Abstract
In the United States, sex-trafficking awareness and prevention has increasingly become part of government-mandated health education. This exploratory study surveyed 250 U.S. adolescents to learn more about the use of media narratives in curricula about sex trafficking in light of research findings about victim-blaming responses to survivor narratives, as well as adolescents’ still-developing emotion-regulation skills. Victim blaming is counterproductive to the goals of trafficking awareness and prevention curricula. Participants viewed one of four narrative messages about a sex-trafficking victim/survivor. Over half of participants reported victim-blaming responses after viewing the message. Participants reported low perceived efficacy regarding the ability to recognize the signs of trafficking, and some participants experienced intense fear responses to the messages. Victim blaming was not associated with fear or perceived efficacy, contradicting predictions from the Extended Parallel Process Model. This study concludes with recommendations for educators and others tasked with communicating with adolescents about sex trafficking.
Keywords
Introduction
Several states now require that public school personnel become educated on the subject of human trafficking (e.g., Texas Association of School Boards, 2019) and, moreover, that sex-trafficking awareness and prevention be included in health education curriculum (Drummond, 2017; Gibbons, 2019; Talbott, et al., 2016). Under federal law, sex trafficking occurs when a commercial sex act (such as prostitution or pornography) is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or when the person performing such act has not attained 18 years of age (Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000). Adolescents with a history of physical, emotional or sexual abuse are at increased risk of sex trafficking, as are those who have run away from or been pushed out of their home, have traded sex for survival, or are involved in the foster care or juvenile justice system (Gibbs et al., 2014; Roe-Sepowitz, 2012). While the prevalence of domestic minor sex trafficking is difficult to measure given the crime's hidden nature (Kotrla, 2010), calls for schoolwide awareness reflect increased understanding of the vulnerability of adolescents to commercial sexual exploitation and recognition of schools as sites of trafficking recruitment (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). The first few states to require their public schools teach sex-trafficking awareness and prevention—California, Florida, and North Carolina—also reported some of the highest numbers of trafficking cases in the United States (National Human Trafficking Hotline, 2019).
Effective communication about this public health issue is vital to understanding healthy relationships, to mitigating stigma and blame for trafficking victimization, and has significant implications for youth, especially those with vulnerabilities that make them susceptible to sexual exploitation. Yet in many instances, legislators provided neither funding nor curricula to support these education initiatives, although some offered recommendations for eventual implementation (e.g., Ohio Attorney General, 2016). A survey of 76 traditional and alternative school principals by Rizo et al. (2021) found out that while the principals agreed schools were appropriate sites for sex-trafficking prevention education, they identified multiple challenges, including staff preparedness. Academic literature provides little guidance on best practices for teaching adolescents about the subject of sex trafficking; to date, only one sex-trafficking awareness-curriculum for high schoolers has been extensively evaluated (Scott et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2020).
Narratives and Victim Blaming
Several pro-social messaging campaigns have found that narratives offer a particularly effective way to communicate with adolescents about health topics (Cooke-Jackson et al., 2015; Gilliam et al., 2016; Willis et al., 2018). Quinn et al. (2007), for example, found in preparation for a media campaign to reduce violence among middle-school students that teens desire spokespersons who can share firsthand stories about violence and its consequences: “It should be someone that has gone through it” (p. 363). Teens engage with narratives that reflect authentic experiences (Messerlian & Derevensky, 2006; Morgan et al., 2018).
Yet, the use of narratives to promote awareness about social issues has been associated with victim-blaming responses. Early research on victim blaming found that news stories focused on individual experiences of poverty and racism, for example, resulted in audiences attributing the phenomenon to individuals experiencing the problem, rather than to society (Iyengar, 1994; Saguy & Almeling, 2008; Wright, 1993). In addition, research on media and gendered violence has found that narratives focused on individual attributes, behavior, and circumstances, often result in audiences blaming the victims for their assault (Berns, 2004; Mardorossian, 2014). Media narratives are a source of socialization that influence attitudes about rape and rape victims (O’Hara, 2012); victim blaming can be a formidable obstacle to prevention and intervention.
Sex trafficking-focused research has found evidence of victim blaming in news stories featuring narratives about victims’ experiences (Johnston & Friedman, 2019). In Shafer and Looney’s (2018) study of sex-trafficking narratives and responsibility attribution, participants (age 18–32) were more likely to blame a victim who was groomed into trafficking than a victim who was abducted and trafficked. Relevant to the current study, Murphy et al. (2016) found evidence of adolescents’ victim-blaming responses during focus groups following an intervention using documentary-style narratives featuring survivors of child commercial sexual exploitation. Although participants praised the video narrative, excerpted from the 2007 anti-trafficking documentary “Very Young Girls,” for its “realness,” their responses suggested that “prevention of exploitation hinges on an adolescent's ability to assert her worth, ask for help, and avoid her own victimization” (p. 109). The researchers note that, in explaining sexual exploitation as a gradual process (“grooming”), trafficking narratives may inadvertently encourage victim-blaming responses by suggesting victims disregard warning signs and multiple opportunities to extricate themselves. Sexual abuse and exploitation are never the victim's fault.
Other studies have shown that news stories about sex trafficking share narrative structures and express cultural myths consistent with coverage of other forms of gendered violence (Johnston & Friedman, 2019). Victim blaming has resulted from these narratives, too. Lippman (2015), for example, found that when popular media narratives depicted stalking as a facet of courtship, victims’ concerns are more likely to be minimized in social and legal settings. Similarly, Monckton-Smith (2012) cited media narratives about gender violence that “paradoxically often sympathize with men who claim to love the women they control, beat and kill” (pp. 53–54). Thus, when developing curriculum for sex-trafficking awareness and prevention, it is important to recognize that narratives interact with one another to reinforce a belief system that victims, rather than perpetrators, are responsible for their abuse. Menaker and Franklin (2015) noted the consequences of blame attribution regarding victims of trafficking: “Prostituted women and girls face significant and enduring blame for their involvement in the sex trade, including complete rejection by peers, family, intimate partners and potential employers,” they wrote. “Cultural stigma surrounding prostitution is perhaps the most significant barrier to exiting the sex trade and maintaining prosocial pursuits” (p. 11). Victim blaming is counterproductive to the goals of trafficking awareness and prevention curricula.
Victim Blaming as an Emotional Response
Emotions figure into responses to narratives about social issues. Victim blaming has been conceptualized as an emotional response that serves to minimize fear about external threats and to reinforce a “just world” belief system, which sees the world as predictable and safe (Kogut, 2011; Lerner & Simmons, 1966). In spite of its theorization as a defensive response to fear, victim blaming has not yet been contextualized within the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM), which outlines responses to fear appeals in persuasive messages. This study is interested in that connection between emotional regulation and narrative messaging about trafficking.
According to the EPPM, people respond to fear appeals in three ways: Individuals take no action when they do not perceive the threat to be severe (Maloney et al., 2011); individuals respond with danger control when they perceive their actions will effectively reduce their risk to the danger (Witte et al., 1996). And if they believe they cannot effectively reduce the threat, individuals will respond with fear control (Witte et al., 1996). Fear-control responses are cognitive coping strategies that reduce fear, like avoidance of the issue or denial of its severity (Witte et al., 1996). Thus, persuasive messages that utilize fear appeals are most effective when they also include high-efficacy messages (Witte & Allen, 2000). These efficacy messages should target both perceived response-efficacy (the effectiveness of the response) and perceived self-efficacy (the ability to enact the recommended response) (Witte, 1992). Victim blaming, as a mechanism for reducing the perceived threat of an issue, meets the EPPM's definition of a fear-control response. In blaming victims for their own predicament, a message receiver reduces perceived threat by rationalizing that he/she would not make the same mistake as the victims and is therefore not vulnerable to the threat (Kogut, 2011; Lerner & Simmons, 1966). For example, media narratives that focus on a young person groomed into trafficking by someone pretending to be a love interest could prompt a fear-control response among adolescents, who might identify with the victim but rationalize that they would see through the trafficker's ulterior motive and avoid harm.
Furthermore, it is important to consider the unique ways in which adolescents experience emotions, like fear. Teens’ emotion regulation strategies—or the behavioral and psychological tactics that individuals use to manage emotional arousal (Compas et al., 2017; Singh & Mishra, 2011)—are still in development. Adolescence remains marked by heightened sensitivity to emotions and emotional stimuli, and teens may have strong emotional reactions to events that adults only consider “mildly annoying or hurtful” (Somerville et al., 2010). Adolescents may find messages about sex trafficking to be frightening. Therefore, in light of the EPPM's theorizations about frightening messages, adolescents may be especially prone to using victim blaming as a fear-control response.
In their studies testing the implementation of “Bodies are Not Commodities,” a human-trafficking curriculum for high schools developed by the NGO A21, Scott et al. (2019) and Zhu et al. (2020) both found that some students seemed to have emotional responses to the curriculum. Some participants’ responses to questions about slavery and poverty's relationship to trafficking were left blank or answered with emoticons portraying sadness/crying. The authors speculated that students used emoticons because “the topic may have been too painful for some to speak about” (Scott et al., 2019, p. 32). In an interview, a teacher who implemented the curriculum described an instance in which one student who “is normally talkative and charismatic…all of a sudden completely shuts down and lay their head on their desks,” as well as other students who “refused to come to class and I saw them in the hallway … in tears” (Zhu et al., 2020, p. 1364). These findings indicate that some adolescents may experience strong emotional reactions to messages about sex trafficking.
The Present Study
Scholars have examined the role of narratives for communicating about social issues including trafficking, yet the research has not typically focused on adolescent audiences or their unique developmental needs. As state legislatures increasingly call for anti-trafficking programming in schools, what forms of narrative messaging are well-suited to impart sex-trafficking awareness and prevention while mitigating victim-blaming responses? The present, exploratory study surveyed adolescents in a Southeastern state to answer the following research questions:
These survey results provide information that can be useful as educators develop holistic curricula about trafficking that are developmentally appropriate for adolescents.
Methods
Participants
All research protocols were approved by an institutional review board. Participants age 14–18 (N = 264) were recruited through Qualtrics Research Services. Qualtrics Research Services recruited the parents of participants via traditional actively managed double-opt-in market research panels, asking whether panelists had a child they would like to participate in the survey. To avoid self-selection bias in the first step of participant recruitment, survey invitations sent to market research panel members were general and did not include specific details about the contents of the survey. Qualtrics Research Services manages the distribution of incentives for market research panels based on the length of the survey, their specific panelist profile, and target acquisition difficulty, among other factors. The specific type of rewards varies and may include cash, airline miles, gift cards, redeemable points, charitable donations, sweepstakes entrance, and vouchers. Once participants opened the link to take the survey, they received a message describing the purpose of the study as learning about students’ reactions to educational messages about sex trafficking. Both the parent and the child granted consent by checking separate boxes before beginning the survey. Participants who were 18 years old did not need parental consent. At the end of the survey, participants were provided with the phone number and texting line for the National Human Trafficking Hotline, as well as the Teen Line, a general mental health support hotline for adolescents that offers call and text services.
Data collection was conducted September 6 through September 24, 2019. Participants were from a southeastern state in the US. The mean age of participants was 16.64. Regarding gender identification, 47% (n = 125) of participants identified as male, 51% (n = 136) identified as female, and 1% (n = 3) preferred not to answer. Asked about race, 71% of participants were white (n = 188), 22% were African American (n = 57), 3% were Hispanic (n = 9), 2% were Asian (n = 6), less than 1% were American Indian or Alaskan Native (n = 1), and 1% reported some other race (n = 3). Demographic quotas were set to reflect the state's population. For example, according to the US census, 22.2% of the state's population identifies as African American.
Measures
Demographic questions and questions about pre-existing attitudes and knowledge about trafficking were asked before exposure to the educational messages about trafficking. After exposure to the message, participants were asked about their fear responses, perceived severity of trafficking, perceived threat of trafficking, perceived efficacy regarding trafficking, and victim-blaming responses.
The survey began with questions regarding age, gender, and race, followed by questions assessing participants’ attitudes and knowledge about sex trafficking. The survey did not provide a definition of sex trafficking, as we did not want to introduce bias; the messages selected provide consistent definitions of the term. These questions asked, “How familiar are you with the issue of sex trafficking?” and “How well do you feel you understand the issues surrounding sex trafficking,” where 0 = not at all and 4 = very familiar. Next, we asked, “From what sources have you heard about sex trafficking? Please select all that apply” from the following options: school (i.e., class lecture/discussion, special event, assembly, etc.); friends or family, news media (including online news); entertainment media (i.e., movies, TV shows, magazines, other online entertainment, etc.); public service announcement, advertisement, poster, or billboard; other (with write-in option); and I have not heard about sex trafficking before. We also asked participants the extent to which they felt trafficking was relevant to themselves, their classmates, and their community with the following true or false questions: “Sex trafficking happens often in [name of southeastern state],” “Sex trafficking is a problem in my town or city,” “I’m not the kind of person who would be trafficked,” and “I know someone who could be trafficked.”
Because we were interested in adolescents’ fear responses to these narratives, before exposure to one of four educational messages about human trafficking, we included a brief prompt for participants to think about their emotions (Dillard & Peck, 2000). Participants rated how strongly they felt afraid on a slider scale from 0 (not very much) to 5 (a lot). We modeled Dillard et al.’s (1996) approach to measuring discrete emotions using a Likert scale. We also included open-ended questions asking participants to list up to three emotions they experienced while watching/reading the message and asking what parts of the message made them experience each of the emotions.
Next, we adapted questions from studies using the EPPM (Witte, 1992; Witte et al., 1996) to measure perceived severity of sex trafficking and perceived susceptibility to the threat of sex trafficking. The scales from which we drew questions had reliability coefficients of α = .85 and α = .9 (Witte et al., 1996). Perceived severity was measured with the question “How serious do you think the issue of trafficking is” (0 = not at all serious, 4 = very serious), and perceived susceptibility to the threat of trafficking was measured with the following yes/no questions: “Do you believe that there are some kids at your school who are at risk of being sex trafficked?” and “Do you believe that you are at risk of being sex trafficked?”
Existing measures for perceived efficacy were too context-specific to be easily adapted for the present study. We developed the following questions to assess perceived self-efficacy: “Would you be able to recognize the signs that someone you knew was being trafficked?” and “If someone you knew was being trafficked, would you be able to do something to help him/her?” Possible answer choices were “yes,” “no,” and “I’m not sure.”
To assess victim blaming, we adapted two questions from Shafer and Looney’s (2018) experiment on victim blaming. The full scale used in this study had a reliability coefficient of α = .86. We asked the following “yes/no” questions: “Do you think what happened to the trafficked person in the video/story was partially caused by his/her own behavior?” and “Do you think that the trafficked person in the story could have prevented this from happening?”
Finally, to measure learning outcomes about trafficking we adapted several items from the Knowledge about Trafficking subscale of the Sex Trafficking Attitudes Scale, which has a reliability coefficient of α = .79 (Houston-Kolnik et al., 2016), and formulated additional questions directed toward specific knowledge communicated in the educational messages (Table 2). These answers were coded as a one or a zero, based on the correct answer for the question, and averaged to create a knowledge score.
Stimuli: Educational Messages About Trafficking
Participants were randomly assigned to view one of four educational messages about sex trafficking, three video narratives and one text narrative (Table 1). Similar to Murphy et al. (2016), we selected existing media material for its accuracy in depicting common ways that adolescents become trafficked and for the avoidance of stereotypes. We chose narratives that were circulating online and that educators could potentially adopt and supplement for use in the classroom. The four messages—identified here by their titles, Can You See Me, Kerri's Story, Rebecca Bender's Story, and The Healer (see Table 1 for summaries)—were produced/commissioned by legitimate anti-trafficking organizations to raise awareness about trafficking and encourage reporting of suspected trafficking. The use of these materials was approved by an Institutional Review Board.
Description of Educational Messages About Trafficking Used as Stimuli.
Participant Responses to Questions About Knowledge of Trafficking.
Data Analyses
The first three research questions were answered using descriptive statistics. We also used qualitative answers from write-in responses to provide more context to these findings. For the fourth research question, a one-way ANOVA was used to assess the differences in fear responses between messages and a chi-square test was used to assess the differences in victim-blaming responses between messages. The fifth research question was addressed using Pearson's product-moment correlations.
Findings
Knowledge About Sex Trafficking
Before Educational Message
Of the study's 264 adolescent participants, 60% reported being “somewhat” or “very familiar” with the issue of sex trafficking, and 65% said that they understood the issues surrounding sex trafficking “somewhat” or “very well.” Among participants, 31% reported that sex trafficking is a problem in their community, 47% of participants agreed with the statement “I’m not the kind of person who would be trafficked,” and 49% of participants agreed with the statement “I know someone who could be trafficked.” Of the respondents who disagreed with the statement “I’m not the kind of person who would be trafficked” (n = 139), 59% were female, 40% were male, and 1% declined to report their gender.
News media (79%) and school (62%) were the two most-popular information sources about sex trafficking, followed by friends and family (41%) and entertainment media (33%).
After Educational Message
Nearly all participants (91%) reported perceiving the issue of sex trafficking as a very serious issue after viewing the educational message. However, only 65% of respondents answered “yes” to the question “Do you believe that there are some kids at your school who are at risk of being sex trafficked?”, and 22% of respondents answered yes to the question “Do you believe that you are at risk of being sex trafficked?” After viewing the educational message, participants reported mixed responses about their perceived efficacy regarding sex trafficking. Only 23% of the participants answered “yes” to the question “Would you be able to recognize the signs that someone you knew was being trafficked?”; most participants (69%) answered “I’m not sure” to the question, and 8% answered “no.” However, a greater proportion felt positive about their ability to help someone if they knew that they were being trafficked: 64% of participants answered “yes” to the question, “If someone you knew was being trafficked, would you be able to do something to help him/her?”
Additionally, we asked a series of true or false questions to assess participants’ knowledge about sex trafficking after viewing the educational material. The majority of participants answered these questions correctly (Table 2).
Fear Responses to Sex-Trafficking Messages
Participants were asked to reply how strongly they felt afraid, from not very much (1) to a lot (5); 25.7% of respondents (n = 68) reported a four or a five. Forty-two of the participants who reported a four or five for the emotion afraid were female, compared to 25 males. A one-way between-subjects ANOVA was conducted to compare the fear responses between participants who viewed different messages about trafficking. There was not a significant effect at the P < .05 level [F(3, 260) = .723, P = .539)].
Participants were also asked to list up to three emotions that they experienced after viewing the videos or reading the text, and whether those emotions were prompted by specific content in the educational messages. The most frequently listed emotions across all of the material were sadness, anger, fear, and concern or worry. Open-ended responses provided insight into why participants felt afraid. For example, one participant listed the emotion “terrified” because “…it could happen anywhere & be tricked into it like Rebecca [Bender].” Similarly, others described being afraid or scared because “it could happen to anyone,” “this could happen to me,” or upon “realizing how frequent it is.” One response reflected victim blaming—a participant reported feeling “scared,” noting that the part of the message that made her feel scared was “that she [Kerri] set herself up for this.”
Victim-Blaming Responses to Sex-Trafficking Messages
In addition to understanding adolescents’ fear responses and their belief in others’ risk or their own risk of being trafficked, we found some victim-blaming attitudes in responses to questions about the trafficked individuals in the videos.
As Table 3 indicates, adolescents who viewed Can You See Me or those who viewed Kerri's Story were significantly more likely to respond that what happened to the main character was partially caused by her behavior, compared to adolescents exposed to Rebecca Bender's Story. The high levels of blame among participants who viewed Can You See Me and Kerri's Story appear to drive the significant effect in the chi-square test for each victim-blaming measure. Of the respondents who said that what happened to the main character was partially caused by her behavior, 56 were males and 53 were females. Even higher rates of victim blaming were reported in response to the second victim-blaming measure. As the same table shows, over half of the adolescents, regardless of the message or story they viewed or read, responded “yes” when asked if the trafficked person in the story could have prevented this from happening. Of these participants, 84 were male and 91 were female. Significant differences were found between the message conditions; 80% of the adolescents who watched Kerri's Story responded that the trafficked person in that story could have prevented this (trafficking) from happening. This was significantly different from those adolescents who viewed Rebecca Bender's Story (54.5%) or read The Healer (63.6%).
Pearson Chi-Square Comparing Responses to Questions About Blame and Educational Message Viewed by Participants.
Note: Each letter denotes significantly different condition categories at the .05 level.
To answer the fifth research question, Pearson's product-moment correlations were calculated between victim blaming and perceived efficacy and between victim blaming and fear responses. In these analyses, we used the averaged responses of the two perceived efficacy questions and the two victim-blaming questions. Responses were re-coded so that “no” was coded as zero, and “yes” was coded as one. The resulting correlation between victim blaming and perceived efficacy was significant (P = .026) for a weak positive relationship (r = .137). The correlation between victim blaming and fear (r = −.073) was not significant (P = .236).
Discussion and Conclusion
State legislators have increasingly called for students to be educated on the issue of sex trafficking but have rarely offered guidance or resources; we wanted to know more about the usefulness of stand-alone narratives in conveying educational information about sex trafficking. Although information-seeking adolescents could easily access online the narratives used in this study, as part of a holistic sex-trafficking prevention curriculum, these messages are best contextualized within broader curricula about healthy relationships and teen dating violence, and prefaced with foundational concepts about trafficking, including definitions, typologies and discussion of the vulnerabilities that traffickers seek to exploit. These four narratives depicted some of the ways that adolescents are trafficked, primarily by someone who feigns romantic interest then goes on to control and exploit the victim (Johnston & Friedman, 2019). However, other modus operandi (Sprang & Cole, 2018), including the use of social media for recruitment, should be included.
The narratives chosen avoided stereotypes, yet they exist in a broader media environment that does adopt stereotypes and sensationalism. Adolescents in the southeastern state of the study's focus have learned about sex trafficking from, primarily, news media, school, friends and family, and entertainment media. Since scholarship has documented problematic portrayals of sex trafficking in news and entertainment media (Johnston et al., 2014; Small, 2012), educators could include a media literacy component in sex-trafficking prevention curriculum to disrupt myths about sexual violence and neutralize stereotypes to better recognize and support survivors.
Results show that few respondents considered sex trafficking to be a problem in their own community, yet trafficking happens in all communities. Respondents also indicated that, after viewing the messages, they still lacked confidence to recognize the signs of trafficking or help if they knew of someone being trafficked. These findings suggest that respondents perceived low self-efficacy regarding the issue of sex trafficking after viewing a single narrative, and thus highlight the need to incorporate additional instruction beyond narratives to provide students with the context and confidence to recognize potential signs of trafficking. It might also be useful to expose students to more than one trafficking scenario to illustrate the range of ways that trafficking occurs and to whom. Debriefing adolescents after viewing sex-trafficking educational messages is an important way to parse the signs of trafficking and discuss the role of bystanders. For example, in Can You See Me, the teacher-character notices changes in her student: disengagement, provocative clothing and heavy makeup, and a tattoo on her neck. She witnesses the student leave campus with an adult male, who urges her into the car. How do those signs satisfy or contradict what experts say are possible indicators of trafficking? What is the proper response for an authority figure? For a peer?
Victim blaming was also prevalent in the data; over half of the participants felt that the trafficked person featured in the message they viewed could have avoided being trafficked. This finding aligns with research documenting victim-blaming responses to narratives that focus on an individual's experiences as a trafficking victim or survivor (Shafer & Looney, 2018). Whereas each of the videos in the present study depicted a narrative about a victim, they are distinguished in ways that might have contributed to victim-blaming responses. In Kerri's Story and Can You See Me, the trafficked victims are played by actors, whereas Rebecca Bender's Story and The Healer feature survivors conveying their first-hand experiences. It is possible that videos using actors lack the authenticity that youth appreciate in narratives (Messerlian & Derevensky, 2006, p. 301).
Further, although the four videos are alike in describing the trafficker as someone who pretended to be a friend or romantic partner—a common pathway into sexual exploitation—at the conclusion of Kerri's Story and Can You See Me, the characters remain under the control of their trafficker, suggesting a problem waiting to be solved—but by whom? Kerri, soliciting sex buyers on a busy thoroughfare, appears resigned to her situation (“I guess this is my life now”), and the student in Can You See Me drives away with her trafficker without responding to an alerted teacher. The higher levels of victim blaming among participants assigned to these videos aligns with Shafer and Looney's (2018) findings that anecdotes about trafficking that do not provide an obvious means to provide help to victims might elicit increased victim blaming. Future research should continue to explore the relationship between adolescents’ perceived self-efficacy and victim-blaming responses.
According to the EPPM, participants with higher perceived self-efficacy should exhibit lower victim-blaming responses. However, our data do not reflect this prediction. As participants’ perceived efficacy increased, so did their victim blaming, but the relationship was not a strong one. Still, the finding suggests educators use caution when adding efficacy-enhancing messages within curricula about sex trafficking. Lesson plans focused on trafficking prevention might inadvertently reinforce the notion that, because trafficking is preventable, victims could have avoided their plight. In this context, it seems likely that narratives from individual survivors could be interpreted by students as cautionary tales.
Because of their focus on helping victims rather than preventing victimization, social justice activities may present an opportunity to incorporate efficacy activities that do not promote victim blaming. One study (Scott et al., 2019) evaluated a trafficking prevention curriculum that includes a social activism component but did not directly engage students in related activities. Engaging students in a hands-on activism exercise could help students feel empowered toward a social issue, which the EPPM theorizes would decrease fear-control responses and perhaps decrease victim-blaming responses. Future research should be continued to explore students’ responses to their participation in these activities.
In conjunction with perceived self-efficacy, the EPPM suggests that heightened feelings of fear could contribute to victim-blaming responses. A notable portion of participants felt afraid after viewing messages about trafficking; out of a one to five scale (where 1 = not very much and 5 = a lot), about a fourth of the participants reported a four or a five. This finding affirms knowledge about adolescents’ still-developing emotion-regulation skills (Somerville et al., 2010) and underscores the need for protocols for managing student distress. This study design did not provide for follow-up with participants who indicated adverse reactions. Since there were no significant differences in fear responses between participants who viewed different educational messages, future research should explore what elements of educational messages about trafficking are fear-inducing for adolescents. However, the correlation between fear responses and victim blaming was non-significant, not supporting the EPPM. It is possible that, instead of victim blaming, highly fearful participants used other strategies to cope with fear that are described in the EPPM, such as denying the severity of the issue or avoiding thinking about the issue altogether (Witte et al., 1996). Future research exploring the root causes of adolescents’ victim-blaming responses, perhaps using interviews or focus groups, is needed since neither of the EPPM's theorized predictors of victim blaming (low perceived efficacy and high levels of fear) were related to victim blaming.
Although adolescents’ exposure to narratives about trafficking might prompt victim blaming as a coping strategy, it bears repeating that victims are never to blame for their sexual exploitation. By law, any minor used in a commercial sex act is a victim of trafficking, a crime with documented psychological repercussions for its victims, including depression, anxiety, and PTSD (Contreras et al., 2017). Victim blaming may negatively impact the availability of resources and the willingness of victims to seek help (Menaker & Franklin, 2015), thus delaying justice and recovery. Educators are encouraged to stress these points in trafficking awareness and prevention curriculum, and moreover, to teach, test and correct for victim-blaming responses to the issue. Educators may require additional training to respond at the first sign of students’ distress at exposure to sex-trafficking prevention messaging.
The present study maintained a limited focus on reactions to educational messages produced by prominent anti-trafficking organizations, which educators can easily access online and could integrate into their lesson plans. However, a well-designed curriculum will anticipate and neutralize students’ victim blaming. Future research should examine students’ victim-blaming responses within a comprehensive curriculum. The stimuli were also limited regarding the race of people represented in the messages; three of the survivors/survivor characters are white, while the fourth is possibly Latina. Whereas anyone can be a victim of trafficking, certain communities are at higher risk of being trafficked, including the LGBTQIA+ community; Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC); children in the foster care system; and individuals with a history of previous abuse. Materials used in anti-trafficking education should portray or make clear these distinctions. Narrow conceptualizations of victim blaming and perceived efficacy, measured using yes or no questions, are also limitations of this study. Future research should also use qualitative methods, such as focus groups, for greater and more nuanced understanding of adolescents’ victim-blaming responses to trafficking narratives. Additionally, future research would benefit from exploration of how the acceptance of myths related to sex trafficking might contribute to adolescents’ victim-blaming responses.
Finally, in those few states that have already implemented sex-trafficking awareness and prevention curricula, research should examine their effectiveness. Given the objective of such initiatives—to promote sex-trafficking awareness and prevention—assessments should include victim-blaming measures in their evaluative criteria, since blame attribution has been an obstacle to recognizing who is a victim, to victims seeking assistance, and to their recovery.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge Dr. Maria Leonora G. Comello for her helpful comments on this paper, Teresa Edwards for her assistance with survey design, and Dr. Cathy Zimmer for her assistance with data analysis.
Authors’ Note
Two of the authors were involved in the production of one of the anti-trafficking educational messages used as stimuli in this study.
Ashley Hedrick McKenzie is currently affiliated with Clemson University, Department of Communication, Clemson, SC, USA.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Partial funding for the study was provided by the UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The authors would also like to acknowledge the following sponsor: University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health Cancer Education and Career Development Program— National Cancer Institute/NIH Grant T32/CA057712. Disclaimer: The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Cancer Institute or the National Institutes of Health.
