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By Movieguide® Staff
Several celebrities are using their fame and platforms to bring awareness to key issues affecting children and families today, including human trafficking.
“Trafficking has outpaced our efforts,” Academy Award-winning actress and United Nations advocate Mira Sorvino warned before the UN General Assembly in 2025, citing a 40 percent increase in cases since 2015 — and a sobering reality that 93 percent of trafficking crimes still go unreported or uninvestigated.
Sorvino, a board member of the United Nations Voluntary Trust Fund for Victims of Trafficking in Persons, has spent decades pushing this issue before most of Hollywood considered it a priority. She urged world leaders to “hear their voices and look into their eyes,” calling trafficking “the ultimate evil.” Movieguide® covered her advocacy work extensively when she starred in SOUND OF FREEDOM, the 2023 movie that brought the issue roaring into the mainstream — including Sorvino’s devastating statistic that only 0.4 percent of trafficking victims worldwide ever get discovered or rescued.
She’s not the only public figure treating this as something more than a talking point.
Former NFL quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow has built one of the most structured celebrity anti-trafficking operations in the country. The Tim Tebow Foundation runs a three-pillar program — Prevention, Rescue and Survivor Care — and recently formalized a union with Her Song Jacksonville, the only holistic long-term residential care provider for survivors in northeast Florida. Tebow has also championed the Renewed Hope Act of 2024 on Capitol Hill, drawing bipartisan congressional support.
For Tebow, none of this is separate from his faith — it is his faith. “We are called to fight for the voiceless,” he has said, and the foundation operates accordingly — not as a platform but as a mission. He is one of the clearest examples of a Christian in the public eye treating the fight against modern slavery as a moral imperative backed by actual infrastructure, not just hashtags.
Latin pop star Ricky Martin established the Ricky Martin Foundation in 2004 with child trafficking as its central focus. He serves as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and signed a global cooperation agreement with the International Organization for Migration to combat the sexual exploitation and trafficking of children across multiple countries. His foundation operates awareness campaigns, community programs and support facilities worldwide.
Oscar-winning actress Julia Ormond, appointed as a UNODC Goodwill Ambassador in 2005, founded the organization now known as Advancing Systemic Solutions to end Enslavement and Trafficking — ASSET. Rather than only responding to individual cases, ASSET focuses on systemic, policy-level change and ensuring survivors have direct input at the legislative level.
Not every celebrity advocate has stayed on solid ground. Actor Ashton Kutcher co-founded Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children with former wife Demi Moore in 2009, and Thorn’s Spotlight tool has helped identify more than 14,000 child trafficking victims. Kutcher resigned as board chairman, however, after public backlash over character letters he wrote for a convicted rapist. Thorn continues its important work — but the episode is a useful reminder that celebrity attention to a cause doesn’t mean the celebrity deserves the attention.
Human trafficking is one of the most profitable criminal enterprises on earth, generating tens of billions of dollars annually and targeting those with the fewest defenses. For Christian families who saw SOUND OF FREEDOM and felt the weight of it — or who simply believe, as Scripture says, that every human being bears the image of God — knowing who is actually in the fight matters. Tebow. Martin. Sorvino. Ormond. Different backgrounds, different platforms, and one shared conviction: God’s children are not for sale.
Read Next: 71 Missing Kids Found, Thanks to Tim Tebow’s Foundation
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