On Exploitation, and Anti-Exploitation Messaging

[Trigger warning.]

Copyranter just called my attention to this new spot for StartFreedom.org, a British anti-trafficking site. It's another in a long list of PSAs and adverts for various anti-trafficking, anti-rape, or anti-domestic abuse orgs that features violent imagery, a new trend I really disdain. (Remember this Keira Knightley spot?)

Just this weekend, I saw a billboard along a highway not far from my house with a picture of a little boy with a bruised eye, with the text, "He's got his mother's eyes," followed by some quip that strongly suggested a mother who stays with an abusive father is responsible if her children are abused. Even without the victim-blaming, I was unthrilled with the violent imagery coupled with a pun. It's not the worst thing in the world to suspend the urge to be clever for the duration of one anti-violence ad.

Anyway, in this spot, a white British schoolgirl is stalked, has her head smashed against her desk, and is dragged by her hair out of a classroom by a man while the rest of the class, including the teacher, who continues to do rollcall as if nothing is happening, does nothing to help her.


"Don't be oblivious to the dangers of human trafficking," says the female voiceover as the girl is pulled, screaming, from the classroom, while her (all-female) classmates and (male) teacher ignore the commotion. "Every minute, another young person is trafficked into sexual exploitation. You can stop this. Go to Start Freedom dot org."

I imagine it could go without saying that I strongly support awareness-raising around human trafficking and sexual exploitation.

But I can't say that I am enamored with campaigns that center violent imagery. It's just totally counterproductive to transmit images of violence when ostensibly trying to stop violence.

Especially so when it's the object of an iconic sex fantasy (uniform-clad schoolgirl) being brutally abused by a sex trafficker who looks like he just walked off the pages of GQ, pulling down her skirt and screaming helplessly. If your anti-trafficking advert looks exactly like rape porn, you're doing it wrong.

And here's another problem I have with this spot: Is it really female peers (and a teacher) who need to be represented as "oblivious to the dangers of human trafficking" and sexual exploitation? I've written three posts in the last few years about female bartenders and/or waitstaff who intervened when they saw a man slip something into his date's drink when she went to the bathroom. In one case, a gay male server also intervened. I've written at least three posts that I recall about women calling 911 when they've seen (or heard about) another woman getting attacked, and no one else intervened or called for help. I'm pretty sure this thread indicates that women are well aware of the reality that there are people who want to hurt them, and this thread underscores that many of them are aware of that reality because they've already been hurt, often multiple times.

Which is not to say that all women are intrinsically awesome advocates against human trafficking, or that no men give a flying fuck. It's just that it strikes me as resoundingly unfair to imply that it's almost totally women (and men in social professions!) who are exclusively, or even primarily, ignorant about these issues.

In fact, it's about as unfair as the implication that it's most likely to be a Western middle-class white girl who's dragged off into sexual exploitation, about as unfair as the implication that it's the Western middle-class whites girls who are abducted to whose disappearance no one pays attention.

Genuine and effective consciousness-raising doesn't reinforce existing narratives and ergo more deeply entrench the problem.

I almost can't think of a better gift to traffickers than to exhort Western culture to keep their eyes ever more keenly on their middle-class white girls. How can I not find in this urgent message the tacit recommendation to abandon to traffickers the vulnerable, the easily exploitable, the poor and desperate and orphaned and alone, brown-skinned girls, the girls in countries ravaged by war and poverty and drought and neglect?

Take them and leave our daughters alone is not an anti-trafficking campaign.

There's this weird idea that urging middle- and upper-class people in our culture, people with the means to help anti-trafficking campaigns with votes and sway and money, to "imagine if your daughter was trafficked" makes them more sympathetic. But it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is because people have one of two disparate—and equally ineffective and unrealistic—responses:

1. To become unreasonably fearful that it will happen to their daughters and thus focus disproportionately on preventing something with an already vanishingly small chance of happening.

2. To acknowledge there's an already vanishingly small chance of their daughters being trafficked and tune out altogether.

What we need is not more of these "imagine if" scenarios, of which the image of a white British schoolgirl being dragged from her classroom is yet another example. What we need is some straight talk about how and why that scene is unrealistic, and some soul-searching about why we comfort ourselves with images we know to be unrealistic, so that we might nod our heads sagely about how terrible human trafficking is, while diligently ignoring the people most in need of our help.

[Recent related reading: "This is a kind of isolation I am not able to digest." and Collectivization in India and Blub.]