"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."
Although the above famous quote that would only sound so scary and intimidating from the great Liam Neeson has nothing to do with women and their representation in crime media, you just have to use it when talking about Taken.
In the film, Bryan Mills (Neeson) is working on having a better relationship with his daughter after being absent with his former job as a CIA special agent. Against his wishes he lets his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) go with a friend to France on what he later finds out is a U2 European tour. When Kim and Amanda get to Paris they are invited to share a cab, unbeknownst to them, with an attractive young man who is working for an Albanian human sex trafficking group. While in Amanda's cousin's house alone they are taken, but not before Bryan calls Kim to check on her and is able to talk her through what will happen--and of course he makes the above threat. From there Bryan is on a quest to find his daughter and kill the men who took her.
So this representation is obviously centered around women as victims from sexual crimes. In class we talked a lot about rape myths and how they the media portrays them. Though the concerns brought up in this film are ones to take caution over, they send a very distinct message about sex trafficking and rape.
First of all, we get this message that if you are a pretty upper class young woman who is travelling in a foreign country you will most likely be targeted for sex trafficking, especially if you are alone or with another young woman similar to your demographics. It also presents young teenage woman as an easy target because they are reckless, horny, and only care about have a good time.
Though women are the the majority of people who are victims of sex trafficking, statistics show that most of those women are being trafficked in their own countries. Also, according to the Polaris Project there are more US victims of human trafficking circulated within the US than the amount of US victims circulated in foreign countries. So women are actually more subject to human trafficking in the US than they are in foreign countries according to stats.
Another portrayal in the film is that the trafficking gang makes the women addicted to drugs so that they will have sex with customers to feed their addiction. This representation is accurate in that there has been evidence of this happening around the world. Of course we also get the representation of Kim being sold to an old, fat, rich foreign man as one of many sex slaves. Although this does happen in sex trafficking rings, there is more evidence of this happening to women within their own countries rather than as an American in a foreign land.
So, I think this movie has accurate representations of female victims of sexual crimes in some ways, but their are some exaggerations and misrepresentations in terms of the manner in which the sex trafficking plays out in the film. The message of the film is basically if you are a young, white, middle to upper-class female traveling in a foreign country, chances are you will be take by a sex trafficking ring.
I remember I was in high school when I first saw this movie, and our substitute teacher decided that instead of following the teachers rubric she would show us this movie because it was an important message that we all needed to know. I can tell you after the movie was over, I didn't want to leave the country at all if my parents weren't with me. So the media representation certainly did what it was intending to do, but the message is a little bit over the top.
No comments:
Post a Comment