Will 'Real Men' Make a Difference?

Demi and Ashton's campaign against sex trafficking sparks a debate.

Norma Ramos
Executive director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

Human trafficking is tied with arms dealing as the second-largest criminal industry in the world, and is the fastest-growing human-rights abuse.

It’s incredibly important for people in the public domain – not just celebrities, but anyone with some measure of access to media, including our politicians – to choose human trafficking as an issue they want to call attention to. I applaud Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher for doing so.

I’ve noticed a lot of negativity toward Demi and Ashton’s artistic approach to this issue, but, nonetheless, I continue to encourage artists to use their talents and creative abilities to get their anti-human-trafficking message out. Is Demi and Ashton’s ad campaign the best possible product? Probably not. But I think the public is being way too harsh on them.

However, I’m concerned that their message – “real men don’t buy girls" – is too narrow. It needs to be “real men don’t buy sex.” The message that real men don’t buy girls leaves open the possibility that real men buy women.

Read the full article here.

Allison Trowbridge
Senior director of communications, Not For Sale Campaign.

This week, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men” initiative to address child sex trafficking has come under fire. The new campaign features A-list celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Jamie Foxx, and Sean Penn demonstrating comical scenarios of what a “real man” is, and then utilizes Facebook to offer viewers the opportunity to pledge that they are “real men” (or that they “prefer real men”).

This is clever viral marketing, but the videos have been criticized for making light of an incredibly serious subject. Several organizations have joined in the censure, but is this the right response?

Not For Sale, a non-profit organization working globally to combat human trafficking, was founded on the following mission: Whoever you are, whatever you do, you have something to contribute to the fight against slavery.

Demi and Ashton’s initiative exemplifies this simple call to action.

Read the full article here.