Like many others at the turn of the year, I have a new year’s resolution. My resolution is to be less sensational. That may sound like a weird resolution, but it has to do with who HFJ serves. We exist to provide free primary care to victims and survivors of human trafficking and also to remove the barriers that this population faces in receiving that care. One barrier many may not initially think or know about is the sensationalism of some human trafficking stories.

A recent peer-reviewed medical journal article has done an amazing job at explaining how conspiracy theories, particularly those that rely on sensational (and mostly false) stories of human trafficking end up mobilizing “gendered, racist, and xenophobic manifestations of trafficking victimization as well as problematic heroism responses to trafficking.” The false narrative of this disinformation shapes how the public identifies and responds to trafficking.

Stated another way, when the view of what constitutes trafficking is conflated

with one specific image, then unintended barriers arise to properly providing services to human trafficking survivors as well as for this patient population to access said services.

I encourage you to take fifteen minutes to read the article. To understand how branding a sensationalized false narrative of what the majority of true human trafficking cases look like will invalidate “the lived and professional contributions made by survivors of labor and sex trafficking.” Additionally, “[i]t tokenizes and sensationalizes real trauma while simultaneously appropriating the anti-trafficking movement for political incentives.” In other words, the majority of human trafficking victims and survivors locally and globally, who do not fit the sensational image on social or mainstream media but instead are part of populations that have been marginalized by local and global systemic inequalities (such as immigrants, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, etc), will lose out.

- Dr. Walls