“A lone agent is never going to be alone like that with a victim, shuttling them all over the place,” she says, citing protocols that protect victims. Albright, for instance, takes issue with a scene in Sound of Freedom in which Ballard takes a child victim to a burger joint. Some of the liberties with the truth these films take can be chalked up to the demands of fast-paced storytelling. 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. 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. “ 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.” “We want to believe that people trafficking children are unknown, nefarious strangers,” she says. Tim Ballard, Inspiration Behind 'Sound of Freedom,' Quietly Leaves Anti-Trafficking Group “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. 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.
Yet from the movie’s opening montage, which shows surveillance footage of children being snatched by strangers off the streets, Sound of Freedom offers a “false perception” of how the majority of child trafficking actually takes place, according to Albright.Ĭontrary 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). State Department has reported that 600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders per year, with about 50 percent of these cases being children.
Reliable statistics are hard to come by due to the underreported nature of the phenomenon, but the U.S. “Understanding the complexities of this crisis and educating oneself about the reality of child trafficking empowers individuals to make a difference,” the post reads, including a link to anti-trafficking resources like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.Īs the post notes, child trafficking is a very real and extremely serious problem, in part because it is so difficult to track. Yet one demographic has expressed concern about the film’s tremendous popularity: the anti-child trafficking experts who Sound of Freedom is ostensibly about. Such criticism hasn’t stopped people from flocking to theaters: to date, Sound of Freedom has grossed $40 million at the box office, with many of its defenders framing it as yet another lightning rod in the culture wars and accusing mainstream theaters of suppressing the film (the CEO of AMC, for his part, has denied this, calling such rumors “really bizarre”). The movie, with its central narrative about a former Homeland Security agent (Caviezel) embarking on a high-stakes mission to rescue children from a Colombian trafficking ring, has drawn criticism for its self-serious tone, its star’s promotion of conspiracy theories, and its dubious source material (Caviezel plays a fictionalized version of Tim Ballard, the founder of the anti-trafficking organization Operation Underground Railroad, which has been accused of embellishing some of its more extreme claims, which they have denied). When Sound of Freedom, the new Jim Caviezel thriller about child trafficking, was released in theaters last week, it garnered mixed reviews, to say the least.
0 kommentar(er)
