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How not to talk about human trafficking

Human trafficking is a complicated problem that can be difficult to discuss appropriately and sensitively. But as we've seen after the Somaly Mam case, the discourse of human trafficking has real impacts on anti-trafficking efforts and on trafficking victims and survivors.

2. Not all prostitution is human trafficking

The term “prostitution” refers to any exchange of sex for material benefit and exists on a spectrum of exploitation. At one end are women, men, and transgender individuals who freely choose to engage in sex work. At the other end of the spectrum are victims and survivors of sex trafficking. These women, men, transgender individuals and children are prostituted against their will through force, fraud, or coercion.

Conflation of sex work and sex trafficking often leads to policies that criminalize prostitution, making sex workers more vulnerable to violence and exploitation. Meanwhile, the distinct needs of trafficking survivors are ignored in favor of “demand reduction” programs that target purchasers of commercial sex. These programs have not had any discernible effect on sex trafficking and, in fact, may disproportionately harm the sex workers that the programs are ostensibly intended to help.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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