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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.

6. Do not ignore men and boys

According to the ILO’s 2012 estimates, 60 percent of the 14.2 million people in forced labor are male. Yet male victims of human trafficking are rarely discussed. The lack of public attention on the trafficking of men and boys is reflected in the absence of services for male survivors of human trafficking.

According to a 2012 study conducted by the Polaris Project, there are 529 shelter beds available specifically for trafficking survivors in the United States. Of those 529 shelter beds, 125 are available to men, and a mere two are reserved for men only. 

The problems identified here are not merely semantic. While awareness-raising is critical, it should not be used to justify or excuse misleading or inaccurate information. We will not see true progress until the passion of the anti-trafficking movement is matched with intellectual rigor and is freed from narrow and paternalistic tendencies.

Ryan Beck Turner is associate director of advocacy for the Human Trafficking Center at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. The Laboratory to Combat Human Trafficking and Prax(us) both provided feedback to Mr. Turner on this article.

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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.”

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