I've been meaning to link to this New Yorker story, "The Countertraffickers," by William Finnegan for a while. But I didn't. I guess I didn't know what I wanted to say about it. The only mention I'd seen of it on some blogs was as an example of biased reporting. Some sex worker activists feel reporting like this, which focuses on sex trafficking, as opposed to, say, the sex workers rights movement, is sensationalist. I feel like too many sex worker activists have this response, that they get all up in arms when reporters profile the negative aspects of sex work, when the bad is part of sex work. It sure isn't all good. Nothing is.
Finnegan is a great writer and terrific reporter, but reading the story, I couldn't help but notice that he didn't really get his story in this case. The story, of course, focuses on human trafficking, sex trafficking in particular, and a woman who works to stop it especially.
"[Stella] Rotaru, who is twenty-six, works for the International Organization for Migration, a group connected to the United Nations, in Chisinau, Moldova. She is a repatriation specialist. Her main task is bringing lost Moldovans home. Nearly all her clients are victims of human trafficking, most of them women sold into prostitution abroad, and their stories pour across her desk in stark vignettes and muddled sagas of desperation, violence, betrayal, and sorrow."
The story is full of facts and stats about global trafficking. Along the way, Finnegan speaks with several women who were trafficked, but he never really gets... and this is where language fails me... any of them to pop, or flip, or however you want to put it. Maybe you have to be a journalist to know what I'm talking about. Or maybe you don't.
Janet Malcolm famously wrote: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible." Her idea is that journalists lull their subjects into a false sense of security, and then we betray them in our texts. And it's true. To a degree. I've thought quite a bit about this in recent years, and these days I feel like every interview is a search for a confession. As journalists, we trick, manipulate, flatter our subjects into confessing. What we do with those confessions is another thing. Why people confess is another.
No woman in Finnegan's story confesses. Not really. "I talked to Maria for hours, although she let her psychotherapist, Alina Budeci, who works for La Strada, tell me about what happened in Turkey. Talking about it was too much like reliving it, she said." As a journalist, you're always looking for that moment in which the subject reveals itself to you. Completely. Totally. Utterly. The story lives and breathes in those moments, and without them, the story is dead. That moment never comes in Finnegan's story. Why? I wonder how much it has to do with the fact that Finnegan is a man, his interviewees are women, and the subject is sex.
It's hard to get someone to confess. It's not just you, and it's not just them. There's also the kind of serendipity that you see in poker. Somebody has to want to confess, and you have to want to hear it, or know how to get it, or the moment is lost. It requires a strange confluence of events outside the control of anyone involved.
A few weeks ago, a source told me about a story. It's a good story. A great story. A story that needs to be told. But I couldn't tell it. The nature of it would put me at risk legally, a risk I couldn't take on as a freelancer. And that made me sort of sad. Because I would have liked to tell the story.
But the story was important and bigger than me, so I gave it to another reporter, who I think will tell it well. But he's a man. And the subject is sex. And many of the sources are women. I talked to him on the phone the other day, and he hadn't met any of the players--the women--yet, and I told him that he had to go and meet them. Because stories like these, well, it's hard to know how to put it, but I said it's like you have to tell them with your body. You have to submerge yourself into the story, and all those writhing fucking bodies, and then write it. Because sex stories are about the body, and sometimes the only way to tell them is by getting up to the elbows in the muck. And if you're a man, and the subject is women, and everything in the story is about fucking, sometimes it gets confusing.
"[S]he lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death..." -- Hélène Cixous
