Investigating Accountability in Trafficking: Lessons from an Award-Winning Series

By Noy Thrupkaew - The story wasn’t new, according to Associated Press international enterprise editor Mary Rajkumar. Forced labor and human trafficking in the Southeast Asian seafood industry was an open secret throughout the region. So why should the AP assign four reporters to more than a year’s worth of work on the story?
“‘What’s new’ is a critical question to ask,” Rajkumar told journalists at this year’s Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans. “But another critical question is, ‘If it isn’t new, then why isn’t anything being done about it?’”

To address that question, the reporters behind the AP’s Pulitzer-winning series uncovered hundreds of men held captive on the island of Benjina, Indonesia; used satellite technology to track ships fleeing detection; and followed one victim, Myint Naing, back to his hometown after he’d been lost to his family for 22 years. Their investigations had significant impact – they helped free 2,000 individuals from exploitation and push U.S. lawmakers to ban the importation of goods made by forced labor.

The AP series offers invaluable lessons to other reporters covering human trafficking. How do we find what’s new? How does questioning the status quo – the seeming intractability of exploitation – change what and how we report?

The AP writers never lost sight of two key factors – they reported with an eye toward accountability, and they brought the story home for their readers. The reporters set powerful stories like Myint’s against a broader backdrop of government corruption, lax laws, and complicit policing. And by following murky supply chains all the way to Western consumers, they provoked profound change. Human-rights and labor activists had been beating the drum about forced labor in the industry for years. But it wasn’t until corporations faced reputational risk from potential consumer outrage – and governments were shamed – that the issue gained real momentum.

I’d like to lay out a few concrete ideas for how other journalists reporting on all forms of human trafficking, including forced prostitution, might harness the approach so powerfully demonstrated by the AP.

1) Treat human trafficking like it’s a beat – because it is. Before the reporting starts, that means:

• familiarizing yourself with the laws that dictate responses to trafficking at the international, federal, and local levels. How is human trafficking defined? More importantly, how do various agencies interpret and enforce their understanding of that definition – particularly with regard to voluntary sex work? Or in terms of their understanding of who victims and perpetrators are (gender, age, and race-wise), and how best to locate them, serve them, or disrupt their activities, respectively?
• understanding that the past isn’t even past. This might seem like an extra-credit enterprise, but it is a fascinating and necessary one that will transform your understanding of the present. Delving into transatlantic slavery and the laws and economic systems that supported it, ‘white slavery,’ the Mann Act, the debates behind the passage of the international anti-trafficking protocol, the U.S. government’s anti-prostitution pledge of 2003 … all of this will lend greater depth and resonance to your reporting. Those who go in deep may find themselves delving into convict leasing, the bracero program, exclusions in the Fair Labor Standards Act … and historians of our trade will find the exploits of the ‘father of investigative journalism’ William T. Stead to be eye-poppingly interesting.
• developing deep sourcing. Approach researchers, lawyers, advocates, prosecutors, police, supply-chain auditors, labor-rights groups who organize workers traditionally excluded from protections like domestic and agricultural workers, survivors of trafficking. Check in with them frequently. For thoughts for interviewing survivors, please see Minh Dang’s tip sheet.
• asking for (and, when necessary, FOIAing) documents and data. For example, if your local police department has conducted a human-trafficking sting operation, ask for the full breakdown of arrest data by offense, gender, and race. Why? Because many PDs claim to operate on the understanding that individuals in the sex trade are victims. Why, then, are women being charged with prostitution offenses in so many of these stings? And why are these women disproportionately women of color? Documents and data can reveal the chasm between what an institution claims it does, and what it actually does.
• abandoning myths. The sooner misinformation like ‘the average age of entry into prostitution is 13,’ and ‘100,000 to 300,000 minors are trafficked into the sex trade every year’ disappears, the better. Read the Washington Post Fact Checker columns for some excellent debunking of these statements and the many others that plague reporting on human trafficking.
• avoiding that same old victim narrative. You know the one – focusing on an innocent young woman’s slow and graphic victimization by a pimp and/or johns. Untethered to an examination of failed or corrupt systems, or from larger societal context, this doesn’t contribute much journalistic value, and indeed may be harmful.

2) So what should you write about? Among story ideas unexplored or under-explored:

• Unintended consequences of anti-trafficking initiatives. How are survivors and/or others in targeted sectors impacted by law-enforcement sweeps or stings, diversion programs like ‘human-trafficking courts,’ or initiatives targeting johns impacting those in the sex trade? How do tighter controls on migration and recruitment affect them? Many survivors have come into the States lawfully, but then fall out of status. How does being undocumented affect their interactions with law enforcement and access to help?
• Investigating inequality. For example, how are transgender individuals impacted by anti-trafficking initiatives? Are they recognized as potential victims? Are they disproportionately criminalized? What is the racial breakdown of women appearing in human-trafficking courts? What is the state of services for trafficked men or boys?
• Whose justice? One potential area of research: A comparison of cases brought to cases closed, and/or an examination of what charges are brought under which statutes.  Comparing criminal convictions to civil restitution, particularly in forced prostitution versus forced labor cases.
  
• Trafficking in supply chains. This work can be quite difficult, but can lead to powerful results. To start, acquaint yourself with databases like Panjiva, which aggregates U.S. Customs data. Those exploring agricultural imports should examine Primus lab food-safety reports, FDA import refusals. Tracking goods imported by ship? Check Port Examiner and Marine Traffic. What are the regulatory agencies that vet your targeted import for compliance with safety codes? How are the rules on the books reflected in the reality of their implementation?
  
• What is working? Reporters could bring the rigor of solutions journalism to anti-trafficking initiatives. If you see excellence in the provision of services, prosecution of cases, or prevention side, what is that group or agency doing right? What makes them particularly effective and why? How are marginalized workers and/or trafficking survivors bringing about change?

3) Ask the questions that hold institutions accountable:

• Lawmakers: Are they passing laws that have a measurable impact on improving survivors’ lives and preventing trafficking? Why or why not? Is there discernible corruption or conflict of interest?
  
• Law enforcement: The majority of trafficking is for non-sexual forced labor, but prosecutions don’t reflect this – most human-trafficking cases focus on forced prostitution. Why? Where is the data with breakdowns (type of forced labor, number of victims, indictments, outcome of case) on a local, federal, and international level? Are there instances of law-enforcement complicity with traffickers? Deportation or detention of victims? Sexual or physical abuse?
  
• Corporations: As with the above, reporters need to ground their stories in an understanding of the law – for example, the laws governing corporate legal responsibility and abuse in the supply chain. Interrogate corporate-social responsibility audits carefully and contrast them with reporting on worker conditions. What mechanisms do corporations have in place to mitigate against exploitation? Are they working? What is their compliance with measures like the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act?
• Nonprofits: Dig deep into the world of anti-trafficking nonprofits. Who are the funders? What is the exact nature of the work? What services are offered to survivors, by whom, and for how long? Follow-up is often negligible – what sorts of tracking do nonprofits have for those being helped? Rate of return to exploitative situations? How are service providers defining terms of engagement and the problem they’re fighting? Keeping track of their activities?
• Government agencies: Does this agency, through its programs, mismanagement of its work, or lack of oversight increase vulnerability to trafficking? What’s going wrong?

4) Rethink the frame.

• Hitting that institutional target often relies on telling a powerful, human story. But in doing so, pick a story that is representative – the anecdote must fit the argument, and it must highlight the specific systemic wrongdoing, corruption, or malpractice you are hoping to expose.
• So few stories about trafficking focus on anything but the most basic narrative – unlucky person gets trafficked, insert horrible details here, rescue by nonprofit or police, smiley emoticon, The End. But who were these people before trafficking? What were the circumstances of their lives? Who are they and how do they understand themselves beyond their trafficking experience? As journalist Melissa Gira Grant writes, survivors are too often depicted as “all bodies, no selves.” What do survivors think – what are their analyses, their critiques, their insights, their demands?
  

Very few pieces talk about what I call “life after happily ever after.” The story of Myint is one such rare example. What sorts of services and supports are there for repatriation, reunification with family? How in/effective is the process of getting a specialized visa for victims of trafficking? How many survivors wind up in low-wage, irregular work that seems just a step above their previous trafficking experience?

Covering trafficking isn’t a one-and-done enterprise. If a law was changed for the better – that’s great, but how will it be implemented? If survivors were freed, will others take their place? There are still other men at sea, still corporations hiding behind plausible deniability, government-law enforcement complicity, and consumers demanding rock-bottom prices. There’s no end to the work. But as the AP series reveals, refusing to accept the inevitability of exploitation can change that very abuse – slowly and bit by bit, one story at a time.

Noy Thrupkaew

Noy Thrupkaew, noyster@gmail.com

Noy Thrupkaew has researched human trafficking and labor exploitation since 2006. A recipient of Open Society Foundation, International Reporting Project, and Fulbright grants, Thrupkaew has reported for the New York Times, The Guardian, and National Geographic, taught journalism at Princeton University, and gave a 2015 TED talk on human trafficking.