The gruesome rape and murder of eight-year-old Kashmiri girl has once again seared a burning hole in our hearts and pushed the issue of child sexual abuse in the forefront. Each time a spine-chilling incident of child rape, molestation or groping makes its way into the news, it extracts sharp reactions and protests from most of civil society, both in the online and real world. But for some, the responsibility towards safeguarding little lives doesn’t end just here.
Like Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, an organisation set up in 2009 by Hollywood actor Ashton Kutcher, whose primary mission is to curb child abuse. The actor recently made an impassioned plea to the American government to bring in stringent measures to curb child abuse, by tying up with tech companies and NGOs to employ technology to prevent sexual exploitation of kids. Thorn, in fact, builds software to fight child trafficking on a war footing.
Narrating his experience of watching the video of a child who was the same age as his kid, being raped by an American man — a sex tourist in Cambodia, the actor broke down and recalled that the most sickening aspect was the fact that the child appeared “so conditioned by her environment that she thought she was engaging in play.”
Shilpi Madan for Asian Age
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