Trafficking & the Dangers of the Rescue Narrative

The movie Sound of Freedom has created quite a stir, and a lot of you have been asking me if I'm going to comment on it. I've been reluctant to do so, primarily because I have not seen it and I don't plan to. But I do recognize that there  comes a time when doing the work means having uncomfortable conversations and speaking truth when it is absent or distorted.

What I will not be talking about is the person and organization on whom the film is based and all of the controversy around that (you have your friend Google to look into all of that.)

What I do want to talk about is why sensationalized rescue narratives in the anti-trafficking movement are so problematic.

What trafficking is:

We should just pause right here and answer the question: What is sex trafficking?

Sex trafficking is the exploitation of a person for a commercial sexual act by the use of force, fraud, or coercion.

Does it always involve kidnapping and abduction? Absolutely not. In fact, that is the minority of situations. I've heard estimates as low as 3% of cases involving kidnapping and abduction. Far more often what we see is first of all, victims knowing their traffickers are being acquainted with their traffickers. And the other thing we see far more frequently is traffickers using psychological manipulation and trickery in order to traffic people.

For example, often traffickers will pose as a potential love interest in order to gain trust with the victim and ultimately be able to exploit them and traffic them. The other thing that we see is traffickers using promises of job opportunities or financial, kind of success in order to manipulate victims.

Does kidnapping and abduction happen? Absolutely, but it is far less common and yet it is one of the most common scenarios portrayed in the media, especially when it comes to these sensationalized rescue narratives.

 So now that we've cleared that up, lets get back to it… 

The Good

There are a lot of conversations happening about trafficking, which I would say probably is the good that has come of the film, even according to critics.

Trafficking is real.  

The Bad

The movie centers around a hero rescuing children from trafficking rings. As a response to this movie, and many other sensationalized ministries around this topic, I’ve heard statements like, “I want to start an organization to ‘rescue’ people from trafficking.”

I personally don't think that the word “rescue” has much of a place in the anti-trafficking movement at all.

Now, I don’t mean to get caught up in semantics here. This is not about being politically correct.  But as a survivor of exploitation and the founder of an organization that provides outreach and recovery services to women who have experienced exploitation and trafficking, I'll tell you who the sensationalized rescue narratives benefit and who it doesn't.

Who it benefits: The people and organizations who are perpetuating them. It turns heads, it gets attention, as we've seen, it quite frankly, raises money. People like a good sensationalized rescue narrative. 

Who it doesn't benefit?: Survivors of trafficking. 

And here's why…

  1. Sensationalized rescue narratives perpetuate “white horse fantasies.”

    This idea that people can just bust down doors, throw a survivor over their shoulder and hop on their horse with their cape waving in the wind right off into the sunset and call themselves a hero and now suddenly this victim is free and will live happily ever after.

    Anyone who has spent five minutes truly doing the work of anti-trafficking and truly providing any kind of aftercare or recovery services knows that is absolutely not what it looks like.

    Even in those situations where there is a sting or some kind of situation where quite immediately people who are experiencing trafficked, trafficking are pulled out of those situations, without effective, comprehensive, trauma-informed aftercare, many of these people go right back. There are so many layers and to that and so many reasons the trauma bonds that are created with traffickers Just the psychological manipulation that goes into brainwashing someone to traffic them. If you're interested in learning more, here are some resources:

    + Very Young Girls film
    + Department of Homeland Security: What Is Human Trafficking?
    + National Human Trafficking Hotline: What Human Trafficking Is, and Isn’t
    + Emergency Resources
    + Treasures Training

  2. It creates a power imbalance that is incredibly disempowering to the person who's experienced trafficking.

    The second reason is connected to the first. It’s this idea that the allies, service providers, whomever provided a way out, are rescuers, while the survivors themselves are the poor little victims that are being rescued.


    In 20 years of providing recovery services to people who've experienced exploitation and trafficking, I'm here to tell you that they are some of the bravest, most courageous, most resilient humans you have ever met in your life.

    When a person is able to find permanent freedom from trafficking– permanent freedom from trafficking, not freedom for an hour a day, but permanent freedom – it takes so much fight. It takes so much grit. So much bravery. 

    I would never want to undermine or take away from the fact that's all them. They did that work. That moment of escaping is just the very first step and moment in a long journey of recovery. 

    Just on Friday we got a call from a person who had been trafficked to Los Angeles and she wanted to escape. Myself and a partnering organization, FCI, we worked together. We were able to verify a safe place and get her on a plane, back to her family. From there, we are offering her recovery services as well. 

    But we didn't rescue her. 

    We gave her an opportunity. We provided a pathway. We gave her some resources that she didn't have before…

    …but we didn't rescue her. At the end of the day, she is going to have to do that hard work to stay free.

  3. These narratives don’t accurately reflect what the majority of trafficking looks like


    What is problematic about these sensationalized rescue narratives is the fact that true survivors of trafficking are not going to see themselves in those narratives. They're not going to see themselves in those stories because they don't really accurately reflect the majority of what trafficking looks like. 

    A movie that I highly recommend if you want to learn more about what trafficking looks like domestically is a film called Very Young Girls that was put out by GEMS. Rachel Lloyd, the founder of GEMS, is a survivor herself. When the film first came out, we screened it at Treasures and invited our leadership team, a lot of whom are also survivors and had worked in the commercial sex industry. When the film was over, we all sat there and processed. For the first time, the light bulb for many of the women there went on as they realized that they too had been trafficked.

    That happened because they saw an accurate depiction of what trafficking often looks like. They saw themselves in those stories and they saw themselves in that film. And that's another reason why it is so important that we are portraying very accurate depictions of trafficking. So the survivors themselves can see themselves in the story,  identify, and hopefully get the help in the support that they need.

Those are my thoughts and the extent that I want to talk about this movie and its repercussions.  Hopefully they have been helpful to someone. And if you would like to learn more or get more involved, then I encourage you to check out the resources that we've linked in this blog.

-Harmony





Harmony Dust