Social Journalism Begins with Listening and Thrives on Engagement
--
My work and other takeaways this year at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism.
I recently boarded a plane destined for Columbus, Ohio to teach a creative writing workshop. That’s where I met Vangie. Not too long ago, someone passing by her standing on the corner of South 22nd Street and Bryden Road might have assumed she was a prostitute. But the truth is, she is a victim of sex trafficking. Today she is a survivor and this is her six-word story.
Last January when I began CUNY’s social journalism graduate program, it coincided with Human Trafficking Awareness month. My Twitter feed was streaming with stories about young girls being trafficked during major sporting events like the Super Bowl and children being traded for sex in Upstate New York by their parents to feed their addiction to opioids. While these stories are true, I didn’t come across a single one like Vangie’s. To understand why, let’s begin with some context.
Sex Trafficking in New York
New York is a hub for human trafficking in the United States. The overlap of the commercial sex trade and sex trafficking creates a conundrum for law enforcement tasked with policing prostitution and protecting adults and children forced into sexual servitude. On the surface, a willing sex worker and a sex trafficking victim may appear indistinguishable. Further complicating this is many victims’ unwillingness to disclose to the police that they are being trafficked. They are more likely to keep silent because their exploiter has masterfully manipulated them to equally fear and love them. And once the criminal justice system deems a victim guilty of prostitution, the ripples of negative impact can stretch far into the future.
Meanwhile the mainstream conversation about sex trafficking perpetuates a consistent survivor story, but the reality is much more complex. Seven months ago when I began researching sex trafficking, I was naïve. It’s hard not to be when the media, Hollywood and even advocates portray the emblematic story of a young girl being taken by a ominous villain and chained to a bed in a dark basement.
Tragically, these stories do happen. Yet the more common story is much less sensational. After interviewing survivors and stakeholders across all sectors, I started to understand why there is a bias in emphasizing the most extreme and violent stories. I believe it’s to gain our empathy and motivate the apathetic into taking action against human trafficking. While this may be well-intended, amplifying the rare stories eclipses the majority and skews the public’s perception of this scourge on our society.
As my awareness of these issues and complexities upholding sex trafficking grew over the last year, so did my ability to apply key social journalism principles and practices to serving my community. These principles were foundational in establishing a connection to survivors and ultimately engaging them in workshops to crowdsource their stories and amplify their voices.
Social Journalism Principles Lead to Impact
Listening
To understand the needs of my community, I needed to listen to survivors and that required having access to them. Like other vulnerable communities, journalists and those outside of the community are often distrusted. This was one of the major challenges I faced throughout the year and it relied on many of the other principles of social journalism such as establishing trust, immersion and empathy to begin to make progress.
My first opportunity to speak directly to survivors and hear them tell their stories and share their perspective on the issues impacting sex trafficking was while attending a conference in Philadelphia led by survivors and service providers. Another opportunity happened unexpectedly when one of my sources introduced me to a survivor who also happened to be a colleague. Our conversation that day opened my eyes to an entirely unrealized reality of sex trafficking that greatly changed my understanding of the biggest issues and shifted my focus from child sex trafficking to mainly adult women.
During the year I also listened to survivors by attending another conference, watching documentaries featuring survivors telling their stories, reading published articles of firsthand memoirs, following survivors on social media and attending an event that provided a platform for a survivor to tell her story. However the most valuable opportunity to listen to survivors came during the creative writing workshops I taught which added meaningful engagement that achieved real measurable impact on my community.
To best understand the needs of survivors, it was also important that I listen to the broader community of professionals and advocates that commit their careers and even their lives to anti-trafficking work. I ultimately interviewed nineteen advocates, researchers, service providers, government agency staff, and many others to gain as much insight into my community as possible. This process revealed to me that there is occasionally a disconnect between what survivors need versus what some advocate on their behalf.
Engagement
I developed a creative writing workshop using six-word stories to crowdsource survivors’ stories and amplify their voices to foster awareness of the diversity of women negatively impacted by commercial sex. This enabled me to engage my community firsthand while also offering them a service that can be therapeutic and healing.
Immersion
To craft stories that aren’t already being told and to stand out from the rest, we need to immerse ourselves in our communities and listen long enough and without preconceived ideas so that the story moves us versus us trying to move the story. There are a lot of talented journalists reporting on sex trafficking, so the more I was out there listening, engaging my community, researching and investigating — the more opportunities I had for insights that could lead to relevant untold stories.
Establishing Trust
While scores of people are talking about human trafficking, few of us are talking to survivors. Connection with vulnerable communities like victims of sexual abuse is no small feat and establishing trust is foundational and difficult to achieve. I struggled to establish trust with my community and that’s in part due to the scarcity of my connection to them and also because there is a strong distrust of the media among survivors. This has been my ultimate challenge, but I’m optimistic after two successful workshops that I will establish trust among the community of service providers which can lead to new opportunities to teach future workshops and more community engagement. The plus side is that when I have been engaging with survivors during the workshops, I have been amazed by their openness to me once they understand how social journalism can serve them.
Empathy
To serve my community and inspire others to come alongside them, I learned that I need to produce journalism that can elevate empathy for victims who are too often labeled as prostitutes unworthy of compassion and deemed responsible for the abuse they endured.
Data
By analyzing data from the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Office of Planning and Policy for Human Trafficking Intervention Court, I discovered a spike in arrests for prostitution and unlicensed practice of a profession (massage) in Brooklyn that contradicted NYPD’s statements to the public about shifting its strategy for policing prostitution.
Based on the data, I wrote a piece to draw attention to the disproportionate number of Asian women being arrested in Queens for prostitution. While this borough has a reputation for brothels fronting as massage parlors, there has been a recent spike in arrests for unlicensed massage in Brooklyn. This raises the question — is trafficking escalating in Brooklyn or is policing prostitution? This story is important to my community because many of the women arrested during frequent raids by NYPD vice on massage parlors face further victimization by the criminal justice system and deportation. It also contradicts the NYPD’s message to the public stating that they were going to go after the buyers and pimps instead of the women. Attorneys representing the women arrested say the number of arrests haven’t gone down at all.
Business Skills
CUNY’s Startup Sprint course taught me valuable business skills, entrepreneurial values, engagement models and other practices that helped me develop a service that was more viable, needed and relevant than my original plan.
My goal for my practicum was to give women negatively impacted by the commercial sex industry an opportunity to tell their own stories and be heard. By crowdsourcing their stories and sharing them on social media, survivors might begin to lead the way in reshaping the public’s understanding of domestic sex trafficking.
While elevating empathy for survivors was at the heart of my practicum and amplifying their voices to impact the mainstream understanding of sex trafficking, I also wanted to do more traditional reporting to help meet my community’s needs for a paradigm shift in policing prostitution from one that harms victims to that which targets the buyers, pimps and traffickers who sustain the sex industry.
My Practicum: Have I understood my community’s needs?
Write to be Heard
I began my practicum planning to engage survivors on www.writetobeheard.us, a website that I created, which includes a forum for members to support each other and post their stories, share resources, photos or anything else on their mind.
I also wanted to give survivors an opportunity to lead the conversation on sex trafficking by collaborating with me on reporting the stories that will help meet their unmet needs. Inspired by Hearken, I invite community members to submit their questions or story ideas to me.
I was optimistic, especially after giving an anti-trafficking leader a tour of the site and he praised it saying it had great potential for being a valuable resource for survivors. Then I interviewed one of the social workers at the Kensington Drop-in Center for women needing respite and refuge and she said that while it would be a great tool for survivors who are farther along in their recovery, it probably wouldn’t work for the survivors she works with since most of them do not have access to any technology except voice-only cellphones. So while I had been listening to my community, I realized more than ever that my community is so diverse that if I wanted to engage the larger community, I would need to develop ways to engage them at three different stages:
- Victims — women who are still involved in the sex industry or recently left “the life”
- Survivors — women who are on the road to recovery and involved in restorative programs
- Thrivers — women who have found stability and are farther along on the path to restoration
So I started thinking about the experience I had at the New Day drop-in center. Every Wednesday, the program offers a designated hour for those who choose to participate in a project that uses art for therapy. The walls of the center are covered with their work. There were famous inspirational quotes painted on canvas, murals of handprints with messages of hope and paintings that conveyed beautiful resilience. Inside the room where they create their artwork I envisioned myself teaching a creative writing workshop. I quickly brushed it aside as impossible and dismissed the idea that I was qualified, but in that moment I was inspired.
Now that I was rethinking my practicum goals, I started to see some potential for offering creative writing workshops. The women who came in and out of the New Day drop-in center were mostly still engaging in sex work. Some may have also been actively using drugs, so when I began sketching out my plans for a creative writing workshop, I had these women in mind. Strong, resourceful survivors who enjoy being creative but probably aren’t in a place where they want to write their complete memoir.
As I developed the Write to be Heard workshop, I thought we could use an icebreaker to get to know each other a little better. So I began the session with a very simple version of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment to help the women gain a deeper understanding of themselves. One of the great crimes committed by a trafficker is how they slowly chip away and dismantle their victim’s identity to the point they lose it and are under their control. I thought it could be helpful for the women to spend some time reflecting on how they prefer to engage with the world when they aren’t merely trying to survive it.
In Columbus, the icebreaker was a big hit. I think part of the success was the reaction from their peers. For a few minutes, each woman was the center of attention and they were glowing as they received positive feedback about who they are.
My approach for engaging the women in creative writing was to have them experiment with writing six-word stories. We started with some writing prompts to warm up. Then I read them Hemingway’s famous six-word story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” We discussed the emotion and message conveyed in this very short story and then I asked them, “what message would you like the world to hear?” From there they began writing their own six-word stories. Once they had their story on paper, I worked individually with each woman to create an Instagram post that combined their story with a visual using an app called Typorama. Now with some promotion of the Instagram handle @writetobeheard, the goal is to elevate empathy for survivors and amplify their voices.
See their work plus the stories written during another workshop in Bangor here.
See the workbook created for the workshop here.
Amplifying Survivors’ Voices
I started the Instagram handle @writetobeheard to showcase the stories written by survivors during the Write to be Heard workshops. By amplifying survivors’ voices and their six-word stories, the goal is to engage the larger anti-trafficking community and public in hearing the stories of women impacted by sex trafficking who don’t fit the mainstream narrative.
Six-Word Stories Booklet
My workshop is designed for women newly on the path to restoring their lives after suffering unimaginable abuse and exploitation. Many of them have next to nothing. Sadly, one woman was homeless and had just recently lost the only photographs left of her son when her backpack was stolen while sleeping on the streets. When they were given the workbook for the session, I was surprised by how appreciative they were. The social worker explained to me that they love having anything that they can take with them. So I realized I could compile their stories into a printed booklet and mail it to them as a memento of this experience and for encouragement to keep telling their stories.
A Listening Post using Google Voice
I encouraged the women to keep writing six-word stories. However they do not have smartphones, so I set up local Google Voice numbers for Columbus and Bangor for the women to call and leave their story on a voicemail if they’d like me to add it to Instagram or the printed booklet. I plan to print a catalog of images available on Typorama to send to The Well in Columbus and Hope Rising in Bangor so that they can also choose what image they want to accompany their story.
Accessing Social Media Without Internet Access
Survivors of sex trafficking have a voice and they want to be heard. But while 81 percent of Americans have a social media account, for many survivors the internet is out of reach. Using IFTTT, it’s possible to have the Google Voice stories transcribed and exported into a spreadsheet. From there, I can set up another IFTTT to automatically tweet the stories from the @writetobeheard Twitter handle. This would give survivors a channel for having their voice be heard on social media without having access to the internet
What’s Next
I have now graduated from CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and my work on the practicum could be called complete, but it’s not. My experience working with survivors of sex trafficking and teaching the workshops was deeply fulfilling and I plan to teach as many workshops in 2018 as service providers will allow me.
At some point, social journalists should bow out of their community leaving members equipped and enabled to continue a service that doesn’t rely on them to thrive. For me that point will be after I have taught at least 10 workshops and posted 100 stories created during the workshops or told via listening posts on Instagram. Survivors have amazing stories of resilience, perseverance, survival and hope. These stories must be heard. Until they are, I have work to do.
