No one crushed anyone. What I saw was a ton of emotional responses that never really addressed the questions.
Contrary to urban legends about kids getting abducted in
Target parking lots by strangers, or anonymous figures snatching children from alleyways, the majority of child trafficking victims know and trust their traffickers, explains Teresa Huizar, CEO of the National Children's Alliance (Huizar has not seen the film yet, but was able to provide context about the myths and realities of child trafficking). "Some are throwaway kids. They are kicked out of their homes and trade sex for food and a place to stay, and end up being trafficked by a pimp," she says. "In a lot of these cases, the trafficker starts out calling themselves their boyfriend or girlfriend." Indeed, a large body of
research shows that many child trafficking victims are LGBTQ or gender nonconforming youth who have been kicked out of their homes and forced into the sex trade by someone close to them.
While
Sound of Freedom almost exclusively focuses on very young children, the majority of child trafficking victims are adolescents or teenagers, says Huizar. (A report from the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative
states that 67 percent of children trafficked are between the ages of 15 and 17). While there are, of course, cases where child trafficking victims are much younger than that, they overwhelmingly and heartbreakingly tend to involve parents with substance abuse issues selling their children for drugs, Huizar says.
"We want to believe that people trafficking children are unknown, nefarious strangers," she says. "[It] makes people uncomfortable to think some of these things happen in their own communities, in their own schools, with people they might run into at the grocery store."
The lack of focus on tragic cases like these, in favor of more dramatic narratives about international rescue missions and shadowy strangers abducting kids, has resulted in a skewed perception of child trafficking. By ignoring the realities of what victims and traffickers look like, and the larger structural issues that prevent at-risk children from getting help like, say, widely available, government-funded substance abuse treatment programs for families struggling with addiction, says Huizar anti-trafficking movies like
Sound of Freedom and the 2006 blockbuster
Taken may have the unintended effect of not shedding light on a very serious and real problem, but obscuring it.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/sound-of-freedom-child-trafficking-experts-1234786352/I can already hear folks *****ing about the source being Rolling Stone, but for those that want to hammer me about not seeing the movie (which I was 100% clear about and even conceded that even if the movie is 100% accurate, that doesn't change the questions) take your own advice and read the article. The items to pay attention to have nothing to do with Rolling Stone or the writer, but are direct quotes from people that are experts in this.
