A powerful speech actress Blake Lively gave in 2017 while accepting an award at the Variety Power of Women luncheon about the Child Rescue Coalition is going viral again. In the video, the actress makes several emotional and powerful statements regarding how important it is to protect the children of the world.
As Lively began her speech, she is a mom herself. At the time of the speech, she was a mom of two little girls, now she is a mom of three. “They are my world and I would do anything to protect them. I would literally die for them without a moment’s thought.”
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And it was that notion that as a parent there isn’t anything she wouldn’t ask of herself when it comes to her and Ryan Reynold‘s daughters that she started thinking about “what is the value of a single child’s life who isn’t our own?”
“The sexual exploitation of children is something that isn’t happening rarely. It’s not happening worlds away, it’s happening right here and right now.” And while the idea and thought of child exploitation can be hard to think or talk about, as Lively explained she believes that if we all knew more about it “we would dedicate much more of ourselves to stopping it.”
Video of Blake Lively Talking About Child Exploitation Is Something We Should All Listen To
Lively used the words devastating and unspeakable to describe the graphic photos and videos of pre-pubescent children that could be found on the internet. And as she continued to talk about the graphic details she learned from a law enforcement officer, Lively became visibly emotional.
“I’m sorry to share this but I’m really grateful you guys are listening because this is actually happening. And it’s important that we know this and it resonates with us so that we think about this in our days and in our personal life,” Lively continued. “I feel like if these kids are experiencing this, the least they deserve is for us to hear what is actually happening.”
According to the authorities Lively talked to prior to her speech, there are 30 to 50 million of these grotesque files being traded daily both in the United States and around the world. “I thought that people who worked with children wanted to protect them but often times these people who have a propensity for wanting to lure children, they find a profession that gives them access to children and lots of them.”
As the mom continued, it is known by these preditors that young children are often ideal because they can’t speak up. And so Lively wants us to speak up for them.
Through her partnership with the Child Rescue Coalition, they are doing what they can to end the trade of childhood exploitation. The Child Rescue Coalition “is a nonprofit organization that rescues children from sexual abuse by building technology for law enforcement, free of charge, to track, arrest and prosecute child predators.” The organization “collaborates with a global force of child exploitation investigators, police officers, digital forensic experts, child welfare agencies and donors to rescue children and apprehend abusers in real-time.”
As of today, the Child Rescue Coalition has been able to prevent more than 600,000 acts of abuse in 96 countries. To date, as a result of their work over 12,000 predators have been arrested and nearly 3,000 children have been saved from their abuser.
“Let’s say because they have the IP address of all these predators, they can give the IP address over Care.com or Uber and if that person is filing for an application to work at this company to be a nanny or a driver, they’re immediately rejected because they’ve traded child pornography. Or if Comcast wants to receive their list of IP address, or any big internet service provider, they can block that content from being shared because they know what those files are.”
Lively continued, “There are no privacy issues, they just block that illegal content. So why the hell are we not doing this, it makes no sense. We have to help these kids.”