Writes Althea, Content Writer, Headline Diplomat eMagazine, LUDCI.eu
The UN describes child trafficking as “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt” of a child for the purpose of exploitation. When it is put like this in black and white, you really can’t connect to the experience of the victims. Even the best efforts at documenting the stories of several victims cannot really tell the whole story. This is where the movie industry comes in. Movies have become a part of our lives. In every part of the world, local and international movies are enjoyed by the old and young. The industry had a global net worth of $136 billion as of 2018.
In recent years, Hollywood, the world’s largest movie industry started to make films that illustrated the ordeal of trafficking victims. Born into brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids, the work of documentary photographer Zana Briski is one of the earlier efforts to document the lives of child sex workers. Released in 2004, it received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. From a different angle, Girl Model, a 2011 documentary tells the disturbing story of young girls from Siberia being sold to Japan to work as models. The Whistleblower does more work to describe the intricacies of trying to bring down trafficking rings. It tells the story of how corruption within governments frustrates efforts to combat child trafficking.
The Storm Makers is particularly an important movie work. It tells the story of the various stages involved in human trafficking. The 2014 movie focused on Cambodia, which is a country diseased with forced labour and sex work. The movie brings to light the victims, their traffickers, and the crime syndicates. Tricked is probably one you are familiar with. It brings to the fore how the legal system is unable to keep traffickers off the streets. This is a serious problem that is magnified in the trial of big banks involved in trafficking who get away with only measly fines. The same is true for the cosmetics industry among others who labour children in their supply chains with no repercussions. The movie brings to the fore the struggle of law enforcement agencies to put down child traffickers amidst budget cuts and a lazy legal system.
The biggest success the movie industry has achieved in their fight against child trafficking was with the movie “I am Jane Doe”. Netflix created this documentary in 2017 to focus on the legal suits brought against Backpage.com. Following a private screening of the documentary, the U.S. Congress passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) through Senate into law. The private screening of the movie was most influential in driving the bill through both houses with bi-partisan support. FOSTA amended section 230 that historically protected classified websites like Backpage and Craigslist from accountability in the courts. By lending real voices and faces to sex slavery child victims, the movie told a compelling story of how real child trafficking was in the U.S.
The FOSTA Act led to the closure of Backpage and is supposed to catalyse the reopening of many closed “Jane Doe” cases. This is a tremendous victory for child activists in America but is not nearly enough. Without diminishing the severity of the situation, the U.S. cases of child trafficking are mild compared to other countries around the world. India is particularly diseased with this scourge. China is not excluded either. Countries like Malaysia, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have been reported to suffer immensely from the plague.
Most of these countries have huge movie industries. Bollywood is perhaps one of the biggest there is. Nollywood is the biggest movie industry in Africa yet we have seen very little effort put in by these industries to combat child trafficking. There are very few compelling documentaries about the terrible state of the wide-spread cancer of child labour in these countries. China’s movie industry is renowned globally but has an almost cultic silence on the pervading cases of forced child labour and trafficking within and across its borders.
Conclusion:
This is a call to movie industries everywhere in the world to take a cue from FOSTA; to see how much power they can wield in the fight against child trafficking. It is not enough for us to feel sad about how the future of our children is being smothered by criminals. We must do what we can in our own capacities to force governments to act and end child trafficking. Rather than portray smoking, drug pushing, prostitution, and violence to the general public, the movie industry at large should be more responsible. They must be careful of what is showcased as “cool” to the younger generation. Rather than feeding the lust of the public, they must take responsibility for the great power bestowed on them and use it for good – we say yes to storytelling that saves our children’s futures not corrupt it.
