What We Talk About When We Talk About Trafficking: Sound of Freedom/OUR Part 5
Questions, Comments, Concerns
This is part 5 of 5. For the rest of the series, see the following:
Recap: Where Have We Been?
In the last two sections I’ve taken a pretty narrow focus to argue that the search for Gardy Mardy, spearheaded by Tim Ballard and OUR , seems as though it has primarily been shaped by the assumption that Gardy was a victim of what I callede “capital-T Trafficking.” While human trafficking is an umbrella term that includes a variety of exploitative practices, including bonded labor, forced marriage, and sexual exploitation,”capital-T Trafficking “ is the form of trafficking that dominates American consciousness, and actually drives the intervention model employed by OUR. “Capital-T Trafficking” is the kidnapping and warehousing of children as chattel slaves for international shipping, individual purchase, and short-term rental for the purpose of sexual exploitation (or, in the case of conspiracy theories, consumption or ritual behavior).
However, as we will see, compared with other forms of trafficking (such as bonded labor, forced marriage, or sexual exploitation by a friend, family member, or guardian), this form of trafficking (“Trafficking,” as we called it) does not seem to be nearly as common – certainly not in the US. Fear of it, suspicions of it, and putative “close encounters” with it are much better attested than actual evidence of it occurring.
Nonetheless, the assumption of its prevalence seems to underpin a significant amount of OUR work. Specifically, it seems to be driving the hunt for Gardy as OUR focuses on places where a large number of children might be held together as chattel slaves for are available for sale to other chattel enslavers. In reality, the idea that this kind of Trafficking caused Gardy’s disappearance is an assumption, not one that seems to be backed by evidence that is particular to his case.
(I do want to note that one thing that OUR’s kind of work can be effective in doing is creating disincentives for other people in Haiti doing off-the-book adoptions and that’s worth doing. If Yvrose really did do illicit adoptions – and it looks like she did – this did need to be stopped whether she was involved with Gardy or not).
But here I want to zoom out a little bit more and ask the question, “Why does any of this matter?” Why does what we think about trafficking, and what we think trafficking is, matter in the big picture? After all, OUR, and Tim Ballard, aren’t the only people who assume that this – Trafficking – is the primary definition of what trafficking is and how it happens. This is true of all of us, and it’s heavily mediated through fictional or highly-fictional blockbusters like Taken and Sound of Freedom.
I think Americans are vulnerable to reading the word “trafficking” and exclusively hearing “the American cultural trafficking narrative.”
I don’t want to be stuck in a position of debating the merits or demerits of making a fictional movie, after all. There’s nothing wrong with making a movie that is lightly inspired by true events (The Exorcist is great, and who doesn’t love The Conjuring?). What I want to interrogate is the cultural understanding behind these movies: what we think trafficking is, and therefore what we think is effective at stopping it.
Sound of Freedom makes one narrative out of three stories: Operation Triple Take, Earl Buchanan’s child abuses, and the kidnapping of Gardy Mardy. Of the three, one (Buchanan) demonstrably did not involve international trafficking the way Americans generally understand it. A second (the kidnapping of Gardy Mardy) very likely did not. But all three stories have become the same story – one that Americans are culturally very familiar with.
Americans frequently make a distinction between Trafficking and trafficking. (See my Twitter if you don’t believe me). Let me break it down a little further and reframe the terminology I used in my last essay. So I can start sentences with the word “trafficking” and not confuse everyone, in this section I’m going to make a distinction between two different phenomena. The first is human trafficking, which according to DHS is “ the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labor or commercial sex act.” The UN definition includes all forms of bonded labor, all sexual exploitation of children in exchange for a good or service, the use of child soldiers, forced marriage, and organ theft. In other words, it’s a pretty broad term that refers to a lot of offenses – not all of which are committed against women and children.
The second is what I’m going to call “the American cultural trafficking narrative,” which emerges from popular media, social media, some misunderstood national awareness campaigns, and yes, conspiracy theories. This term is a little unwieldy but this is the best shorthand I have for it: namely that
a) trafficking is extremely common, maybe even the most common crime
b) you need to be constantly on the lookout for trafficking because if you look closely in places of transport or hospitality you can see it around you
c) trafficking is all about kidnapping and sexual exploitation, usually of children, and that trafficking starts when people are kidnapped
d) trafficking is the domain of incredibly powerful organizations with the power of Fortune 500 companies, not a personal ad-hoc crime between people who know each other, and
e) trafficking is basically analogous to selling any other good like clothes or shoes, except that it sells whole persons – it is not time or labor. (It doesn’t have to involve fringe elements like satanists and adrenochrome, but – sometimes it does).
I think Americans are vulnerable to reading the word “trafficking” and exclusively hearing “the American cultural trafficking narrative.” If we read that 300,000 children are vulnerable to trafficking, what we hear is “300,000 children are vulnerable to being kidnapped and sold as chattel slaves for sexual exploitation.”
What I want to argue is that while the American trafficking narrative dominates our consciousness, it’s actually an incredibly rare form of trafficking. We need to realize when we’re reading an article or a report about “trafficking,” the American trafficking narrative may not actually be what the article describes. In fact, the American trafficking narrative is usually not what the article describes.
This does not mean trafficking is not wrong, or is not a big deal, or does not happen. It simply means that if we’re going to understand and fight trafficking, we need to know what it actually is in order to make our communities safer.
Does the “American Trafficking Narrative” Form of Exploitation Happen? How Often?
Domestic Trafficking
Actual numbers of arrests are probably not nearly as high as you’d think. In 2019, HSI arrested 2,197 and recorded 428 victims of trafficking. Of course underreporting does happen in a number of cases that are particularly overrepresented among marginalization – for instance, RAINN estimates that only about 30-40% of rapes are reported to police in the US.
But the numbers for reported rape are still much, MUCH higher. In 2021, 144,300 forcible rapes were reported to police in the US. RAINN estimates only about 5 percent of rapes result in an arrest of the perpetrator. If trafficking crimes result in about the same arrest rate of perpetrators, then we’re still only looking about about 43,940 cases of trafficking in the US a year. (And remember –trafficking is a huge hot-button law enforcement issue, and trafficking busts bring substantial rewards for police forces. All things being equal, a police department that is getting earmarked funds for anti-trafficking work should have a higher arrest record for trafficking crimes relative to perpetrators in their area, not a significantly lower one).
For comparison, about 30,000 Americans die of flu every year, 50,000 Americans died as a result of gun violence last year, and about 100,000 die of drug overdoses every year. As far as prevalent danger goes, this looks like a danger between flu and gun violence, but substantially lower than drugs. Not nothing, but definitely not the most significant danger in American life.
But this is just a guess. The Polaris Project says that while they compile statistics from the Hotline, there actually is no good data of trafficking prevalence in North America and no official number (see 12:31 in the attached video). The National Human Trafficking Hotline received 51,073 tips last year, but more than one in four of them came from a “community member” or a person of an unclear relationship with the victim. Former director Caroline Diemar has said that many of the reports they get are simply suspicions that are never confirmed – “I saw a suspicious person at a store,” etc. So that’s about 38,000 tips from people with some kind of specific knowledge. In the unlikely event that every one of these is accurate and responding to separate incidents and represents a detected incident, we’re still talking about a problem between flu deaths and gun deaths. But again, this is just a guess. The number could be much higher (very few cases are detected) or lower (more people report suspicions than cases that occur).
Most of us, I think, have some awareness that some people are more likely to die of flu and gun violence than others. For instance, the very young and very old are much more vulnerable to flu deaths (at least, post-1918), and a significant number of gun deaths are suicides and domestic violence, so gun deaths tend to correlate with gun ownership. Surely the same thing would be true of trafficking, right?
Yes. The language of “it can happen to anyone” is a common refrain in anti-trafficking networks – and yes, it’s true, trafficking can happen to anyone. But. it might be more helpful to think of this in the same way that domestic violence and sexual assault can happen to anyone. Wealthy, white, college educated women in the United States absolutely are abused by domestic partners. However, like virtually all systemic injustice, some people are more vulnerable to it than others. This is because of the way trafficking works – not through ambush, but through recruitment and deception of vulnerable people.
For instance, Polaris Project notes that risk factors for trafficking among children involve substance abuse among caregivers, homelessness, involvement in the foster care system, and addiction. This is because of the way people often end up victims of trafficking – not through kidnapping, but through grooming and recruitment. Trafficking victims are almost always trafficked by family members, friends, or intimate partners. When you look at survivor stories on Polaris Project’s website, these stories hardly ever involve large groups of organized criminals or even extended periods of captivity – certainly not with other trafficking victims. Rather, children are sold ad-hoc by their parents, or girls by their boyfriends. Even more confusingly, in the United States, kids can be considered victims of trafficking even if no one has trafficked them. Any sex a minor has in exchange for goods and services – even if he or she acts independently of any pimp or manager– is considered trafficking.
And that’s just sex trafficking. Labor trafficking is even more subtle, often preying on those with disabilities, the undocumented, those dependent on their employees for visas, or even just patriarchy (having a wife who is not allowed to leave her home freely or manage her own money and is expected to tirelessly work as a domestic servant).
Trafficking hardly ever begins with kidnapping. It begins more or less the same way abusive relationships do – by making the victim dependent on the abuser emotionally or materially, by isolating them from their family and friends, and by maintaining control through surveillance, shows of anger, and violence. It also usually doesn’t involve large-scale movements where significant numbers of people are being held against their will – even though headlines may suggest that.
There have been two significant trafficking “busts” in the US recently that were reported as though they were raids on people holding others against their will in slavery. However, further investigation reveals a more complex reality.
Case Study: Trafficking Busts in the News
For example, in late 2018, detectives in South Florida started to stake out a massage parlor called Orchids, following a tip off from a local health inspector. The inspector had said that she had seen bedding, an unusual amount of food, and condoms in the facility during her last visit, and believed that the women there were being trafficked. On Jan 18, 2019, police entered the facility after telling the women working there that they had received a bomb threat. They evacuated the building, placed hidden cameras, and continued the stakeout – but now of the interior. The police then spent the next five days watching live footage of men receiving sexual services inside. This story would eventually become national news because one of the patrons was the supremely dim Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.
On February 19, 2019, police staged several raids on massage parlors throughout South Florida, including Orchids. The press conference framed the event as a massive strike against sex trafficking, in which women had been forced to have sex with 1,000 men a year, had been tricked into coming to the United States, and needed rescue. Newspapers uncritically repeated claims from police that the cops had freed women “trapped at the spas,” who had been forced to work for fourteen hours a day. The enslaved women had been sleeping on massage tables, and had been forbidden from leaving the property.
Can you guess where this is going?
Yeah, none of this is true. The women were sex workers – though, despite the reports that they were raped hundreds of times per year, they were never seen actually having penetrative sex with a customer. They worked long hours because they were poor. The madam, Mandy Zhang, hired her workers by placing ads in Mandarin and Cantonese newspapers around the country seeking women who were interested in moving to Florida. She didn’t make the women live on the property – and they didn’t. Mandy rented a condo for women who were planning to work in the spa only temporarily, and also as a location to provide childcare for employed mothers. Only one woman actually slept at the spa, Yong Wang, did so temporarily because her regular ride to and from work was sick. Lixia Zhu, several hours into questioning, invented a story about being forced by her boyfriend into trafficking, hoping to evade charges herself. Under oath, and with her lawyer present, Zhu affirmed she chose to go into sex work on her own. There was no trafficking, and the state’s case evaporated. They’d just found immigrants who worked long hours as sex workers to support themselves.
Mandy Zhang, co-owner of Orchids, was charged with 26 accounts of soliciting others to commit prostitution. In police affidavits, the victim of her crime is listed as “the state of Florida.”
You can think what Mandy does for a living is wrong. You can also think it’s sad that immigrant women can make more money as sex workers than they can in other fields. (If you have a better idea for how they should provide for themselves and their children, I’m all ears). But I still don’t think Mandy’s a trafficker. No one ever said that Mandy forced them to be there.
Another “busted ring” headline emerged from Georgia in 2020. Headlines reported that U.S. marshals found thirty-nine missing children. This was regurgitated on social media as a story of 39 missing children found in a double-wide trailer, accompanied with shock that this wasn’t a much bigger news story. The reality is actually far more complex. Operation Not Forgotten, the recovery story in question, was not specifically an anti-trafficking mission. It was a hunt for 78 “critically missing” children – children who law enforcement deemed it was critically important to find after they had been declared missing, because they were vulnerable to trafficking or parental abuse, or were endangered runaways, or because they had medical conditions (two were actually sought because they were suspects in homicide cases). Of the 78 children sought in Georgia, 65 were located. 26 of these cases were closed without recovering the children – which means the children had been located by another agency, such as CPS, or had returned home after being reported missing. 39 were “recovered” from dangerous situations – the streets, houses of friends, or parents who didn’t have custody. Only two were recovered together – this was not a “warehousing” situation.
Six of the children were confirmed as victims of sex trafficking – which is six too many. They were transferred to the Receiving Hope Center, a residential facility for trafficking survivors in Paulding, GA. 85% of the children are referred there for counseling by the juvenile justice system or by foster care programs. After ninety days on site, the children are usually returned to foster care. Rescue and intervention are important – but they’re only the tip of the spear of a much larger problem, and children remain vulnerable long after their rescue. As trafficking expert Erin Albright said of the children, “A year from now the U.S. Marshals could do this again and pick up the same 39 kids.”
Some of you will write off these kids – the ones who routinely return to trafficking as an alternative to their foster homes or abusive family situations – ans “not the actual victims.” As I have written this series, so many people have written to assure me these victims – of labor trafficking or in-family exploitation – are not the “real victims.” The “real victims in the US” are the ones who were kidnapped! It happens every day!
But does it?
Kidnapping: How Often Does It Happen in the US?
A number you often see thrown around in these cases is that “400,000 children go missing in the US every year.” That’s actually not accurate. That’s about the number of times a report of a missing child is made every year in the U.S. (359,094 in 2022). But this is not the same number as kids who disappear – only the number of reports (if it was accurate, this would mean that of every 200 children, one disappears every year. The nearest middle school to my house serves about 600 students, so if this was accurate, we would expect three students from that school to disappear every year. This is clearly not the case, and is likely not the case at the school your child goes to, either).
Every time a child goes missing, a different report is filed. This means that the same child is often reported several times – and this happens a lot, mostly because of the nature of how children go missing. Of the cases that NCMEC assisted in last year, 91% were runaways – overwhelmingly from foster homes. Another 4% were family abductions. Less than .3% were stranger abductions. In situations in which a child is running away from an abusive family or foster care situation multiple times, or a parent is not complying with custodial arrangements, this means the same child can be represented in the reporting data multiple times.
This is not to say that children running away is not a big deal. It’s a huge deal. These children are incredibly vulnerable to abuse – and, as we’ve noted, they’re extremely vulnerable to trafficking. But what they aren’t is evidence of stranger abductions. In the United States, there are only about 115 stranger abductions a year (NCMEC reported 98 the same year).
The good news is, most of these cases are resolved. The Polly Klaas foundation reports that 97% of missing cases they handle annually end with the successful recovery of the child. NCMEC’s clearance rate is 88%. This doesn’t mean that family abductions or runaway kids don’t matter – these are hugely traumatic events. But it does mean that nothing like 400,000 kids vanish every year.
The risk factors for going missing are roughly the same as those of being trafficked – unstable housing, abuse, poverty, and foster care. These are the populations of children who should command our attention as a society – and they need a lot of help and long-term assistance to be protected.
International Trafficking
In the global sphere, studying human trafficking – or even measuring it – becomes incredibly complicated for a range of reasons. We’ve already said that trafficking prevalence data for North America doesn’t really exist – but it definitely doesn’t exist for the rest of the world, either. Data collections from arrest and police reports are often unreliable, since different nations define the crime of trafficking in different ways, and because trafficking in the majority world is often difficult to police. It might even be ignored and tolerated by local officials, or even sponsored by the state. Because of this, even among reputable organizations, numbers of trafficking victims, or breakdowns of victims into kinds of trafficking (remember: trafficking is an umbrella term that includes a variety of offenses, including forced labor, bonded labor, wage theft, sexual exploitation, child soldiers, illicit adoption, and forced marriage) vary substantially from one organization to another.
For example, the International Labor Organization estimates that in 2016 there were 24.9 million victims of trafficking, between 20.1 million victims of labor trafficking and 4.8 million victims of sex trafficking. Their 2021 report ballooned to 49.6 million, including estimates of forced marriage and increased estimates of forced labor in the private sector. However, the 2022 UN Global Trafficking Report actually found similar numbers for sex trafficking and labor trafficking, with 53,800 identified victims a year (though of course identified victims are not assumed to be the total number of victims in a year. The Counter Trafficking Data Collaborative works to measure the phenomenon based on victim testimony – which is probably as good a start as any. Their data sets from 2005-2022 depend on the documentation of 17,000 global victims in 123 countries, plus 37,000 perpetrators.
Trafficking on the global scale looks different than it does in the US. In the majority world, state-sponsored trafficking and trafficking carried out by organized crime/paramilitary organizations is far more prevalent than it is in the United States. Likewise, incidences of forcible capture and imprisonment seem to correlate primarily with war zones, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan, and recently Ukraine.
A majority of human trafficking is domestic – in 2020, about 60% of victims were trafficked within national borders. Sub-Saharan trafficking victims are the most likely group to be found across national borders, followed by South and East Asian victims. Even across national borders, though, most trafficking is regional, not cross continental. Only 16% percent of victims are trafficked outside their own region or neighboring regions – and very few of them end up in the United States (in other words, US border policy probably isn’t an effective anti-trafficking measure).
It’s still true that many cases involve some element of deception (a person is told they will have a different job than sex work), grooming (a person is persuaded/deceived into sex work by an exploitative person), or family involvement. For instance, 40% of people convicted of trafficking globally in 2020 were women, largely because of the prevalence of active recruitment – not abduction. Transport hubs in large cities are also commonly reported “hot zones,” not because of kidnapping but because of recruitment – migrants arrive in cities looking for work and relief from unemployment, and are deceived by labor traffickers. Male victims of labor trafficking also report high incidents of alcohol abuse and drug abuse – even supplied by traffickers to keep them compliant.
All this is to say: individuals are exploited for sex trafficking and labor trafficking in significant, horrible numbers all over the world. Victims of war and refugees are subject to capture and enslavement in some regions. Preventing this form of trafficking is about as easy as preventing regional instability and violence – in other words, it’s really hard and we’re bad at it. But on the whole, people become victims of trafficking abroad for the same reasons they become victims in the United States – because they’re poor, or they lack economic opportunity, or because they’re marginalized, or because they trusted the wrong person. This makes the “rescue” narrative of fighting trafficking – locating the victims of trafficking and essentially letting them out – incredibly complicated. Trafficking survivors need opportunities and chances for independent survival in order to escape their predicaments. They need rights, and social services, and to be part of a community that values and protects them. Women and children in particular need freedom and self actualization to not be married against their wills, and protection from parents who think they have a right to sell women in their household.
This is systematic work. That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. It just means it’s impossible to do apart from development work. And given that 41% of identified trafficking victims leave on their own, we might need to redefine what “rescuing” means.
Why Should You Care?
So what have we learned? What does all this tell us about the gap between trafficking as it occurs in the world, as opposed to the narrative that Americans consume through popular culture?
You might say that the gap between public narrative and reality doesn’t matter – either way, trafficking is bad and people should be more aware of it. But what are we actually becoming aware of? And what does it inspire us to do?
If we don’t understand trafficking, then being more aware of – or more concerned – about trafficking doesn’t actually help. If we don’t know what it looks like, how it happens, or who it happens to, then being more aware of it is simply being more aware of our own misunderstandings. And if we don’t understand trafficking and how it happens, we certainly can’t stop it – and our interventions actually may do harm instead of the good we wish to do.
Let’s break this down into a series of myths that are harmful to believe, and the truth that can resist them.
Myth 1: White, suburban, middle-class American women and children are especially vulnerable to being kidnapped and trafficked.
Why this is false/harmful to believe:
As we have noted, people who are vulnerable to trafficking are often poor, displaced, marginalized, and without stable family situations. This makes them vulnerable to recruiters. Furthermore, as we have also discussed, stranger kidnappings are incredibly rare. You’ve probably heard or seen people on social media saying that they saw evidence of trafficking in a grocery store or parking lot (ie, zip ties on cars, or someone they don’t know approaching them at a bus stop, or abandoned car seats, etc.), expressing fear that they or their children, or other people like them, were very nearly kidnapped and sold. However, these stories – which center stranger abductions from middle-class neighborhoods – reflect a misunderstanding of how trafficking happens and how we can actually keep our community members safe
I want to acknowledge that people absolutely are creepy to women and feel entitled to their attention in public – being approached by strangers in parks or on buses is upsetting and absolutely can devolve into frightening experiences of harassment. This is horrible and if this has happened to you, I’m absolutely sorry this happened. They might not have been traffickers, but what they did was wrong, and you have a right to make a scene, call for help, and demand someone leaves you alone. Encourage your kids to do the same.
But – this is not evidence of trafficking. As we noted above, trafficking rarely starts with kidnapping, and recruiters are rarely unknown to their victims. As Megan Cutter with Polaris notes, focusing on stranger danger distracts from the real ways that trafficking happens and how we can keep our communities safe.
If all our attention is on the possibility of flyers on our cars or men in the diaper aisle, we might be too focused on ourselves to think about actual vulnerable people in our neighborhoods. How many kids are in foster care in our cities? How can we help them? Instead of using our social media platforms to publicize incidents of suspicion or anxiety in public (unless of course there’s an obvious danger – if someone harasses you in public, feel free to put him on blast), what if we drew attention to the work that domestic violence shelters or recovery houses are doing in our neighborhoods, and encouraged people to give their time and money? Or got involved with labor organizing to fight wage theft and unsafe working conditions? This would actually take a decisive step against the victimization of our neighbors.
Fear of stranger abduction and the belief that it is prevalent also contributes towards the tendency to police hands-off parenting. Unfortunately, parents who let their children walk home from stores, walk their pets, or allow them really any rational amount of independence are increasingly vulnerable to police action. Fear of “child snatchers” is often invoked as reasons why children shouldn’t be unsupervised, but this fear is incredibly overblown relative to the data. Unfortunately, in the above examples parents who let their children walk to the park alone did have their children taken – by CPS.
We also just don’t want people to live under a burden of anxiety they don’t need to. We already ask too much of moms in the US – asking them to do one more thing isn’t fair. Going to Starbucks and worrying someone will take your kids if you turn your back for a second is no fun. You know your neighborhood better than anyone, and not everyone’s neighborhood is safe. But of all the things that can happen to your ten-year-old, stranger abduction is among the rarest.
Myth 2: I need to be on the lookout for trafficking.
Why this is false/harmful to believe:
As we’ve argued, sex trafficking depends on deception, grooming, and recruitment. It is a highly personal, ad-hoc crime. Because of this, the odds that you will be able to spot a stranger who is a trafficking victim – as opposed to a friend or relative – is incredibly low. However, this doesn’t stop people from sounding the alarm on people in public who they think might be trafficking someone – relying on a “gut feeling” that something is out of order.
The problem is that people’s gut feelings are prone to internal biases, and what we think of as “suspicious” or “unusual” might just be internalized racism, misogyny, or homophobia. You might think it’s odd for a man to be in a store with two kids, or for two men to be pushing a stroller, or for an Asian woman to be traveling with a white baby. But this might just owe to your personal biases – the belief that women, not men are primary caretakers of kids, or that two men cannot be parents together, or that nuclear families all share the same ethnicity.
Policing people for being “suspicious” can run the risk of legitimizing the practice of harassing people who strike us as being “inappropriate” or “out of place.” If we encourage people to police people who seem to them “suspicious” (“if you see something, say something”), people’s biases will heavily steer them towards what they already think of as “suspicious.” This is particularly true in the case of accusations of people of color.
A particularly well-known incident of this occurred when Cindy McCain mistakenly believed she had stopped an incident of human trafficking when she called the police on an interracial family simply traveling in an airport together. But this is not an isolated event. Frontier Airlines detained Peter DelVecchia for suspected trafficking when he was traveling with his adopted son. DelVecchia is white, but his twelve-year-old son is Black. And Southwest Airlines called the police on white mother Mary McCarthy who was traveling with her interracial child.
In a country with a long history of racism and miscegenation laws, it’s not surprising that there are still people who, even on an unconscious level, find something surprising or destabilizing about parents and kids of different races. But this doesn’t mean that this is suspicious, or that interracial families should be subject to regular police interrogations about whether or not their families are legitimate.
But this problem isn’t even limited to interracial families. The idea that traffickers are seeking children in public spaces, combined with suspicions of racial minorities, also creates contexts where suspicious parents have broad social permission to harass people of color simply existing in public. In 2020, Petaluma Instagram influencer Katie Sorenson went to a local police department saying that two Hispanic people had been behaving suspiciously towards her and her children in a local Michaels, asking them to make a public notice about local traffickers. When the police investigated and found no evidence of a crime, Sorenson made a two-part video herself, now saying that the Hispanic couple had attempted to take her stroller and returned to the police, no longer asking for a public notice but for the couple to be prosecuted. Police began the search for grandparents Eddie and Sadie Martinez (it’s worth noting that in addition to being people of color, Eddie was wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt), only to conclude that the Martinez family did not interact with the Sorensons at all, certainly did not attempt to grab the stroller, and were there to do their Christmas decorating.
Sorenson’s motives here were probably more complex than simple paranoia – the fact that her story changed from the first report to the second and her promotion of her story on Instagram certainly hint that Sorenson saw “surviving a trafficking attempt” as a way to boost her followers. But POCs deserve to be able to shop, parent, and travel without suspicious attention on them – even from those with more misguided and less mercenary motives.
We don’t need to police interracial families or POCs. The idea that this is an effective intervention rests on the idea that, if we spot an unusual adult and child together in public, police can arrive at the scene, see that the adult and child are not related, and then return the child to their actual parents. But this still assumes that when children are trafficked, they’re trafficked at the hands of strangers, not parents. Evidence that an adult and child are not related is not evidence that a child is being trafficked – and, of course, an adult and child can be different ethnicities and still be related, either by birth or adoption.
Instead of looking out for people who seem “odd,” be on the lookout for injustices in your area. What’s your city’s unhoused population, and what civic solutions have been attempted to help? How are the food banks doing in your area? Are the kids in your school system reading at grade level? Who in your workplace, church, or neighborhood is struggling with medical debt? Could your church or PTO do more to help people with these needs? Is your state on the list of those that have recently allowed for more legalized child labor, and if so, have you told your representatives how wrong this is? I realize I’m putting a real microscope on myself here, so I am by no means trying to hold myself up as an example. But these would do more to help our neighbors who are vulnerable to exploitation than calling the police when we see Hispanic people at Michaels.
Myth 3: Trafficking occurs when women and children are kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery.
Why this is false/harmful to believe:
Trafficking does not often involve kidnapping and doesn’t even always involve sexual exploitation. Trafficking is a systematic problem that often depends on deceiving and recruiting the most victimized and marginalized people in a society – people who, without building our awareness and consciousness, we’re not always primed to empathize with. These can include juvenile offenders, kids from broken families, and addicts.
Trafficking does not need to involve the use of force, kidnapping, or restraint to occur. For example, Kyra Doubek, the executive director of Washington Trafficking Prevention, is herself a survivor of trafficking. She was manipulated by a series of boyfriends (some of whom were online!) into doing sex work for their profit. Doubek was not kidnapped or physically forced; she was vulnerable to abusive relationships because of her extensive trauma as a survivor of childhood abuse, including sexual abuse. Only after she received care did she realize she was trafficked. Her traffickers were never charged or convicted – but she was.
This was also true of Canadian survivor and advocate Karly Church, who at age 15 was already heavily involved in sex work to support her drug addiction. When she was an adult, her boyfriend, a drug dealer, made her financially dependent on him, and began to sell her to others for money.
These are the stories of victimization most people who work with trafficking survivors actually hear. These are real stories, involving real people, who were hurt while they were in a place of brokenness and pain and even believed they were consenting. This is so often what trafficking actually looks like. But would the American public hear these stories as trafficking? How many of us would hear about a woman on her way to a sex buyer, only to crash into a police car, and hear the story of someone we can help – not someone we can care for?
This is important to note so that we are not vulnerable to fixating on “perfect victims” at the expense of others. These women did not deserve what happened to them any more than they would have if they were kidnapped. Victim blaming is an incredibly common phenomenon among victims of sex crimes, and we need to make sure we’re not doing that. A child who is sold to a brothel by her parents at age 14 does not deserve any more – or less – help than a sixteen-year-old who is pimped by her boyfriend because they are both addicted to meth. Trafficking that involves kidnapping and sexual slavery is not the realm of “real victimization,” as opposed to other forms. People do not need to be perfect to deserve help. Minors who struggle with addiction or juvenile delinquency are more vulnerable to harm – and yet they’re the kinds of kids who often get the least sympathy and attention.
Trafficking also occurs in the context of beliefs or systems that, if we’re honest, we’re reluctant to part with. Most of us don’t want to buy children but all of us want to buy lettuce and iPhones. But corporations that deal in manufacturing and agriculture often do engage in labor trafficking and other exploitative labor practices. We might not want to change our shopping habits to focus on more local and ethical delivery systems. But if we’re serious about trafficking, we should.
Trafficking might also flourish in the midst of systems that we might think of as benevolent or protective, such as patriarchy. But men feeling entitled to women around them is impossible to separate from systems like sexual violence and forced marriage. A world without trafficking is a world with women’s rights, where women have access to education, meaningful work, and their own finances.
Myth 4: We can stop trafficking by arresting “bad guys,” freeing kids, and closing the border so no more children can be shipped here.
Why this is false/harmful to believe:
The belief that trafficking happens to merchandised, kidnapped people leads to the support of bad ideas to stop trafficking. As we discussed above, one of those bad ideas is calling the police every time you see unsupervised kids, or people who strike you as “creepy.” Often this is just harassing parents for legitimate parenting choices, or policing families that aren’t ethnically uniform.
But this results in bad policy ideas, too. Tim Ballard (who actually worked for the Trump administration) has repeatedly said that having a closed border would help fight trafficking because fewer children would be smuggled across the US border. He has used both “Liliana” and “Jose” as examples of this. However, as we have argued, neither of these people were kidnapped and shipped to the United States. In fact, in Liliana’s case, fear of being deported by aggressive border control actually kept her in a trafficking situation even longer.
Another is policies that fail to distinguish between sex workers and sex slaves. In the raid on Orchids (which resulted in Robert Kraft’s arrest, discussed above), the only people who ended up in jail weren’t wealthy, high powered pimps or sadistic johns. They were poor women who made a living as sex workers. But Mandy was arrested for trafficking anyway.
If you don’t understand trafficking, then you don’t understand what would help prevent it. Instead, we back policies that either do nothing to help vulnerable people, or put them further in harm’s way (if the women at Orchids couldn’t make a decent living outside of sex work before they were charged for prostitution, what do you think their prospects are like now?). Taking people’s children for non-supervision, and putting them in foster care, makes them more vulnerable to trafficking – not less. Vigorously pursuing and arresting people who are in the U.S. illegally makes it harder for undocumented women who are trafficked to help – not less. Bad understanding leads to bad ideas.
Myth 5: Once someone has been “saved” from sex work, they may need some therapy, but the rest is up to them.
Why this is false/harmful to believe:
If the box office numbers from Taken and Sound of Freedom are any indication, Americans really love stories where sex trafficking is solved by rescue – punching bad guy, snatching damsel, returning to normal. After this, the saved woman or child reenters public life. The victim’s primary problem is captivity. It’s not poverty, patriarchy, immigration policy,
This is harmful to believe because the work of helping people escape exploitation is ongoing, difficult, and circuitous – it’s not a moment of rescue.
There’s a remarkable moment in Operation Underground Railroad’s reality TV series The Abolitionists when the crew sees a teenager walking the street as a sex worker who they actually “rescued” just last year. When the group gets out of the car and asks her to come with them, she says no. In a later interview, she says her problems started after she was “rescued,” not before. Clearly, arresting her pimp didn’t actually start a new life for this teenager. If she’s going to get out of sex work, she needs a lot more.
As survivor Kendall Alaimo can tell you, exiting trafficking is only the first step. People need education and work opportunities to keep themselves from returning to the work that is sometimes the only work experience they have. They need to go to school, or college. They may need extended medical care to recover from their trauma – and someone needs to pay for that.
Trafficking comes from poverty. It comes from need, and desperation, and marginalization. American audiences love the image of breaking chains and freeing children from a paddock – but where do they go next? Where can they go next? As we saw with the children freed from trafficking in Georgia in the above example, a lot of the children simply went back into foster care – where they remain as vulnerable as they were before.
Myth 6: Something bad will happen if we as a culture are not really worried about the sex trafficking of kidnapped children
“Do you really want to be the person who asks about trafficking numbers?”
The idea that someone is doing something dangerous or harmful – or even has impure motives – for pushing back against sex trafficking narratives appears to be a pretty pervasive one, if my Twitter is anything to go by. I think this comes out of two things: the belief that awareness solves problems, and from magical thinking that relates to prolonged experiences of anxiety.
Here’s what I mean.
Concerning the language of awareness: the popular narrative pushed from things like “awareness months” or “days” is that the way a social problem is solved is by more people thinking about and talking about something as though it’s a really big problem.
You definitely need to be aware of a problem to fix it. But “awareness” in common parlance often is just synonymous with “anxiety.” At its best awareness is actionable knowledge – which I’ve strenuously tried to give you adobe. But if you look at the landscape of “trafficking awareness” a lot of laypeople treat accuracy of information as though it’s a red herring. This is because, in some contexts, “awareness” has been detached from the idea of “knowledge" and has now become “interest, attention, and concern.” If you believe this kind of awareness (interest, attention, and concern – not necessarily knowledge or action) is necessary to fight a social problem, mythbusting is at best superfluous, and at worst disastrous. This creates the perception that non-awareness is where problems come from. Therefore, anything that creates more awareness (inflated stats, public campaigns, movies, anxiety, social media) about human trafficking fights it. Conversely, anything that diminishes anxiety, interest, and attention – correcting myths, challenging narratives, revisiting police reports – is essentially seen causing human trafficking. Fact checkers are against awareness! They’re pro-trafficking!
But that’s not true. Knowledge of a thing as it actually exists is essential to solving a problem. Awareness of a concept itself is not helpful. People do not become more aware of measles if they talk about measles frequently as a waterborne illness caused by exposure to dogs. They become aware by (ah shoot here comes another can of worms) knowing about the dangers and how it spreads, and why they should get the MMR.
Second, magical thinking. By magical thinking I mean an experience that’s common to a lot of people who struggle with anxiety – myself included. This isn’t supernatural thinking, but instead refers to the idea that your feelings – particularly negative ones, like anger and anxiety – are themselves productive experiences. If you are worried about something, then you are doing something about it.
But this means that someone trying to intervene in your anxiety can feel dangerous, or even harmful. If you’ve ever snapped at your therapist (hi James, I’m sorry, you’re actually great), you might have been experiencing something like this. Someone who comes along and wants to fact-check the things you’re worried about is interrupting your experience of productivity. You feel like your negative feelings are solving a huge social problem, and you don’t want someone to stop you.
I think people’s motives around this behavior are often very well intended. But we need to be clear on the fact that information can help ourselves and our community – more than fear and anxiety ever could. We can act to stop exploitation in a way that doesn’t hurt our neighbors. But it starts with the truth and right thinking.
Conclusion: On OUR and Sound of Freedom
It’s okay to watch a movie and be moved by it. But if you saw Sound of Freedom last week, and now feel newly invested to help prevent child exploitation: the exact wrong way to respond is with misinformation. It’s okay to love a movie. It’s not okay to hurt people around you or neglect real ways to help because you want to believe that the story you saw is true, and happening in your neighborhood.
After hours and hours reading OUR materials and watching their footage, I’m dubious of a lot of OUR’s claims and of the usefulness of their intervention style. What I’m not dubious about is the need to help vulnerable people in our community and the world. If you want to help, there are a thousand ways you can volunteer and give in your own communities – please share in the comments about how you do this or plan to do this going forward! If you want to help globally, consider giving to organizations like IJM, which works on systematic trafficking prevention efforts. Or do what I do, and sponsor a child through World Vision development programs, which aim to transform communities from the ground up. We can all be more involved and give more to make the world safer for women, children, and the poor. Every one of us has something to give – either locally, or on the world stage.
But as far as liking a movie goes?
I dunno. I preferred Oppenheimer.