Challenging the Human Trafficking Narrative

Victims, Villains, and Heroes

Erin O'Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the moral of the human trafficking story, and how can the narrative be shaped and evolved? Stories of human trafficking are prolific in the public domain, proving immensely powerful in guiding our understandings of trafficking, and offering something tangible on which to base policy and action. Yet these stories also misrepresent the problem, establishing a dominant narrative that stifles other stories and fails to capture the complexity of human trafficking.

This book deconstructs the human trafficking narrative in public discourse, examining the victims, villains, and heroes of trafficking stories. Sex slaves, exploited workers, mobsters, pimps and johns, consumers, governments, and anti-trafficking activists are all characters in the story, serving to illustrate who is to blame for the problem of trafficking, and how that problem might be solved. Erin O'Brien argues that a constrained narrative of ideal victims, foreign villains, and western heroes dominates the discourse, underpinned by cultural assumptions about gender and ethnicity, and wider narratives of border security, consumerism, and western exceptionalism.

Drawing on depictions of trafficking in entertainment and news media, awareness campaigns, and government reports in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, this book will be of interest to criminologists, political scientists, sociologists, and those engaged with human rights activism and the politics of international justice

Chapter 1

Introduction

The narrative code

Written by Erin O’Brien

Introduction

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want.

If you are looking for ransom I can tell you I don’t have money.

But what I do have are a very particular set of skills.

Skills I have acquired over a very long career.

Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.

If you let my daughter go now that will be the end of it.

I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don’t …

I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.

With these words, and a particular set of skills, Liam Neeson became the ultimate action hero for a new generation, portraying father Bryan Mills, fighting to rescue his teenage daughter from the clutches of human traffickers in the 2008 film Taken. The movie was a smash hit with audiences, generating more than US$200 million, and spawning two sequels and a television series. The impact of the film goes far beyond entertainment value, telling hundreds of thousands of moviegoers their first human trafficking story.

When the movie was released in 2008, the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children was just eight years old, though activists had been fighting to establish anti-trafficking laws for well over a decade. Stories of trafficking have been in the public domain for some time, only becoming more prevalent. In the 10 years since Taken premiered, I have taught hundreds of undergraduate university students about human trafficking, always asking them where they have heard about it before. For many, the movie Taken was the first time they heard the word trafficking. Over the years, as Taken gets older and classes get younger, a few more say they have heard about trafficking on the news, in documentary programmes, through other entertainment programmes like Law & Order or through shared news stories or awareness raising materials on Facebook or Twitter. More and more students are now coming to class with prior knowledge of human trafficking, gleaned through some of the many stories of trafficking that are prolific in the public domain.

But what do these stories tell us about human trafficking? The story in Taken (EuropaCorp and Twentieth Century Fox 2008) is a hero’s tale. The victim is the stereotypical, virginal damsel in distress who is missing from the screen for the vast majority of the film. The villains are caricatures of a foreign, non-white gang. The film gives little consideration to the causes of human trafficking, the experiences of trafficking victims or the wider solutions to the problem. It is the story of one man, heroically battling villains to rescue the victim. Taken is, first and foremost, entertainment. It exists to thrill, rather than to educate, so it is hardly surprising that it does a poor job in depicting the complexities of human trafficking.

News stories, government reports and public awareness campaigns serve a greater educative function. This is especially true in the absence of reliable data on human trafficking (Dragiewicz 2015, 1). Despite more than two decades of moral outrage and political attention towards human trafficking, it is still largely a hidden crime (Di Nicola 2007, 53) and remains persistently difficult to quantify. This problem is compounded by competing national definitions of trafficking (Anderson and O’Connell Davidson 2003, 9), as well as disputes over the international definition adopted by the United Nations (Sullivan 2003, 81). The problem may be, as O’Connell Davidson astutely observes, that ‘you cannot measure what you cannot define’ (O’Connell Davidson 2015, 9). O’Connell Davidson argues that modern slavery is ‘not a thing, but a set of claims about what is (and what is not) morally and politically obscene’ (2015, 26). The terms ‘human trafficking’ and ‘modern slavery’ are so broad, and disputed, in their meaning that those attempting to quantify the problem must rely on ‘proxy categories’ such as debt bondage, forced prostitution¹ or child labour in order to make the terms more meaningful, and measurable (O’Connell Davidson 2015, 8).

In the murky void created by competing estimates, sweeping generalisations and ‘exploitation creep’ (Chuang 2014), where an increasing list of abusive practices are labelled ‘trafficking’ or ‘modern slavery’, public understandings of the problem are built through stories, not statistics. Even when data on trafficking does exist, stories are more likely to resonate and guide our understandings of the problem. This is true not only for human trafficking, but for all social problems, due to the ability of stories to represent something tangible on which to base policy decisions when faced with elusive or contradictory statistics, complexity and political polarisation (Miller 2012, 36).

The construction of the ‘problem’ of trafficking is a key factor in the development of responses to human trafficking at both the national and international level. Problem recognition is the first step in policy making and plays a vital role in setting the agenda for which policy proposals are likely to be adopted by legislators (Kingdon 2003). Victims’ stories have played a central role in creating a narrative of trafficking that informs policy and contributes to the recognition of the problem, with individual victim narratives often guiding the definitions of social problems ( Jones and McBeth 2010; Nowlin 2011). Boswell (2011) demonstrates the key aspects of narrative necessary for achieving problem recognition, and thus informing public understandings and policy responses to problems. According to Boswell, narratives first attempt to define the scale and scope of a problem. Second, they make assertions about the causes of the problem. Third, they imply that certain policy interventions are likely to address the problem (Boswell 2011, 4–5). The trafficking narrative presented in news stories, awareness campaigns or entertainment media often lacks complexity, yet nonetheless aims for a problem of trafficking to be recognised, understood and acted upon. Stories of human trafficking thus inform not only our understandings of trafficking, but also our individual, societal and political responses to it.

Stories play an important role in the process of political construction and in the pursuit of social change, but can also be harmful or counterproductive. In particular, the repetition of a singular, or dominant, narrative can have significant, and damaging, implications on policy. Chimamanda Adichie (2009) has warned of the ‘danger of the single story’, arguing that ‘they make one story become the only story’. It is essential to question and deconstruct the narrative put forth by these stories, in order to reveal the political, social and cultural assumptions that underpin the central human trafficking narrative.

This book explores the dominant trafficking narrative through a detailed examination of the cast of characters in the trafficking story. The causes of, and solutions to, human trafficking are frequently represented through a depiction of who the victims are, who the villains are and what the heroes do. In trafficking stories, the cast remains quite consistent. There are vulnerable and powerless victims, there are villains profiting from the misery of others and there are heroes rescuing damsels in distress.

In deconstructing the stories of human trafficking that dominate public discourse, I ask not only what is represented as the problem, but also what aspects of the issue are overlooked and excluded. Throughout, I reflect upon the assumptions that underpin the representation of human trafficking as a problem, who is seen as to blame, who benefits and who is harmed in this construction (Bacchi 2007, 2009). Policy adoption is governed through the establishment of key boundaries: ‘good or evil, innocent or guilty, responsible or not, possible or impossible, strong or weak, right or wrong’ (Stone 2012, 384). This boundary setting often results in the creation of heroes and villains in the narrative, and is clearly evident in trafficking discourse. I thus consider how stories influence problem recognition, problem representation and ultimately policy adoption through the intentional framing of the trafficking problem by positioning key characters within these boundaries. I begin this task in this chapter by, first, describing the narrative code embedded in trafficking stories and, second, demonstrating both the purpose and power of narrative as a key tool for building understandings of human trafficking and ultimately prompting action on the problem of trafficking. I conclude this chapter by outlining the aims, scope and structure of this book.

The narrative code

Stories as a conduit of information are central to the way humans construct and derive meaning from the world around us, and permeate every aspect of our daily lives. As Hardy says:

We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, play, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate and live by narrative.

(Hardy 1968, 5)

Stories have been the focus of research across a number of disciplines including psychology (Gerrig and Egidi 2003), communications (McComas and Shanahan 1999), marketing (Mattila 2000), neuroscience (Ash et al. 2007) and criminology (Presser and Sandberg 2015). Within political science and policy analysis, narrative has been recognised as a powerful tool through which to advance a policy argument (Fischer 2003, 164–169), stimulate collective action (Mayer 2014), create policy consensus (Stone 2012) and institutionalise discourses (Hajer 1993).

Stories may be told, and used, in different contexts, for different purposes and in differing forms, but ultimately they provide a schema through which the storyteller can convey content and meaning to an audience. Stories derive much of their power and pre-eminence as a method of communication from the ‘single, familiar, structure’ (Rumelhart 1975 cited in Mayer 2014, 67) that makes them so accessible to diverse audiences. Stories of human trafficking are powerful and compelling not just because of the horrors of exploitation they describe, but because they employ a narrative code to convey information in a simple, and immediately understandable, format.

Story elements

The dominant trafficking narrative can be gleaned through multiple different types of stories. Entertainment media and news reports offer the most easily recognisable form of the narrative. Yet a narrative is also present in human trafficking awareness campaigns, sometimes explicitly in the form of victims’ stories, but also implicitly in the form of calls to action, which suggest causes of, and solutions to, the problem. Government reports, statements and legislation similarly construct the victims, villains and heroes of the narrative through legislative definitions, sanctions against villains and guidelines for heroic action to solve the problem. The term ‘narrative’ can be a descriptor of personal accounts, as well as the thematic impression created by public discourse through a range of mediums. Throughout, I utilise the term in both ways in discussing narratives contained in traditional storytelling formats, and the wider narrative at play in non-traditional formats such as awareness campaigns and government policies.

The format of a story is debatable, yet all of these mediums convey a narrative. At the most basic level, what constitutes a story is largely in the eye of the beholder. If the audience recognises what they are being told as a story, as a narrative, then there is little need to assess whether the words constitute a specific narrative code. Stories can, in fact, contain very few words, yet still convey a narrative. Nair (2002, 215) and Mayer (2014, 70) both point to a traditional Bengali story, in highlighting the minimal requirements for a narrative:

A tiger. A hunter. A tiger.

The text contains no detailed character descriptions, no explicit statement of actions, no articulated origin story or described resolution. Yet these words are still recognisable as a story. The characterisations and events of the story are dependent on the audience’s assumptions, or worldview. I will later return to the importance of assumptions in deriving meaning from a story. But it is clear that very little is actually required to generate a narrative. Nevertheless, stories can be seen to consist of common elements.

Labov’s (1972, 363) narrative model consists of six key elements: an abstract; orientation; complication; evaluation; resolution; and coda. This model has been questioned by others, who argue that narratives sometimes rely on very limited context that can barely be described as orientation. Stories can also consist of competing evaluations, and frequently have no identifiable resolution or coda to the story (Fairclough 1992; Polletta et al. 2011; Sandberg 2009). Yet stories that end suddenly with protagonists in peril are still identifiable as stories.

Structuralists define narrative according to key plot elements of a beginning, middle and end (Mayer 2014, 53). They argue that these elements represent ‘consistent and identifiable components from which generalisations can be formed’ ( Jones and McBeth 2010, 331–332). For structuralists, the text of the story, presented in a consistent format, is the central focus of analysis offering insight for scholars based on the language employed. Post-structuralists move beyond the format and language of the text in an effort to view the meaning behind the text, or ‘deconstruct narratives for the purpose of revealing hidden ideologies’ ( Jones and McBeth 2010, 332).

Despite the differing core units of analysis, structuralists and post-structuralists rely on similar understandings of the minimum narrative requirements. Mayer (2014) simplifies Labov’s six elements to an essential three plot elements of orientation, complication and resolution (2014, 55). Stone (2012) analyses narratives utilised within policy discourse, arguing that the definition of policy problems, establishment of the cause of problems and contestation over competing solutions usually reflect a narrative structure. She argues that policy narratives:

are stories with a beginning, middle, and an end, involving some change or transformation. They have heroes and villains and innocent victims, and they pit forces of evil against forces of good.

(Stone 2012, 158)

Policy discourse may not be immediately identifiable as a narrative, yet within policy debate, documentation and legislation, a narrative exists. Shanahan et al. (2013) argue that there are two ‘necessary conditions’ for materials to constitute a policy narrative:

First, a policy narrative must contain a policy stance or judgement on a policy-related behavior…. Second, a policy narrative must contain at least one character who is cast as a hero, villain, or victim.

(Shanahan et al. 2013, 457)

Policy documents, government statements and legislation could be viewed as a narrative taken from the perspective of the resolution. The proposed policy may be seeking to restrain a villain from causing harm to a victim, or empowering a hero to save a victim. Contestations over an appropriate policy allow an audience to infer the cause of a problem (or villain) and the heroic action required to address it (the hero) for the sake of the harmed party (the victim).

Key elements of a narrative may compress or expand the categories required for plot, but the consistent features of a story can be simplified to the absolute minimum requirement of characters and events. Characters may be explicitly rendered or implied, but they are required to drive the action forward. Events are required to characterise the actors. Despite differing, and sometimes absent, narrative elements, what constitutes a narrative may be largely self-defined as ‘audiences seem to recognise it as a story when they hear or read it’ (Press...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the narrative code
• 2 Telling trafficking stories
• 3 From sex slaves to migrant men
• 4 Ideal and invisible victims
• 5 Pimps, johns and mobsters
• 6 Heroic consumers
• 7 Everyday activists and action heroes
• 8 Government heroes and villains
• 9 Conclusion: narrative evolution
• Index