age, and the general anonymity of using the Internet to buy and sell sex provided the clients with a reassurance of safety. This girl was raped and sexually abused repeatedly for three days, then loaded back into the trunk and taken back to Los Angeles to start the cycle all over again.
Just as this child was sold online, thousands of children are advertised on the very online classified sites that people use to sell a bike or a couch. Pimps and traffickers use this technology to help market the individuals they are exploiting, and johns use it to look for an individual to purchase. When we looked at the response to this issue across the country, we realized it was missing one critical area of focus: If the perpetrators are using technology to exploit our children, why aren’t we channeling the best and brightest minds in technology to fight back? We decided to answer by forming Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children. Thorn focuses specifically on driving technology innovation to fight child sexual exploitation.
Read the full story: www.ocregister.com
Source: Human Trafficking Awareness USA
