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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.

3. Do not sensationalize or sexualize human trafficking victims and survivors

Reveling in graphic details does not help victims and survivors, nor does it contribute in any meaningful way to the fight to end human trafficking. Rather, it tokenizes the experiences of victims and can trigger trauma for human trafficking survivors.

Before portraying a trafficking victim or survivor, ensure that it is necessary. Does this particular portrayal contain important information that could not otherwise be effectively conveyed? Is the victim/survivor’s experience being used to promote an organization or raise money for that organization by inciting feelings of shock, horror, or disgust in the viewer?

When portraying, publishing or publicly identifying a human trafficking survivor or her/his story, the interests and needs of the survivor should be of primary importance. After ensuring the survivor has given fully informed consent (confidentiality, scope, framing, support, etc.), it is critical to question how the portrayal might affect other survivors and whether the portrayal may create a skewed public perception.

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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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