Covering sex trafficking: Journalists can do better
Scholars want to nuance how journalists cover sex trafficking, the most common form of modern-day slavery but an issue that the media still grapples with.
By Lene Sillesen
When journalist David McSwane pitched a story about sex trafficking in minors to his editors at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in 2012, they were skeptical. As one of his colleagues put it: “People don’t want to read about sex with children when they’re eating their food.”
To McSwane, that comment later resonated with a more general attitude toward the issue. “It was almost a microcosm of what’s happening as a society. We don’t want to look at it because it’s uncomfortable,” he said.
But McSwane started doing some research and found that the media’s coverage of sex trafficking was simplistic and full of misunderstandings. The stories were usually spun around the same clichés about young girls who got into drugs and trouble, he said: “I thought to myself, nothing is that simple. That narrative is incongruous to what is actually happening in the individual lives of these girls or boys.”
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“If most coverage is crime, people think it requires law and order solutions, such as increased police and punishment,” Friedman said. A simplified explanation of a very complex issue that neglects other solutions to the problem – these could include more shelters or a decreased workload for social workers, she added. In contrast, the researchers determined that only 16% of the coverage treated sex trafficking as a human rights issue.