Barbara Friedman

Framing the problem of sex trafficking: whose problem? what remedy?

News media play an important role in explaining the issue of sex trafficking and may influence discourse among the public and policymakers. Understanding the ways that mass media address sex trafficking has implications for the news industry and the global status of women. This study, a quantitative content analysis, analyzed news coverage of sex trafficking in major US newspapers to understand how the issue was framed during a year of coverage. Using Entmans typology to classify the function of frames, the study focused on how news coverage defined the problem of sex trafficking and identified the remedy. The study found that news coverage of trafficking was overwhelmingly framed as a crime issue (episodic not thematic) and proposed no remedies. Most news coverage favored official sources. Survivors of trafficking and their advocates were the least heard-from sources. The authors argue ultimately that if media are to fulfill their watchdog role where trafficking is concerned, a wider range of news frames and sources is needed.

Unlikely Warriors: How Four U.S. News Sources Explained Female Suicide Bombers

With their post-9/11 emphasis on international conflict, the U.S. news media have noted womens involvement with terrorism and tried to explain the motives of female suicide bombers. This qualitative study examined the motive explanations in broadcast and print news from 2002, when a woman detonated a suicide bomb in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, through October 2004, after Chechen women participated in the Beslan school siege. The study found five motive explanations: strategic desirability, the influence of men, revenge, desperation, and liberation. The study considers how news coverage of suicide bombers reinforces or challenges popular beliefs about women and war.

Standpoint in Political Blogs: Voice, Authority, and Issues

In 2005, political commentator Susan Estrich rebuked Michael Kinsley, then-editor of the Los Angeles Times, for excluding women from the newspaper’s editorial pages. She argued that Kinsley neither solicited nor published women’s opinions on substantive issues and cited as just one example, a three-day period in which only one of the newspaper’s twenty-five opinion pieces was contributed by a woman (Estrich). In Kinsley’s defense, some journalists and bloggers insisted women were not writing about politics (Goldstein; Sullivan), something that others disputed. “The tiny universe of political-opinion writers includes plenty of women who hold their own with men,” wrote Katha Pollitt, who then named seventeen of them. That (white) men dominate commentary in major media outlets is an oft-repeated charge, and indeed, an examination of commentary in traditional and new media (Johnston, Friedman, and Peach) confirmed the white male monopoly cited by Estrich, Pollitt, and others (Dowd; Zimmerman). The same research also refuted the notion that women do not or cannot write knowledgably about politics; commentary by women was plentiful on the Internet, particularly among blogs. Indeed, most bloggers are women (Lenhart and Fox), and many feminists have hailed the Internet for providing a forum more hospitable than

Framing an Emerging Issue: How U.S. Print and Broadcast News Media Covered Sex Trafficking, 2008–2012

Sex trafficking has increasingly become a topic on the public and political agenda. This study revealed that coverage of sex trafficking in U.S. print and broadcast media from 2008–2012 was largely episodic, focused on crime and policy frames, privileged official sources, and neglected survivors’ voices. However, findings suggest a shift toward thematic framing as the issue became more widely understood by the public and policymakers.

“The Soldier Speaks”: Yank Coverage of Women and Wartime Work

Abstract During World War II, the U.S. government undertook a massive propaganda effort to alter public perceptions of working women, as critics charged their employment was a threat to the social fabric of American society, and an obstacle to job-seeking veterans. Mass media was the arbiter of public opinion, and while much of the commentary was offered on behalf of enlisted men, soldiers′ opinions were rarely represented. This study considers the ways that Yank, a World War II-era armed services weekly, depicted womens wartime employment at a time when public sentiment was strongly opposed to it. How did Yank convey soldiers′ attitudes on the subject, and how might its content have fit into a larger propaganda effort aimed at recruiting women for industrial work while instructing them to maintain their femininity? The study finds that while women figured significantly in the pages of the journal, Yank made womens work a “non-issue” for soldiers. The topic was given short shrift in nearly every part of the journal: letters to the editor, news from the home front and feature articles, for example. When it did broach the subject, Yank suggested a return to pre-war gender roles was inevitable.

Sex Trafficking as a News Story: Evolving Structure and Reporting Strategies

ABSTRACT This quantitative content analysis uses sex trafficking as a case study to understand how news reporting techniques evolve as a social problem emerges on the public agenda. Results indicate that as news organizations became more experienced in covering trafficking and the public made more aware of trafficking as a social issue, journalists moved from routines that favored official perspectives and frames that concentrated on individuals, to the sociocultural level, in which knowledgeable sources attempted to explain why trafficking occurs, and to an institutional level, in which strategies for intervention were proposed and debated. In this way, the newsworthiness of trafficking is sustained.

Conclusion: What Can We Do About Mediated Misogyny?

We conclude with a series of questions and answers about how different stakeholders can help combat mediated misogyny and contribute to a safer world: digital platforms, journalism, the law, and universities. Experts in each of these fields present tangible advice, ethics, and guidelines for changing systems of power and challenging misogyny.

Editors’ Note: Introduction to the Special Issue

Media are a primary source of information for the public about human trafficking. Yet for media practitioners, the representation of trafficking is fraught with risk. In entertainment media, for example, it may be difficult to engage a content-weary audience and at the same time avoid stereotypes. In news media, it may be difficult to cover accurately an issue that has no reliable statistics to evidence magnitude, a basic determinant of newsworthiness, or to “humanize” a story (another expectation of news producers and audiences) about trafficking when a journalist cannot gain access to a survivor for an interview. These challenges to media hail from a range of circumstances, some beyond the practitioner’s control: genre conventions, a saturated information ecosystem, whirlwind deadlines, and shrinking newsroom resources, to name a few. These obstacles are not insurmountable, however, as indicated by several noteworthy incidents. For instance, The Associated Press was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its deeply researched series on trafficking and labor abuses in the Thai fishing industry (Associated Press, 2016); a Texas Tribune series on sex trafficking and the failure of that state’s child-welfare system helped spur a last-minute budget change by lawmakers to help trafficking victims (Smith, Satija, & Walters, 2017); a series by the Center for Investigative Reporting about sexual exploitation in the pot-farming industry was a finalist for a national award and motivated a series of community interventions and preventive programs (Walter, 2016); and the film “I Am Jane Doe” (Mazzio, 2017) has been heralded at film festivals and become a valuable tool to illustrate the unintended consequences of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (e.g., Jackman, 2017; Lee, 2017). These sorts of media productions “have ... become powerful vectors of the global distribution of the trafficking and ‘modern slavery’ rhetoric,” wrote Andrijasevic and Mai (2016, p. 1). But, too often, media messages “offer simplistic solutions to complex issues without challenging the structural and causal factors of inequality. Through fictional and narrow representations of ideal victims they tend to entrench racialized narratives and conflate all sex work with trafficking, which legitimates criminalizing policies and interventions exacerbating the social vulnerability of sex workers” (para. 1, p. 1). And, as Brennan (2005) has observed, “Researchers on trafficking find themselves writing on an issue that has been sensationalized, misrepresented, and politicized” (p. 36). Those same frustrations, however, can also serve as a call for research that focuses on the role of media in human trafficking. As a nascent subfield, media and human trafficking offers excellent opportunities for productive interdisciplinary collaborations that explain (not excuse) the ways media, broadly construed, are implicated in all facets of human trafficking. Already, media have found their way into trafficking-related scholarship—as material objects of study, such as organizational brochures about trafficking prevention (Kaufman & Crawford, 2011) and mobile technology (Elliott & McCartan, 2013); and as a process of meaning-making (Pajnik, 2010; Sobel, 2016) and agenda-setting (Gulati, 2011; Marchionni, 2012; Meriläinen & Vos, 2011; Wallinger, 2010), to cite a few examples. Further, scholars have shown how media technologies (Musto & Boyd, 2014) and the laws that govern them (Perer, 2012) facilitate and disrupt trafficking. In journals as varied as Violence Against Women, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Criminal Justice, and Celebrity Studies, for example, scholars have examined the ways that images and information about trafficking make their way through media into the public sphere and onto political agendas. The Journal of Human Trafficking and The Anti-Trafficking Review, both founded in the last 5 years, JOURNAL OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING 2018, VOL. 4, NO. 1, 1–5 https://doi.org/10.1080/23322705.2017.1423442

Veiled Threats: Decentering and unification in transnational news coverage of the French veil ban

In October 2010, France approved a law banning the Islamic veil in all public areas, asserting the republican principle of laicité. This cross-cultural analysis applies Muhlmanns theoretical framework to French and US news coverage from March 2004 to October 2010 in order to discern whether coverage featured unifying frames invoking shared values; or decentering frames challenging consensual views and presenting alternative contexts.

Introduction: Thinking through the challenges of new media studies

A cursory survey of job postings in media studies around the world will tell you that “new media”—in its rhizomic manifestations—is the current “celebrity” in our field. As we embrace the study of new technology, it is certainly necessary to consider the role that feminism can, and should, play within new media studies. It might be useful to contextualize this need for a consistent feminist approach to new media through Sherry B. Ortner, who, almost four decades ago, wrote that a