By Musikilu Mojeed
July 7 -- The United Nations says that the world’s media coverage in reporting human trafficking is woeful.
The topic was the focus of a panel held last month in New York and organized by the UN Office for Drugs and Crime, the United States Mission to the UN and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
“You asked me how I will rate media performance,” said under secretary-general Antonio Mario Costa, executive director of the UN Office for Drugs and Crime. “I don’t think at this point it is either A or B. It’s maybe a C or even less than that.” Costa was responding to a question by the panel’s moderator, Lynn Sherr, a former ABC correspondent and now a blogger with The Daily Beast.
“I believe that the media needs to be able to mobilize society at large against human trafficking,” Costa said. “This is not happening. The media has failed to create a sense of anger in the population.”
12 Million People Trafficked
Prostitution in Havana, Cuba. According to a recent report from the UN, some 80 percent of human trafficking is sexual exploitation. Unicef Photo |
Human trafficking is a huge global problem, said Nan Kennelly, deputy director at the US Department of State’s office to monitor and combat trafficking in persons, at a separate briefing recently in New York. And UN agencies, governments and nongovernmental organizations are working to eradicate it and punish traffickers. In 2009, about 50,000 victims were identified worldwide with more than 4,000 traffickers successfully prosecuted, according to the State Department’s 10th annual trafficking report, released on June 14.
The media has also focused on the problem, sensitizing the public on the menace, uncovering trafficking rings and highlighting the sufferings of victims. Indeed, the panel consisted of Costa and journalists who have covered the topic.
Guy Jacobson, a filmmaker and activist, recently received the US State Department’s Global Hero Award for his efforts fighting child sex trafficking. His latest film, “Holly,” which explored sex trafficking in Cambodia, premiered in New York City in June.
Mike McGraw, a reporter for The Kansas City Star, was part of a team that produced an award-winning series in 2009 that exposed the flaws in US efforts against trafficking and slavery.
Benjamin Skinner, a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute, has published an investigative book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face With Modern-Day Slavery.”
And Noy Thrupkaew, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, has written on trafficking for The Guardian, The Nation and The American Prospect.
Costa said at the panel discussion that the work done by these journalists and others had not been far reaching enough to rouse societies to action. He wants the media to assume an advocacy role and mobilize people to shoot down the crime with every resource possible.
Not a Smart Argument
But Claus Mueller, a journalist and professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York, said that Costa’s comments were “naïve and lacking in intelligence.”
“Though journalists can certainly be advocates if the objective base of their reporting permits so,” Mueller said in an e-mail to UNA-USA, “You cannot assign to them the priori role of advocates. That is a personal decision.”
George Daniels, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, also defended the media, saying that Costa should not blame journalists for failing to attract enough media attention to this cause.
“The media reflect the realities of society,” Daniels said in a telephone interview. “There are very many important issues in societies and advocates of certain causes have to work hard to claim media attention.”
Like Costa, Like CdeBaca
Luis CdeBaca, an ambassador at large who directs the US State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, also spoke at the panel, rating the media low on the subject.
“When I was at the Justice Department, there were times when I had to keep explaining to people that no, you can’t come and write about it as we rescue these women because the last thing they need is to have a camera on their face,” CdeBaca said.
Some journalists on the panel agreed with Costa and CdeBaca on some points. The Schuster Institute, for one, asked the moderator to read a statement from its office to the audience, accusing the media of failing to “report thoroughly and accurately” on the subject. And Thrupkaew of The Nation condemned how some journalists who write on human trafficking “mine the psyche of the traumatized for salacious details.”
Throughout the discussion, Sherr supported her profession. “I think we will all agree that the reporters here have done an extraordinarily good job in exposing the truth of what we are talking about,” she said at the end of the event. “I think we should do this again because we deserve better than a pass or fail. We deserve better than a C.”
Musikilu Mojeed,an intern in the UNA-USA Publications Department, is an International Ford Foundation Fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and has written for newspapers in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria.
Keywords: human trafficking, slavery, UN Office for Drugs and Crime, Luis CdeBaca, Antonio Mario Costa
World Bulletin | July 7, 2010
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