Victims, Villains, and Valiant Rescuers: Unpacking Sociolegal Constructions of Human Trafficking and Crimmigration in Popular Culture
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015
Maria João Guia (ed.)The Illegal Business of Human Trafficking10.1007/978-3-319-09441-0_77. Victims, Villains, and Valiant Rescuers: Unpacking Sociolegal Constructions of Human Trafficking and Crimmigration in Popular Culture
(1)
Department of Justice Studies, San José State University, San José, CA, USA
Abstract
Increasing media attention to human trafficking in the U.S. has expanded awareness of the issue and mobilised campaigns for new anti-trafficking laws aimed to rescue victims and punish those who exploit them. This chapter analyses the sociolegal construction of the subjects of this narrative: victims, villains, and valiant rescuers. Drawing on investigative journalism, television shows, and movies that depict the “war against human trafficking”, I examine the framing of “trafficking” through narratives of crime, sexual risk, and crimmigration. The dual role of law as an instrument for vindicating victims and policing the risks posed by trafficking reflects the influence of “governing through crime” politics and “carceral feminism” in American anti-trafficking efforts. The sociolegal construction of trafficking subjects in American popular culture reveals the important influence of public frames processes in developing the criminal justice response to trafficking that typifies American responses to the problem.
7.1 Introduction
Human trafficking re-emerged as a hot topic in the U.S. media in the 2000s. Although men, women, and children are trafficked into a variety of sectors, “sex trafficking” has dominated both political discourse and popular representations of the problem. Those sensationalistic representations are typified by narratives of captivity, sexual violence, and criminality. Spurred by stories of innocent women and children trafficked by ruthless gangs of foreign criminals and exploited as “sex slaves” by pimps and sadistic “johns”, a “new abolitionist” movement has forged an unusual alliance between the Left and the Right: activists, politicians, and celebrities of varying political convictions have joined forces to combat human trafficking (Chapkis 2003; Berman 2006; Bernstein 2010). Almost always, such efforts call for increased mobilisation of criminal justice institutions to rescue innocent victims and punish the criminals who exploit them.
Public conceptions of human trafficking as “modern-day slavery” are shaped by a spate of documentaries, exposés by investigative journalists, television crime dramas, and feature films that reveal this “hidden crime” to the viewer. Popular knowledge of trafficking does not come only, or even primarily, from official reports. Most pop culture portrayals of human trafficking focus on its sexualised dimensions. The sexualised depictions of trafficking in the popular media help construct popular and political understandings of the phenomenon. Media representations of trafficking not only (re)produce “narrative conventions and rhetorical tropes commonly used to depict sex trafficking” but also “[establish] methods for gathering facts and arriving at conclusions about prostitution and sex slavery” (Soderlund 2011, p. 193). Moreover, the constitutive relationship between law and society suggests that media portrayals of trafficking both reflect and inform anti-trafficking enforcement efforts and can shape “law in action”. Indeed, media attention to trafficking stimulates public calls for government officials and law enforcement to address trafficking and prostitution.
This chapter examines how popular representations of human trafficking operate to construct the legal subjects of anti-trafficking campaigns and to promote a law-and-order response to the issue. Using three case studies, I illustrate how journalistic exposés and “crime dramas” construct sex trafficking as “an object of humanitarian action, law enforcement intervention, and human rights policy”, shaping both public understanding and official responses to the issue (Soderlund 2011, p. 193). First, I explore the role of investigative journalism in anti-trafficking using as an example of such journalism Landesman’s (2004) New York Times Magazine article “The Girls Next Door”. That article illustrates the blurry line between fact, fiction, and infotainment in investigative reports about trafficking in the U.S. Next, I examine the 2008 Hollywood thriller Taken, starring Liam Neeson, an ex-CIA operative whose extralegal quest to rescue his kidnapped daughter from Eastern European sex traffickers reveals a web of foreign corruption, crime, and moral decay. Finally, I evaluate the 2005 Lifetime Television cable miniseries Human Trafficking to explore this example of direct collaboration between media, advocacy organisations, and government agencies in efforts to raise awareness of trafficking and illustrate the role of the police and immigration officials in anti-trafficking crackdowns. The miniseries captures the tough-on-crime and anti-prostitution politics that dominated American anti-trafficking campaigns in the mid-2000s.
In each of these three depictions of trafficking, trafficking is framed as an imminent danger comprised of migrant criminality and ubiquitous sexual exploitation, to which only aggressive law enforcement tactics can respond effectively. The representation of trafficking as a “crimmigration” issue in popular culture demonstrates the important effect of media on legal consciousness, as media portrayals of crime and justice shape not only beliefs about trafficking but also practices of legal institutions responding to trafficking.
7.2 Theoretical Framework
7.2.1 Legal Consciousness: Popular Representations of Crime and Trafficking
Public conceptions of law, justice, and rights are shaped by formal and informal legal institutions. As most people lack a formal legal education, “legal consciousness” and understanding of the legal system primarily come not from knowledge about courts or major cases but from diffuse sources, including popular culture and day-to-day social interactions (Ewick and Silbey 1998). This constitutive theory of law, whereby law both constitutes and is constituted by social relations and cultural practices, enables scholars of law and society to assess how “[l]aw enters social practices and is, indeed, imbricated in them, by shaping consciousness, by making law’s concepts and commands seem, if not invisible, then perfectly natural and benign” (Sarat and Kearns 1995, p. 31).
Portrayals of law in films represent “not only a valid source of information on popular attitudes toward law but also a form of legal discourse, a constituent of law itself” (Rafter 2007, p. 229). Examples of the impact of popular culture on legal consciousness abound. For example, “tort tales”, TV judge shows, and crime dramas have figured prominently in debates about legal issues (Haltom and McCann 2004; Elkins 2007; Wilson and Ackerman 2012; Tyler 2006). Depictions of crime shape the social construction of criminality and legality (Mason 2003). Consequently, cultural criminologists have proven that media representations of crime—particularly emotionally charged crimes such as sexual violence—affect people’s attitudes and assessments about actual crimes (Young 2008; Kovera 2002).
The dramatisation of crime in news, television shows, and films employs simplified narratives populated by simplified characters: criminals, victims, hero/heroine cops, corrupt officials, forensic experts, adversarial prosecutors, and amoral defence attorneys. Cultural images of crime are popular because they offer “a set of stories which address certain social anxieties in its audience” and are able “to render the messy and troubling complexities of law enforcement pleasurable by assigning them to the ancient simplicities of crime and punishment” (Sparks 1990, p. 123). Indeed, the standard moral pattern of “violation, discovery, punishment, and resolution” in conventional Hollywood crime films (Rafter 2006, p. 74) offers viewers the “dual satisfaction of vicariously partaking in transgression while providing reassurance that in the end order and the status quo will be restored” (Kohm and Greenhill 2011, p. 201).
Significantly, mass media studies have found that people tend to confuse different forms of media, such as entertainment, news, and commercials (Shrum 2003). As Tyler observes, “fictional depictions of crime and the criminal justice process can and do spill over to shape public views about the nature of crime and criminals”, as people fail to “discount fictional dramatizations of crime when making legal judgments” (Tyler 2006, p. 1062; Doyle 2003). Although some individuals may have direct experience with the criminal justice system, such knowledge is supplemented and contextualised with information from popular media. Indeed, studies show that mass media reports about crime rates are linked to fear of crime (Heath and Gilbert 1996) and perceptions of the seriousness of crime (Iyengar and Kinder 2010).
The prominence of crime in newspapers, television, and films reflects the fact that crime has emerged as an organising problem in both contemporary politics and public life more generally. In our “risk society”, fear of crime and the drive to respond to social problems through punitive, law-and-order solutions reveal a new form of “governing through crime” (Simon 2007). This dynamic posits the ideal citizen as a (potential) crime victim, as crime can serve as a “potent stimulant to political community” by “invest[ing] individuals with political subjectivity as victims, offenders, prosecutors and judges” (Simon 2000, p. 1128). Thus, to analyse the social construction of legal subjects and social control, David Garland suggests that one must consider not just the “controllers and the controlled” but also “the onlookers, whose sentiments are first outraged and then reassured” through the processes of crime and punishment (Garland 1990, p. 8).
Because popular media shape conceptions of law and legality, how trafficking is framed in the media shapes how it is defined in public discourse, who is posited as being “at risk” of trafficking, and what proposed solutions appear tenable (Benford and Snow 2000). Especially because statistics measuring human trafficking are notoriously unreliable, media representations are particularly likely to shape popular, academic, and policy understandings of the issue (Kempadoo et al. 2005; Weitzer 2007; Soderlund 2011; Government Accountability Office 2006). Media portrayals of law and legal institutions also shape public expectations of how these institutions should operate—how police officers should treat suspects, what kinds of evidence should be gathered, what should happen to/for victims, and how criminals should be punished. In addition, the increasing “celebritization” of human trafficking and the rise of celebrity activists as rescuers, “ambassadors,” and (often ill-informed) “experts” who advise political elites in law and policy forums reveals the powerful role pop culture plays in the anti-trafficking movement (Haynes 2014). Thus, assessing the sociolegal construction of crime, victims, offenders, and enforcers can offer insight into the mobilising power of crime frames for politicians and social movement activists, as well as the ways in which sought-after reforms are likely to be implemented in practice.
7.2.2 Framing Crime, Risk, and Victimhood in the “War on Trafficking”
The centrality of the idealised victim-subject in contemporary political discourse makes it a powerful mobilising icon for anti-trafficking reformers. “Crime frames” can underscore the urgency of a social problem and target certain populations as in need of or threatening security, inviting and legitimating government intervention. Actors operating in a political milieu dominated by governing through crime rhetoric can strategically “frame” movement issues in terms of crime, victimhood, and justice to generate support for proposed reforms. Though initially framed as an issue of women’s and children’s rights in the 1980s and 1990s, contemporary anti-trafficking laws and policy at the international and national levels tend to frame trafficking as an issue of crime and national security (Gallagher 2009). Driven by international efforts to combat transnational organised crime and stymie people smuggling, the criminalisation of human trafficking over the past 15 years—and generalised “crackdowns” on migration as a means to combat it—marks one front in the internationalisation of “crimmigration” (Chacón 2010).
As the “war on trafficking” is waged alongside a war on terror, a war on drugs, and crackdowns on illegal immigration, counter-trafficking initiatives exemplify the internationalisation of governing-through-crime politics that legitimate aggressive criminal justice approaches to a variety of social problems. The U.S., as the self-appointed “global sheriff” in the war against trafficking (Chuang 2006), uses its anti-trafficking policies, funding, and unilateral sanction regime as an “opportunity for statecraft” to “implement its foreign policy objectives through elements of its human rights agenda” (Bumiller 2008, p. 146). Although the U.S. promotes the “3 Ps” approach to trafficking—prevention, protection of victims, and prosecution of offenders—criminal justice and security objectives dominate U.S. anti-trafficking policies and programmes at home and abroad (Chacón 2006; Srikantiah 2007; GAATW 2007). In the post-9/11 era, representations of human rights violations in trafficking intersect with “cultures of security”, which are “textual and visual strategies that the state and media use to promote both fear of violence from some outside force and a promise of protection by the state as long as citizens comply with the ideological, political, and legal frames of regulation and control” (Hesford and Kozol 2005, p. 4).
Reductionist narratives of crime and victimisation figure prominently in discourses about trafficking. News articles emphasise crime as the “cause” of trafficking and focus on criminalised activities, particularly illegal immigration and prostitution (Gulati 2011). Efforts to raise public awareness about human trafficking often invoke the iconic victim-subject of the “sex slave” in need of rescue from evil traffickers, who are nearly always identified as noncitizen men of colour (Chacón 2010, p. 1616). Journalistic reports about trafficking reflect a “preoccupation with sex” that fails to track the legal definition of human trafficking that includes coerced labour in other spheres (Cheng 2008). Indeed, over half of articles assessed in a recent study of news coverage of “human trafficking” referred to the issue in terms of sex trafficking, prostitution, or pornography (Gulati 2011). News reports commonly simplify or ignore the complex global dynamics that foster risky migration and exploitation, simultaneously decontextualising women’s migration and sex work and obscuring women’s agency (Cheng 2008).
Contemporary anti-trafficking discourses thus function as “cultural myths” that affect particular conceptions of migration, female sexuality, and the sex industry, reflecting “deeper fears and uncertainties concerning national identity, women’s increasing desire for autonomy, foreigners, [and] immigrants” (Doezema 2000, p. 24; Doezema 2010). This problematic framing of trafficking evidences a process of “othering” both victims and offenders that not only mischaracterises the phenomenon but also misdirects reform efforts, impeding the effectiveness of legal responses to human trafficking (Todres 2009). Moreover, the sympathetic victims, villainous traffickers, and valiant rescuers who populate official and popular portrayals of human trafficking represent a way in which the crimmigration trend is normalised and legitimised. Securitising discourses about the risks of trafficking and calls to protect innocent victims from traffickers justify tighter border controls and enhanced surveillance of migrant communities, targeting both suspected offenders and potential victims “at risk” of trafficking.
The framing of trafficking as a sex crime and crimmigration problem helps explain why legal responses to “modern-day slavery” are both stimulated and constrained by popular attention to the issue. The emphasis on sexual risk and law-and-order interventions in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns and popular representations thereof exemplify “governing through crime” politics (Simon 2007) and the rise of “carceral feminism” (Bernstein 2007). The U.S. anti-trafficking movement has been dominated by an unlikely alliance of “new abolitionists”, including evangelical Christians and radical feminists (Bernstein 2010). Characterised by “militarised humanitarianism” and “carceral feminism”, new abolitionists share an ideological framework that posits prostitution as “the literal antithesis of freedom”, coupled with a neoliberal sexual agenda that “locates social problems in deviant individuals rather than mainstream institutions, that seeks social remedies through criminal justice interventions rather than through a redistributive welfare state, and that advocates for the beneficence of the privileged rather than the empowerment of the oppressed” (Bernstein 2007, p. 131).
The following case studies examine how trafficking victims, villains, and rescuers are constructed in popular media, including investigative journalism, television dramas, and Hollywood films. I explore how narratives of migrant criminality and sexual risk are deployed to legitimate law-and-order anti-trafficking interventions that raise troubling concerns with regard to the protection of victims’ rights and the normalisation of “crimmigration”.
7.3 Popular Depictions of Trafficking
7.3.1 “Perfect Victims”, Migrant Criminality, and the Journalistic Sex Trafficking Exposé
Over the past century, investigative journalism has played an important role in the cultural construction of sex trafficking as an object of moral reform, human rights, humanitarian, and criminal justice intervention (Cheng 2008; Langum 1994; Soderlund 2011; Walkowitz 1980). Indeed, “investigative journalism has become a dominant mode of knowledge production both in popular understanding of human trafficking and in policymaking”, as the public and legislators both rely upon journalists’ exposés of trafficking to support new anti-trafficking initiatives (Cheng 2008, p. 7). The blurry line between news stories about sex trafficking and its representation in popular culture is exemplified by Peter Landesman’s lurid (and contested) 2004 report, “The Girls Next Door”, in the New York Times Magazine (Landesman 2004).
As with other subjects of crime journalism, such reports posit an idealised victim subject—innocent “women and children” unwittingly trafficked into sexual slavery. The narrative conventions of innocents enslaved in prison-like brothels by foreign criminals and abused by monstrous clients have roots in late nineteenth-century campaigns against “white slavery” (Doezema 2010; Soderlund 2011). Landesman painted a graphic picture of a ubiquitous-yet-invisible epidemic of sex slavery in America. Drawing on a tradition of sordid journalistic depictions of white slavery dating back to the nineteenth century, Landesman’s exposé of sex trafficking bordered on the pornographic, trading on ‘allusions to the sex trade’s hidden nature and the reader’s potential for voyeurism” (Soderlund 2011, p. 201). Indeed, under the suggestive headline “Sex Slaves on Main Street”, the front cover of the magazine featuring Landesman’s article pictured an anonymous girl sitting on a bed, wearing a Catholic school uniform and black knee socks; the camera angle positions the viewer so as to look up the girl’s skirt.
Landesman’s report introduced readers to the seedy underworld of the sex trade by invoking known, moralised archetypes. He combined first-hand accounts of commercial sex establishments, interviews with activists and law enforcement officials, and hearsay reports to describe the process by which young foreign girls were trafficked to satisfy U.S. demand for prostitution and the “increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous sex”: abduction, “breaking in”, and sexual enslavement (Landesman 2004). Landesman “reiterated the popular, hystericised image of human trafficking: that young, innocent girls are tricked, kidnapped, beaten, and forced into a life of sexual slavery” by “vast, international crime syndicates” for enormous profits (Berman 2006, p. 289).
Unlike previous reports of trafficking in poverty-stricken countries, however, Landesman’s story emphasised traffickers’ breach of U.S. borders and criminal migrants’ infiltration of American suburbs. Reflecting the emergent crimmigration approach to trafficking, Landesman’s anti-trafficking narrative described the risks of the “porousness of the U.S.–Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it” as the “main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry” where international sex traffickers “subcontracted” coyotes to smuggle girls across the border (Landesman 2004). Landesman’s focus on migrant criminality pervades his descriptions of squalid brothels where young girls service migrant men for US$4.50; Eastern European trafficking operations run as “well-oiled monoethnic machines”; and Mexican traffickers, as 12-year-old schoolboys, are given “one or two girls their age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasises the arts of kidnapping and seduction” (Landesman 2004). Combining the threat of sexual risk and migrant criminality, “The Girls Next Door” buttressed the view that “prostitution via sex trafficking has become … [a] threat to ‘our’ communities, ‘our’ women, and ‘our’ way of life” (Berman 2006, p. 289).
Intense criticism of Landesman’s reporting—including accusations that he fictionalised portions of the story—resulted in an Editor’s correction attempting to explain inconsistencies in his story (Shafer 2004). Despite these concerns with its veracity, the article was the basis of the 2007 Hollywood film Trade, starring Kevin Kline (Kreuzpainter 2007). Trade features a kidnapped Mexican girl and a young Polish woman tricked into the sex trade by the same nefarious gang. The film tracks the trafficked girls through a treacherous journey across the U.S./Mexico border to a stash house of sex slaves in New Jersey. Ultimately, the trafficked girl’s brother joins forces with Ray (Kline), a “Texas lawman”, to rescue the virginal girl before she is sold into sexual slavery in an Internet auction. After bidding US$32,000 to buy the girl, Ray poses as a paedophile to pick up his “purchase” from the traffickers: she is dressed in a school uniform reminiscent of the girl posing on the cover of the New York Times Magazine for Landesman’s article. As Ray liberates the girl from the traffickers’ clutches, police raid the proverbial “house next door”, rescuing child sex slaves trapped in the basement, including one little boy. The rescued victims are assured that U.S. law enforcement officials are trustworthy—unlike the corrupt cops in Mexico—but this is where the rescued victims are promptly repatriated.
Before the closing credits of Trade, viewers are informed that the CIA “estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 girls, boys and women are trafficked annually into the United States to be pimped out or sold for forced sex”: no specific evidence is cited. Official sources explain the paucity of data regarding victims of trafficking in the U.S. by stating: “we are not finding victims in the United States because we’re not looking for them.” This sets up a dynamic where awareness-raising reports by journalists and others in the “rescue industry” emphasise the scope, scale, and suffering of trafficking victims to trigger and justify law enforcement efforts to tackle the “hidden crime” of trafficking (Agustín 2007; Soderlund 2011).
The cultural resonance of this framing of trafficking normalises the harsh trend of crimmigration while concealing its more pernicious effects. Media coverage of anti-trafficking interventions rescuing and protecting (innocent) trafficking victims puts a “soft glove” on the “punishing fist” of American immigration enforcement (Chapkis 2005). The symbolic power of personal narrative about sexual suffering—a classic feminist advocacy and journalistic trope—aims to trigger visceral reactions and serve as a “solidarity-inducing denominator”, simultaneously redeeming the sex slave and disidentifying her from the criminality associated with “illegal aliens” and voluntary sex workers (Aradau 2004