Hank Nuwer, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
The influence of lobbying groups and the media on the law-making process in the United States with selected examples of offenses to the detriment of minors and crimes of human trafficking.
Crimes against victims regularly attract headlines in the United States. Newspaper editors judge articles about violent crimes as newsworthy and place them on the front and feature pages. Likewise, in television news, multimedia stories depicting violent behavior and assaults against persons dominate TV news programs. A philosophy of “If it bleeds, it leads,” governs story selection during a television sweeps month when auditors assign ratings to U.S. TV stations.
Many print and TV stories involving criminal violence endured by victims are fleeting in importance because they are insufficiently researched, sourced and vetted. They emphasize the news formula elements of who, what, where, but ignore the analytical why and how elements. Cursory media coverage seldom spurs legislators to propose legislative bills.
However, many distinguished media outlets do pursue the why and how elements when covering victim stories “in-depth.” Their journalists possess an ethical mandate to tell stories that matter in a democratic society, as well as to editorialize on societal issues that need addressing. Distinguished reporting with verifiable facts helps create a public agenda for Congress and states to create or to reform legislation. One such groundbreaking and influential series on human trafficking was “Girls Next Door” by Peter Landesman in The New York Times Magazine of Jan. 25, 2004.
For example, influential media treat the subject of human trafficking as the complex issue it truly is, and not as the simple issue that Hollywood thrillers and tabloid publications make it out to be. According to Rachel Martin and Amy Farrell, authors of “Human Trafficking and Media in the United States: “Human trafficking involves immigration and migration concerns, economic inequality concerns, and human rights and gender rights violations to a criminal activity, but it is [often] framed in the media as simply a crime or a transnational security threat.”
The complex societal issues of environmental factors, socioeconomic realities, nationalism, and refugee displacement are much harder to address than stereotypical bad-guy stories, making the discussion of trafficking within these complex frames less popular and less likely to resonate with the public compared to the simpler crime frame theme that can be summarized in a single Twitter tweet.
[Media and Lawmakers]
Thus, the present paper considers the impact of U.S. media—primarily the work of investigative journalists—on the introduction of criminal and civil legal solutions put forth by congress and individual states. Of particular interest, given the scope of the present conference’s agenda, is media coverage regarding crimes against victims, including slavery and human trafficking, specifically the exploitation of a child or adult for illegal sexual commerce or for coerced captive labor. Dogged reporting by crusading reporters is crucial to help society prevent and fight crime, as well as compassionately to address the needs of victims.
[Crime of the Century and Legislation: 1932]
Historically, perhaps the best known, notorious public crime ultimately leading to a stern federal law and numerous similar state statutes was the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., 18-month-old son of the iconic aviator-adventurer and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a celebrated author, from the couple’s second-floor nursery in Hopewell, New Jersey.
Circumstantial evidence tying a former German soldier-turned-carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptman to some of the ransom money, as well as testimony by handwriting experts dissecting ransom notes, led to Hauptman’s conviction and execution. While some coverage of his trial was probing journalism of the best kind, much was tawdry. For example, a famous, sensationalist columnist and radio commentator named Walter Winchell agitated for a vigilante-type execution prior to trial, and notorious publisher William Randolph Hearst paid for Hauptman’s defense attorney in exchange for exclusive access to interviews with Mrs. Hauptman. The courtroom and media circus—including a movie theater newsreel video camera and some 120 photographers vaulting onto tables for more advantageous shots of witnesses——prompted New York Times special correspondent Edna Ferber in January, 1935 to condemn Hauptman’s raucous trial as “an affront to civilization.”
Nonetheless, the media coverage of the abduction led Congress to pass important federal legislation regarding the crime of kidnapping, particularly with regard to the taking of a baby or juvenile.
Specifically, the 72nd U.S. Congress passed the 1932 Lindbergh Law (AKA The Federal Kidnapping Act 18 U.S.C. § 1201) that noted similar crimes to the Lindbergh kidnaping that included transporting a victim past state lines, could result in punishment as severe as execution. In addition, some states adopted “Little Lindbergh Laws” followed passage of the federal law; these covered cases in which accused kidnappers did not cross state lines.
Also of interest, the media circus that was the Hauptman trial led to the state of New Jersey banning cameras from the courtroom in 1935.
[The Times Are Changing: 1932-2019]
Flash forward to 2019. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1968 that the federal law on kidnapping no longer was an automatic capital offense but instead recommended life imprisonment for the accused upon conviction. Cameras eventually were allowed in courtrooms and today often routinely are present at trial.
But the times and circumstances have changed from the Lindbergh baby kidnapping during the Great Depression to today’s stories in the U.S. about human traffickers operating in every city of any size. The most publicized kidnapping cases back in the Roaring Twenties involved victimizing of wealthy parents and were motivated by an abductor’s greedy expectations of ransom money.
Today, most abduction involves children being taken by a non-custodial parent, a category not included in the Lindbergh federal law, and while abductions with an expected ransom in return continue in the U.S, at present, data indicates they occur less often as the disturbing kidnappings-for-ransom that certain nations of Africa now endure, including victim snatching by Isis and Boko Haram.
Nearly 90 years after the Lindbergh homicide the nationwide scourge of trafficking dominates the news and passage of more and more legislative reform by the U.S. and European Union seems assured. For what is true is that the media exists on replication. Let one newspaper or TV station break a notorious story about victimization and all others will cover that same story even while adding their own spin on events.
[Put Trafficking Victims First Act: Under Review, 2019]
At present, media coverage of abductions with victims abused as slave workers and/or abused for human sex trafficking has coincided with legislation proposed by Karen Bass, a Democratic representing California in the House of Representatives, and co-sponsor Ann Wagner, an HR Republican from Missouri. Their H.R. 507 “Put Trafficking Victims First Act,” passed by overwhelming majority in the House and is now under review in 2019 by a Senate Committee.
Almost without exception, reputable U.S. media outlets have endorsed H.R. 507. For example the Rochester [New York] Democrat & Chronicle endorsed H.R. 507 without reservation. “The Put Trafficking Victims First Act will draw more attention to human trafficking, help the nation to understand where it happens, and help victims recover after being trafficked,” noted the newspaper.
At the same time, the Rochester paper highlighted the five-count conviction of trafficker Stephen Jones, 30, who U.S. Attorney Melissa Marangola termed “the worst sex trafficker that this district has seen.” Sentenced to 25 years in prison, Jones beat, threatened, tattooed and, alternatively, sweet-talked women and young girls into sexual encounters with as many as 15 clients daily.
[Reliable media coverage is a must]
Unfortunately, not all media are reliable conduits of human trafficking news. Certainly the need is there for news outlets to interview experts, prosecutors, lawyers, law enforcement and qualified journalists to debunk stereotyped portrayals of victims and to give victims a voice in news coverage. Media audiences need to demand accurate news coverage of the problem and for media to recognize that the most scientific means must be employed by reformers to combat the societal plague of human trafficking.
For example, increasingly, for media audiences to get a truer picture of trafficking, what’s needed are reliable database numbers on victims of both commercial sex trafficking and slave labor trafficking, multimedia coverage of such issues, and editorial commentaries based on fact and information from informed sources–not supposition and coverage gleaned from sources that are fonts of misinformation. Too often estimates of the number of human trafficking victims tend to be exaggerated by activists eager to convince media and legislators of their cause’s worth. Even data supplied by experts may be of dubious worth owing to methods used by researchers to define, categorize and gather meaningful data on trafficking victims.
[The Need for Reliable Data]
Precise data on the number of child victims entrapped by trafficking is a must-have in the future, however, for media reporting, and one goal of H.R. 507 is to provide the means for collection of this vital data. Without exact numbers, the news lacks factual clout as it employs mere estimates. In other words, the number of human trafficking victims past and present could be underreported or overestimated. One reliable estimate is that suspected human trafficking cases soared in one recent year, 2015-2016, according to data kept by the National Human Trafficking Hotline. As with other types of crimes involving victims, it is often hard to say whether the rise can be attributed to more criminal cases or to increased awareness due to reports in traditional, web and social media.
[H.R. 507: Other Intentions of the Bill]
Another intention of H.R. 507’s sponsors is to train prosecutors and victim service providers, as well as to form a working group composed of law enforcement, trafficking experts and victims. This is so important, note activists, because they can point to case after case in which trafficking victims, many minors, are charged by prosecutors and police with prostitution and similar crimes, particularly if the abused take violent actions themselves against those abusing them.
Instead of mandatory long sentencing to keep victims caught in criminal acts such as prostitution in prison, H.R. 507 favors rehabilitation services for those trafficked to help them forge new lives instead of floundering and reverting back to their former tortured existences.
[FOSTA and SESTA: 2018]
The most hotly debated anti-trafficking legislation in recent memory is the House’s FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and Congress’s now-passed SESTA bill (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act). Newspaper columnists have praised the bills as a way to combat those posting ads explicitly for prostitution by making platforms and Internet Service Providers liable and responsible for the postings. On the other hand, many in the media such as the popular site Vox have crusaded against FOSTA and SESTA, which rapidly shut down a number of prominent sites such as Craigslist Personals. Vox blasted the bill as a threat to First Amendment and Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Act. At this writing, the debate between proponents and opponents of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act continues unabated.
Lobbying in Congress for and against the so-called reform bills is a definite reality. Craigslist, for example, spent $260,000 in 2018 alone on lobbying, according to Opensecrets.org.
[Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000]
Recent legislation has demonstrated or almost demonstrated a paradigm shift in the attitudes of lawmakers toward trafficking victims, much of it attributable to the efforts of activists and crusading journalists—many of the latter that also reversed their positions on trafficking victims arrested for prostitution and similar crimes. In short, victims were viewed as victims, not as criminals as reprehensible as the thugs who had kidnapped them and lived off their ill-gotten earnings.
One important legislative breakthrough occurred in 2000 with passage of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (which since has been amended and renamed The William Wilberforce Trafficking Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008).
The Trafficking Victims Protection Act was a landmark event in that it and its successors followed up on extensive media coverage with legal reforms pertaining to two types of trafficking. The first type was sex trafficking “induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act is younger than 18,” according to a 2018 statement by the National Council of State Legislatures. The second was labor trafficking, “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery,” according to the NCSL.
Important to know that in some cases state laws precede a similar federal law, and sometimes a federal law precedes laws passed by individual states. Following passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, all 50 USA state legislatures approved similar statutes of their own.
[Trafficking in Persons (TIP) scorecard]
As previously noted, the U.S. for a long time prosecuted persons forced or coerced into prostitution as if they were criminals instead of victims.
That policy began to change with the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000. That law has been updated a number of times, including a 2019 resolution expanding the U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) scorecard.
The way the TIP scorecard works is that all world nations get assigned to one of three categories by the U.S, State Department on an evaluation of each country’s anti-trafficking programs. The lowest Tier 3 level may see its U.S. aid cut (if it has been receiving such moneys).
[Freed at Last: 2019]
In the case of sex trafficking, particularly in cases where victims, some under 18, are convicted of crimes and sentenced for many decades, the media has played an important role in changing the mindset of prosecutors and public alike. In many cases, print and TV reporters find themselves educated on such issues because of the dogged activism of Hollywood celebrities such as Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West who have adopted the issue of unreasonable sentencing for trafficking victims and made the issue a media cause célèbre.
Perhaps no other trafficking victim adopted by Rihanna and Kardashian West has so claimed the attention and support of the media as Cyntoia Brown. These entertainers began their campaign in 2017 to free the incarcerated Brown—in many ways the classic abused victim who had been manipulated by pimp Garion “Cut Throat” McGlothen prior to his death.
As a teenager Brown had been offered no opportunity for social services for which she was entitled due to her attorney’s lack of knowledge about victim services. Instead, she was tried and convicted of killing a 43-year-old John as he slept, resulting in a mandatory Tennessee state sentence of 51 years without parole possibility. “The system has failed,” Kardashian tweeted in a message widely repeated in social and traditional media. “It’s heartbreaking to see a young girl trafficked[,] then when she has the courage to fight back is jailed for life! We have to do better & do what’s right.”
In January of 2019, then Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam ignored a ruling by the Tennessee Supreme Court to keep Brown full term in prison. He commuted the then 30-year-old Brown’s sentence to the 14 years already served, citing her youth and victim status at the time of the homicide, as well as her rehabilitation and pursuit of a college education while in prison.
Brown’s release, heavily covered by most major U.S. media, has opened the floodgates for new and proposed legislation. If H.R. 507 passes in the Senate and President Trump signs, which seems likely, it would go a long way toward ending a longstanding practice of state courts trying child sex-trafficking victims as adults in murder cases and jailing them upon conviction for many decades without possibility of parole.
An influential advocacy group, Ohio Justice and Policy Center (OJPC), which has been quoted millions of times by mainstream media, stresses that cases such as Brown’s are too numerous to ignore. Moreover, OJPC offers evidence that many teenage victims, predominantly females, never had the opportunity to enter existing programs meant to rehabilitate teens rather than try them as adults and incarcerate them for decades.
As of June 2019, state bills influenced by activists and the proposed federal reform act have been introduced in Nevada, Arkansas and Hawaii, that would reform current draconian measures that now place juveniles in prisons as adults in cases where those convicted kill the person or persons abusing them.
[Putting a Victim’s Face to Legislation]
The family of deceased victims often must fight alone, but not always. With media exposure, many families of victims were introduced to potential followers and crucial financial backing.
Quite often, when a pet cause results in state or federal legislation being adopted, the passed bill bears the name of the victim. Local and national media respond favorably to such personification, as does the general public. In common parlance, this puts a victim’s face on legislation.
Examples abound of victims whose identities have become household names after widespread media attention and savvy lobbying by families and supporters led to the passage of bills.
–Thus, when Congress passed the Jacob Wetterling Act, the law establishing a sexual offender registry, his family and its foundation found an important way to keep his legacy alive after the Minnesota schoolboy was sexually assaulted and killed by a local deviant. The 1989 crime was solved in 2015 when a criminal charged with ownership of child pornography on his computer then confessed to Jacob’s murder in hopes of gaining favorable court treatment.
–Megan’s Law is the name given to federal legislation in honor of Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old raped and murdered by a repeat sex offender. The highly publicized New Jersey case not only spurred Congress into passing the bill giving authorities the right to make public all notable information on sex offenders, but it also led to numerous state laws titled, informally, Megan’s Law.
–One of the most recognizable names is that of Adam Walsh who was murdered and beheaded in 1981 after being abducted from a Florida shopping mall. Thanks to the notoriety of the documentary Adam in 1983, as well as the fact his advocate father John Walsh evolved from grieving parent into the host of two Hollywood crime shows, Congress passed the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act in 2006. The legislation created a publicly accessible database of sex offenders, as well as increasing criminal penalties for those convicted of sexually assaulting a child.
[Seafood for Slaves: 2018 Journalism Pulitzer Prize for Public Service]
Human trafficking that enslaves men and women in forced or coerced labor is, of course, equally as repulsive as human sex trafficking, but because access to the victims is either limited or non-existent, the sheer volume of quality investigative journalism devoted to the important human rights issue for too long was insufficient to grab the attention of lawmakers. That awareness may have begun to be achieved after the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service went to the Associated Press for its searing “Seafood from Slaves” investigation of more than two thousand Southeast Asian workers catching and processing fish and shrimp for sale in such notable outlets as Wal-Mart, Costco, Whole Foods, and Dollar General.
The series caused union seafood workers to organize protests and for a small army of activists to beseech members of Congress, particularly in states such as Hawaii where work slavery for too long had managed to get around existing laws on a technicality. The series also exposed the country of Thailand as an arrogant scofflaw nation in flagrant violation of all international protection acts in its contemptible treatment of seafood slaves that turned a blind eye to the realities of the victims’ health, safety, and appalling living conditions.
To get the story, four courageous female reporters uncovered slaves (mainly) from Myanmar kept in forced captivity, outwitted and outran thugs pursuing them, and connected the caught and processed fish to corporate seafood and pet companies. The upshot of the award-winning series is that these two thousand slaves were released.
Unfortunately, with seafood profits an important revenue source for states such as Hawaii and corporations with deep lobbying pockets, and without an attractive victim to be the “face” of the seafood scandal, it remains to be seen if state and federal legislation will one day eliminate the widespread, lucrative seafood human rights abuses.
The seafood industry is hardly the only U.S. industry dependent on slave labor. Journalists, for example, long have reported how Florida’s tomato workers often are slaves who not only labor impossibly long hours to benefit unscrupulous growers, but often are subjected to sexual assaults, beatings and reprisals if they protest.
Of importance, authors Rachel Austin and Amy Farrell have concluded this: “…Sex trafficking may be easier to cover in a news story because it provides a clear and simple violation of the law, whereas labor trafficking cases are more complex and are often debated as civil issues and not law enforcement issues. Whatever the specific cause of media bias, labor trafficking cases have remained largely invisible to the public because of underrepresentation in the media.”
[In Conclusion]
The compassionate aims of recent bills such as H.R. 507 are a far cry from decades of draconian punishments for trafficked victims that were arrested while performing the wishes of those true criminals who controlled, beat, and manipulated them. An oft-cited example of poor legislation approved by the U.S. Congress was the ill-advised 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That well-intentioned but flawed President Bill Clinton administration law, note activists, not only punished girls and women caught in the trafficking net, but also imposed unreasonably long prison terms for relatively minor drug offenses. Many states such as Tennessee not only adopted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act but their state legislators tacked minimum and mandatory sentences even longer than the federal legislation.
Indeed, the one lesson that the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act taught society is that the one thing worse than no law at all is a bad law strictly enforced.
Franklin College Professor Hank Nuwer is the author of numerous books, including “Hazing: Destroying Young Lives” (2018).
Works Cited
- Barnett, “Dividing Women: The Framing of Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation in Magazines,” Feminist Media Studies, 16 (2), 205-222 (2015).
Rachel Martin and Amy Farrell, “Human Trafficking and Media in the United States,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Criminology and Criminal Justice, April 2017. Accessed June 1-5, 2019 at Http://Oxfordre.com.