Crime, human trafficking and media exploitation

I occasionally listen to one of the local news radio stations to catch the weather report, although I’m not sure why because it is almost always wrong; they must employ astrology rather than meteorology, and maybe consult an Ouija board to make sure. One thing you can be certain about in regard to local reporting is that it will exploit any female victim of a crime (preferably a violent one) for ratings. Not that some women don’t mind being exploited in this way, but it does tend to give an impression that doesn’t necessarily represent reality; an even bigger problem with such reporting is that it damages its credibility and causes a cynical response from those demographics who are ignored by the media.

For example, according to the records of the King County Medical Examiner’s office, in 2011 there were 54 homicides among the 2,000 or so deaths that they came under its jurisdiction, such as those that could not be explained by hospital records under a doctor’s care; this number is down from the 93 homicides that occurred in 2002 and 2003. Not all were perpetrated with “criminal intent.” This apparently includes those killed by police, like John T. Williams, “involuntary manslaughter” or “self-defense.”  35 of the deaths were by guns, 9 by stabbing. But the gender breakdown remains fairly constant with the FBI’s national statistics: Males comprised 74 percent (40 total) of the homicide victims. We can discuss who did what to whom, but the fact is that the media offers a skewed picture of violent crime by focusing its reporting resources on women  victims (Suicides in King County, by the way, accounted for 265 of the deaths handles by the Medical Examiner in 2011—the highest figure in the last 10 years; this number does not include those who died of so-called “assisted suicide” due to terminal illness. 72 percent of the victims were male).

There have been various explanations for the media’s fixation on female victims. Some claim that the media has established a “hierarchy” of victimization that it believes “plays” better, in the belief that women are more significant consumers of news; on top of the period are white females. White females are regarded as the “ideal” victims by the media, because they are seen as more “innocent” than others—like, say, the victims of gang crime. Victim advocacy organizations play a role in this; in the search for publicity and donations, it is necessary to resort to “hype,” particularly since violent crime is actually decreasing in this country. 

This goes hand-in-hand with devaluing or ignoring other demographics who are more likely—or in the case of blacks, much more likely—to be a victim of a violent crime.  It is interesting to note that in regard to female perpetrators, a 2009 study by Pauline K. Brennan and Abby L. Vandenberg examined select newspapers and found that the media is more likely to use “neutralizers” in their reporting on white female perps. Forty percent of news stories involving female criminals either denied or minimized the white female’s “responsibility” for a crime, and the degree of victimization caused was similarly adduced. Responsibility for criminal acts is often explained away by “external” factors and “forces beyond her control.”  She is often a “sad/mad” person rather than malicious. This is true in cases of homicide in which men are the victims, and in child murder, such as the Andrea Yates case. There is also more frequent condemnation of the accuser in these cases. If men were the victims, there was greater effort to “make it seem like these men suffered no injury and, as such, are not victims.” 

Anyways, there are some crimes that white females have a harder time being made the center of attention of. Thus we see a slight uptick in the current press concerning human trafficking. But as I noted in my “Human trafficking and the problem of counting” post, there is a great deal of “interpretation,” guesswork and hype involved—with an emphasis on “hype.” Take for instance the story that appeared on the front page of the Sunday Seattle Times this week, which discusses the United Nations report on human trafficking. Times reporter Christine Clarridge writes that “Women and girls together account for about 75 percent of all trafficking victims, both for sex and for labor, the U.N. report said.” Thus the entire focus of her story is on female victims, and in particular on sex trafficking, which naturally women are more likely to be “employed” in. 

The problem is—as I pointed out in my previous blog—is that the numbers are not generated from scientific analysis, but by partisan assumption by advocacy groups, passed on as “fact” by the UN, the media and anyone else who will listen. The numbers they offer tend to overestimate the number of female victims while underestimating the number of male victims. For example, thousands of boys from Bangladesh are kidnapped to Middle Eastern countries and trained as camel jockeys, because of their light weight; the UN “statisticians” do not count these boys as victims of human trafficking. Nor does it count the boys who are “recruited” to fight in the various civil wars in Africa; some of these boys are as young as 12: Girls may be recruited for sex trafficking, but boys are for cannon fodder. I can’t tell which is worse. 

The Times continues to be irrelevant to me, not the least because it tries to sell papers with its frequent gender exploitation stories, just like this one. No one is going the question the worst-case local anecdotes it can dredge-up, particularly since the female victim on the front page was only one of a group of both male and female human trafficking victims. This tendency to inflate one side of the equation was the topic of the May 2011 report by the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law entitled “Fact or Fiction: What Do We Really Know About Human Trafficking?” which I discussed at length in the aforementioned post. For those who might desire to be better informed, I’ll rehash what the report found. 

It found, for example, that the numbers generally put out are mostly invention, and that 64 percent of all the world's statistics on human and sex trafficking are made up right there on the spot; unfortunately, “82.4 percent of people believe them whether they're accurate statistics or not.” The report found no substantiation for claims that “600,000 to 800,000 people trafficked across international borders annually, (that) 80 percent of victims are female, and 50 percent are minors.” It admits that exaggerated claims are made to draw attention to the issue, but it is still exaggeration. In the UK, “NGOs, politicians and the media in the United Kingdom proclaimed (without producing evidence) that up to 25,000 ‘sex slaves’ were in need of rescue and that 80,000 women were in sex work. However, the Operation Pentameter II police raids that looked for the 25,000 sex slaves only located 351 women, all of whom variously absconded from police, went home voluntarily, declined support, were removed by the UK Borders Agency or were prosecuted for various offences. The 80,000 figure was also shown to have no basis in fact.”

In fascinating story from 2009, Nick Davies of The Guardian wrote of how a tiny number can become a huge number in the human trafficking counting business. Two females academics in Britain managed to somehow extrapolate how 71 women detained on suspicion of being “victims” of human sex trafficking was actually 1,420—and  that 71 became 25,000 in no time once politicians and the media got a hold of it. When this number came under critical scrutiny, Davies reported how “Fiona Mactaggart, a former Home Office minister, in January 2008 outstripped MP Denis MacShane’s estimates, telling the House of Commons that she regarded all women prostitutes as the victims of trafficking, since their route into sex work ‘almost always involves coercion, enforced addiction to drugs and violence from their pimps or traffickers.’” But Davies noted that “There is no known research into UK prostitution which supports this claim.”

The tendency to over-report your everyday prostitute as a victim of sex trafficking was also addressed by a 2007 report by the American Sociological Association. Although it did not question that some women enter the sex trade against their will, it added:

“Plenty of evidence challenges the notion that prostitutes, across the board, are coerced into the sex trade, lead lives of misery, experience high levels of victimization, and want to be rescued. These patterns characterize one segment of the sex trade, but they are not the defining features of prostitution. Sex workers differ markedly in their autonomy, work experiences, job satisfaction, and self-esteem. It’s time to replace the oppression model with a polymorphous model—a perspective that recognizes multiple structural and experiential realities."

A lot of the hyped numbers are the product of “junk science.” Take for instance an “independent study” conducted by the Women’s Funding Network in regard to online sex-trafficking. When it was exposed, the group admitted that its numbers were bogus, using the data to mislead the media and commit perjury before Congress. Why? For free publicity and public funding. "We pitch it the way we think you're going to read it and pick up on it," said activist Kaffie McCullough. "If we give it to you with all the words and the stuff that is actually accurate—I mean, I've tried to do that with our PR firm, and they say, 'They won't read that much.' "

Another problem is once you get into individual cases, the “evidence” of human trafficking is often a matter of interpretation, and who is doing the interpretation.  Take for instance the case of Lamyaá Ennassime, a Moroccan girl brought into the country illegally by her uncle, Abdenasser Ennassime, who owned an espresso stand in Lakewood, WA and had just acquired his U.S. citizenship. According to the FBI and local reporting, she was a victim of human trafficking—held a virtual prisoner in a room the size of a wall closet, and forced into slave labor. That was the story she told her friends who visited her at the espresso stand, who subsequently contacted authorities. 

Yet Ennassime would eventually be sentenced to community service and probation—relatively light given the hype surrounding the story. In an otherwise negative portrayal of the uncle and aunt, an AP story noted that  Lamyaá  “came to stay with her aunt and uncle at age 12 in September 2001, with the understanding that she would help care for their young son and help with the housework in exchange for lodging and a chance for a good education. She made breakfast and dinner, did laundry, cleaned the house, and worked weekends and summers without pay at the espresso stand.” No doubt she was apparently raised in a strict Muslim way (after all, she was far from her parents who had certain expectations of her upbringing and safety) that most Americans would find unbearable; but it is also true that teenagers (especially girls) are drama queens at that age.  Both the uncle and his wife considered the girl ungrateful. Tonya Ennassime claimed that she and her husband “had treated Lamyaá lovingly, as their own daughter, and that they were terribly hurt by her unfounded allegations.” The one “good” that came out of all of this is that the notoriety gained the girl legal residency in the country instead of deportation in the care of her family in Morocco—even after the father traveled half a world away to take her home. 

I’m not one of those masochists, self-flagellants or misandrists who doesn’t question deliberately inflated numbers used for exploitation purposes, especially in regard to gender politics. Remember the CDC report last year on intimate partner violence that not only showed that men reported to be the victim of various forms of domestic violence nearly as often  as women, but in the previous 12 months 25 percent more men than women reported being the victim of domestic violence. Yet the media only reported on sexual assault figures, and completely ignored the people who are more legitimately the silent victims in this society.