Sex worker advocates have been very critical of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore’s organization called DNA for conflating almost all prostitution with trafficking and slavery, while ignoring how such attitudes harm sex workers and have resulted in anti-prostitution laws that are more focused on harming sex workers than stopping trafficking.
For example, they claim that only a small percentage of people working as prostitutes choose this work and most are trafficking victims, without providing any evidence to back up this claim. The website also repeatedly provides statistics without naming the sources. Here’s a link: http://demiandashton.org/ .
Despite my concerns stated above, I appreciate how Ashton challenged the conflation of all sex work with trafficking while on the David Letterman show, saying that strippers and porn performers aren’t trafficking victims. I’m not a mind reader, but I’m guessing he meant that not every porn performer or exotic dancer is a trafficking victim or that the prevalency of this is low, considering that none of us can know for sure that nobody is ever trafficked in these industries or many others.
Though I appreciated him asserting this, I wish he would have also mentioned how not all prostitutes are trafficking victims. Here’s a link to the video clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inQ3GS6dA4Y .
