Muckraking and Stories Untold: Ethnography Meet Journalism on Trafficked Women and the U.S. Military

Investigative journalism using visual media has become a dominant mode of knowledge production both in popular understanding of human trafficking & in policymaking. A 2002 Fox I-team report exposed the U.S. military in Korea as being actively involved in a transnational network of trafficking women into sexual slavery. The report circulated in policymaking arenas as evidence of the need to combat trafficking & prostitution via global U.S. initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from exactly the same U.S. military camp towns in South Korea, this article raises questions about investigative journalism & its truth power. The author also seeks to illuminate how news reports may decontextualize & make ahistorical generalizations about sex work & women's migration, especially in the larger context of the revival of a global panic about human trafficking. The fundamental question the author raises is, What stories are untold in this genre of media representations preoccupied with sex trafficking? Adapted from the source document.