March 6th, 2008
Sexism in antitrafficking media
Littoral Mermaid has a post up about the poster for the movie “Holly.” (Glad to see LM is blogging again, by the way!)
I noticed similar dynamics in the official summary of the antitrafficking film “Trade”:
Adriana is a 13-year-old girl from Mexico City whose kidnapping by sex traffickers sets in motion a desperate mission by her 17-year-old brother, Jorge, to save her. Trapped and terrified by an underground network of international thugs who earn millions exploiting their human cargo, Adriana’s only friend and protector throughout her ordeal is Veronica, a young Polish woman tricked into the trade by the same criminal gang. As Jorge dodges immigration officers and incredible obstacles to track the girls’ abductors, he meets Ray, a Texas cop whose own family loss to sex trafficking leads him to become an ally in the boy’s quest. Fighting with courage and hard-tested faith, the characters of Trade negotiate their way through the unspeakable terrain of the sex trade “tunnels” between Mexico and the United States. From the barrios of Mexico City and the treacherous Rio Grande border, to a secret Internet sex slave auction and the final climactic confrontation at a stash house in suburban New Jersey, Ray and Jorge forge a close bond as they give desperate chase to Adriana’s kidnappers before she is sold and disappears forever into this brutal global underworld, a place from which few victims ever return.
I had planned to see this film when I first heard about it, but the description focused so much on the heroic efforts of Jorge and Ray, and the relationship between them, while casting the trafficked young women as helpless victims, that I decided not to see it after all. Why can’t media about sex trafficking refrain from presenting yet more titillating images and ideologies about victimized women? Why do we need more propaganda that tells us that the good men will save women from the bad men?
