STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Kutcher's Misguided War on Child Prostitution
By Staff News & Analysis - July 06, 2011

Ashton Kutcher (left) Targeting Advertisers In Twitter War Vs. Village Voice … Don't mess with Ashton Kutcher! That's the message he and his seven million Twitter followers have made very clear after he became embroiled in a bitter war with Village Voice, which he claims is profiting from victims of child prostitution. The actor began his quest to bring down the paper after it published an article about he and his wife, Demi Moore. Village Voice claimed the pair had used exaggerated numbers when campaigning against sex-trafficking. Ashton then used his Twitter social networking page to contact huge businesses such as American Airlines, Disney and Domino's Pizza to get them to drop their advertising from the site. "Hey @disney @dominos are you aware that you are advertising on a site that owns and operates a digital brothel?" he tweeted. – RadarOnline.com

Dominant Social Theme: Another terrible crisis, and men are to blame.

Free-Market Analysis: Ashton Kutcher and his famous wife have launched a new campaign to prevent child prostitution with special emphasis on US trafficking. While this may be seen as a laudable endeavor, the Village Voice recently had the temerity to point out that while Kutcher claimed that there were some 300,000 little-girl victims, other numbers actually show something like 8,000.

Now let us state up front that prostitution is an unspeakable evil for children, especially. But many terrible things happen in this world and we have a suspicion that even child-prostitution is being exaggerated to support the furtherance of the power elite's "one world order." More on that below.

Kutcher's doesn't seem to want to discuss the issue rationally. His response has been to blast the Village Voice, seeking to remove its advertising support. And much of the coverage of his campaign has been only mildly critical. RadarOnline (see excerpt above) touts Kutcher's response as manly ("Don't mess with Ashton Kutcher") and other mainstream criticism has focused on the idea that while Kutcher might have gotten his facts wrong, the problem itself is so important that a little hyperbole never hurts.

The issue has generated a lot of heat. The official blog of the Family Research Council (a neocon facility that tends generally toward authoritarian solutions to social ills) recently published a short post in favor of Kutcher's comeback. The post, entitled, "Ashton Kutcher's Tweet Tirade Against the Village Voice on Child Prostitution" defended Kutcher's figures:

The sleezy yet still influential Village Voice mocked Kutcher saying he wildly inflated the number of girls who are sex trafficked in the United States. That number is notoriously hard to get, but Kutcher and his program are working with NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a source to be trusted. Not only did the Voice play down the problem – suggesting, ludicrously, that the number of actual arrests gives some scope of the problem — but Kutcher is right to point to the Voice as potentially part of the problem. Turn to their back pages and see dozens of ads for prostitutes. (They call people like us who support laws against prostitution "prohibitionists.") Good for Kutcher. He slammed the Voice with a tirade of late night Tweets.

It is true that the Village Voice uses a figure around 8,000 but what the Council does not add is that these are the number of arrests in a DECADE. The actual number of arrests per year are perhaps 700-plus in the US. And the statistics do not seem to include ages. The Civil Rights blog Care2 comes down more or less on the side of the Village Voice. The number needs to be put in context, the blog cautions.

"What no newspaper has bothered to explain—and what Moore and Kutcher certainly don't mention … is that the figure actually represents the number of children [the original researchers] considered 'at risk' for sexual exploitation, not the number of children actually involved." Even these researchers admit that it is nearly impossible to determine exactly how many child prostitutes there are in the United States.

What is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)? It is "primarily funded by the Justice Department," according to Wikipedia. Apparently one of its duties is to act as a clearinghouse on exploited children, parents and law enforcement officials and to "raise public awareness about ways to prevent child abduction, child sexual abuse and child pornography."

The NCMEC is supported by John Walsh of "America's Most Wanted" fame. Walsh is a sometimes controversial figure who once "jokingly" told senators during a summer 2006 press tour that they ought to pass a law to implant "exploding" chips in the anuses of sex offenders. Walsh has also suggested that women never hire a male baby sitter. "It's all about minimizing risks. What dog is more likely to bite and hurt you? …. Who's more likely to molest a child? A male."

One imagines that the Kutcher/Demi Moore campaign received a good deal of support from the NCMEC when they decided to pursue their campaign, even though the organization does not seem directly involved. The NCMEC also has a contract to process various applications involving potential abductees with the United States Department of State and the United States Department of Justice. "The NCMEC receives [some] US$40-million funding each year from the United States Government."

The NCMEC also runs the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) and in 2008 the ICMEC was granted "Special Consultative Status" with the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to help assist the UN in its efforts regarding these matters. "The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is an associate of PACT Parents and Abducted Children Together in the United Kingdom."

We are not surprised. Once again it is the US and Britain that are leading the charge in publicizing a "problem" that seems to need a massive law-enforcement effort to solve. Surely child-prostitution is a terrible thing; but here's a modest proposal: Could the US stop bombing women and children in Afghanistan ("collateral damage") and end what are now six separate military engagements in and around the Middle East as well?

In fact, someone enlightened about elite memes and their goal of social control might find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that Kutcher's efforts regarding child prostitution in America are, in addition to pointing up a terrible issue, in a sense supportive of an old and weary dominant social theme: "Men are evil, sexual creatures apt to molest anything that moves, especially little girls."

Can it be seen as something of a variant of the woman's liberation theme, which also had at its core (partially anyway) a kind of demonization of men? The whole issue of woman's lib seems to have subsided somewhat in the mainstream media, but the issue of children and sex constitutes, seemingly, an ever-shriller dialogue.

Western media, especially the US media, seems obsessed with sex and children. Adult "perverts" are constantly (supposedly) being arrested for having pictures of children on their computers and it seems that not a day goes by without a profile appearing in one media format or another about a "sex offender." These "offenders" are almost always male and the public service announcements launched by Kutcher and Moore focus directly on males as well. Here's how the Village Voice describes them:

… [The] announcements [appear] under the banner "Real Men Don't Buy Girls." In the spots, Kutcher plays a scruffy doofus who'd rather toss out his smelly socks and put on a pair fresh from the package than do a load of laundry. "Real men do their own laundry," an off-camera voice booms. "Real men don't buy girls." The message is somewhat bewildering, given the lack of context, but there are more like it, all part of a campaign featuring celebrities Justin Timberlake, Sean Penn, and Jason Mraz doing cartoonishly manly things, such as trying to shave with a chainsaw and find a car while blindfolded in a parking lot.

Kutcher is not alone in sounding the alarm about the "300,000 American-born children sold for sex each year." According to the Voice, the New York Times, CNN, Media Bistro, Salon, Family Court Chronicles, Wikipedia, UN ambassador Julia Ormand, Orphan Justice Center and C-SPAN have all used the phony figure.

It's like a Who's-Who of an "Amen Corner." Whenever there is a story to tell about a social problem (and a potential government solution) the high-end, elite-dominated mainstream media swings into action. Nothing like a News York Times' story to add a patina of media credibility to a scenario that makes a problem perhaps thirty-five times worse than it really is.

Kutcher's reaction to the Voice article was to generate a series of tweets attacking not the story but the Voice itself. With seven million tweet followers, Kutcher has a lot clout and he used it in his counter-offensive. Here's how the Atlantic Wire (Atlantic magazine) covered Kutcher's reaction:

Ashton Kutcher … has successfully convinced American Airlines to stop advertising with the newspaper. Dominos may be next … Kutcher [also] took The Voice to task on Twitter for the escort ads in the back of the paper … We covered the spat in full on Thursday, just shortly after Kutcher tweeted, "Hey @villagevoice I'm just getting started!!!!!!!! BTW I only PLAYED stupid on TV.

On Friday, Kutcher went after The Village Voice advertisers. "Hey @disney @dominos are you aware that you are advertising on a site that owns and operates a digital brothel?" he tweeted first. Shortly after, he upped the ante with a very serious charge against The Voice: "Hey @AmericanAir are you aware that you are advertising on a site that supports the Sale of Human Beings (slavery)?"

Within two hours, American Airlines told Kutcher in a direct message that they had pulled their ads from The Voice website. He bragged, "Thank you! Via dm @AmericanAir –> Heads up: Ads should be down w/in the hour. Blank ads are being served for now."

According to the Atlantic Wire, the Voice braintrust was unwise to point out the flaws in Kutcher's campaign. It quotes Felix Salmon at Reuters as saying that while the Voice's efforts were "basically admirable," they were sort of "asking for trouble when they picked on Kutcher."

Additionally Salmon suggests there were "big weaknesses with the piece." For one, he says, "it gratuitously attacks Ashton Kutcher, a smart person who's making the world a better place, in an unpleasantly ad hominem manner. Kutcher is not the problem here. And it needs a lot more serious discussion of VVM's own ethics with regard to running adult classifieds, including classifieds, which turn out to be advertising underage prostitutes. You can argue about the efficacy of Kutcher's campaign, but he's not making the problem worse."

For Salmon, then, Kutcher's claims that perhaps 300,000 little girls are involved in prostitution in the US when it is apparently a much smaller number is not the issue. The REAL issue is that a newspaper that carries sex ads has attacked a young man who simply wants to make the world a better place.

In the pre-Internet Reformation era, the controversy surrounding Kutcher and Moore's public service announcements likely would not have blown up. The Voice is a minor paper with a fairly small voice and the anti-prostitution announcements would perhaps have continued unscathed. But in the 21st century, articles even posted by minor media can "go viral" and the subsequent controversy can disseminate the news even further. This makes elite promotions considerably harder to disseminate.

In fact, given the players involved, we think its obvious that the Anglosphere power elite was likely floating yet another elaboration of the larger dominant social theme of men-as-perverts and sexual demons. This meme provides fuel for legislation that facilitates divisive divorces and generally erodes the family. In place of the family, the Anglosphere elites want to place government itself.

Is it about building world government? Certainly sex trafficking has an international dimension. Make it an issue and there are more reasons than ever to create additional global para-military action forces along with new NGOs and international laws. Maybe even a new "child protection" court to be established at the Hague. In fact, we Googled "Hague and child prostitution" and found this:

… The Ministry of Justice proposes that New Zealand accede to the Hague Convention on Jurisdiction, Applicable Law, Recognition, Enforcement and Co-operation in Respect of Parental Responsibility and Measures for the Protection of Children. (the Convention) …

The Convention is one of three modern Hague Children's Conventions which aim to protect children across international borders … Conflicts in jurisdiction are an area of difficulty in family law matters. The lack of internationally agreed jurisdictional rules creates uncertainty for litigants and difficulty for the courts in determining the appropriate forum for resolving disputes.

Acceding to the Convention will provide significant practical benefits for New Zealand children. The Convention establishes rules in respect of jurisdiction and applicable law; enables the automatic recognition of court orders and other agreements made in one Contracting State to be recognised in other Contracting States; and provides a basic framework for the exchange of information and co-operation between judicial and administrative authorities in Contracting States.

Legislation is required to implement the Convention in New Zealand. The Convention will enter into force for New Zealand during 2012 if implementing legislation has been enacted and any necessary regulations and court rules have been promulgated during 2011.

After Thoughts

Apparently there is another internationalist push on, this time having to do with a child protection "Convention." Thus, the Kutcher prostitution-promotion satisfies several memes at once. It reinforces certain male stereotypes and contrasts them favorably with US (and perhaps UN) government services. It also supports, apparently, an attempt to pass a more expansive, international covenant – involving child trafficking. Step by step an increasingly visible global order is constructed.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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