This blog post is written by guest blogger Kaixuan Guo, a senior at the Atlanta International School. Kaixuan is a student leader and activist who was instrumental in My Freedom Day 2024 events, including a student film festival. My Freedom Day is an international campaign to raise awareness about human trafficking and slavery. Kaixuan was invited in her capacity as a student leader on human trafficking awareness for young people to introduce her original research paper titled: Ideal Human Trafficking Victims versus Reality: A Content Analysis of US-Based NGO Websites. You can read the paper on page 378 of  the CURIEUX Academic Journal.

Impact- what does it look like?

What were we going to do—chase down the bad guys? That was the question that flitted through my head when I first joined my school’s anti-human trafficking group—Atlanta International School Against Human Trafficking or AISAHT for short. My initial reasons for joining the club were slightly convoluted. While I was curious about the issue, I was extremely skeptical about the purpose of joining a group like this. After all, what could a high school group do to help stop human trafficking? 

The reason I ended up staying in the group is much simpler. AISAHT spreads awareness about what human trafficking is and what it looks like to those in our school and local community. One part of stopping human trafficking is to prevent people from being trafficked to begin with.  Since many cases involve children between the ages of 12-14, what better advocates are there than students of the same age? Wouldn’t other young people who can relate to and resonate with their peers make it more likely students would listen and understand what they had to say? After I recognized the importance and potential impact of this student-led group, I decided to stay and see what kind of a difference I could make during my four years of high school.

The question emerges

After being involved with the club for a while, I became a leader of AISAHT and I started to notice something strange. Whether it was the videos about labor trafficking we showed new members during meetings or images of child labor on the presentations featured at grade-level assemblies, all the pictures seemed to show a singular narrative about what human trafficking was. We can and did talk about the variety of human trafficking cases and how every situation has differences. But to me, there was a disconnect between the words we were saying and the images we were showing. The words and images on the posters, websites, and billboards seemed to be perpetuating a story that people already believed in. They were not representing the wide variety of trafficking experiences I now knew were out there. And if we only painted the picture as looking one way, our voices would fail to reach the students we wanted to inform.

I didn’t want to be part of perpetuating an incorrect idea of what human trafficking looks like. Thanks to my participation in AISAHT, I knew how crucial spreading awareness is to the prevention of trafficking. But what if we give people the wrong idea or an incomplete idea of what trafficking looks like? Wouldn’t all the awareness we’ve been spreading be rendered utterly ineffective and potentially even detrimental? I realized I wasn’t sure what a more complete picture of human trafficking looked like in reality either. These questions started to brew in the back of my mind, leading me to the idea that I could research and write a paper to educate myself and others about this growing global issue.

The research begins

Right before Thanksgiving of my junior year, I committed to writing the paper. I knew writing a research paper sounded demanding but I discovered it’s even more difficult than it sounds! The first challenge was finding sources on my specific topic. It was the first time I had written anything of this caliber and my inexperience made researching more laborious than expected. In trying to find journal articles that explicitly discussed human trafficking victim representation on websites, I was dismayed to discover that there weren’t that many of them. I realized I needed to expand my research beyond anthropology and human trafficking to include other disciplines, ranging from political science to criminology and sociology. The process taught me just how complex the issue is, no one field of study can encapsulate it. 

In the beginning, my mind felt like a jumbled ball of yarn, tangled up with all I wanted to say. My budding organizational skills hadn’t yet been sharpened and I had failed to take notes on my sources as I researched. Making matters worse, some of my key sources were written in academic language that was hard for me to comprehend. To parse the writing, my technique became focusing on the message of the work as a whole and how it could contribute to my research. I had to interpret images and words and contextualize them within the public perception of human trafficking. Reading a work, relating the concepts to my topic, formulating my own perspective, and putting my own stamp on the existing concepts- it was exhausting! Even if I only reiterated and combined what other scholars had already written, it was important to me to put everything together in a cohesive way that would be insightful and in-depth, while furthering this area of research. To put it simply, I felt a lot of pressure! 

The transformative power of research – for the reader and the researcher

At times I found it very difficult to keep writing. There were multiple instances, particularly late at night when the streetlights outside dimmed, that I never felt more like giving up. But somehow, I made it to the end. Ultimately, my methodology hinged on my perspective and my interpretation of the keywords, descriptions, and images NGOs use on their websites and how human trafficking victims are portrayed on these websites. Despite the subjective nature of this analysis, I believe this study will contribute to increasing understanding of the accuracy of victim representation in anti-human trafficking efforts. While there are many limitations, such as the lack of publicly available data regarding the socio-demographic category of trafficking victims, the main purpose of this study is achieved through the comparison of NGO portrayals of human trafficking to data from federal court cases. The research aims to identify discrepancies while examining the potential implications of such discrepancies. 

During this sometimes arduous process, in addition to transforming my research skills, my purpose for writing the paper gradually changed as well. My original intention had been to learn more about how trafficking was represented in the media. My new goal has become to reach as many people as possible about the issue of human trafficking and modern slavery, especially those who are actively working to stop human trafficking, to help inform their portrayal of trafficking across the sector. 

Celebrate the win, but the journey continues

Completing this project took me around 7 months and culminated in a virtual symposium where I presented my findings and insights in front of friends, family, and anti-trafficking professionals. I’ve never been particularly fond of public speaking, but I can’t deny how happy I felt about being able to verbalize my thoughts in front of an audience listening raptly to what I had to share. When my presentation ended and the audience began to ask questions, I felt relaxed and I spoke more freely and confidently. Despite feeling anxious, I was able to articulate my thoughts to the audience and I was overjoyed by the result. 

I don’t want to share the results of my research too specifically here, but please read it if you’re interested. My favorite section is the Discussion Section because I was able to combine everything I examined before into one section which also included my thoughts and reflections on the work as a whole. Lastly, I feel incredibly honored to have my work featured in the Human Trafficking Search as a high school student. I would like to give special thanks to Ms. Mulford, my research mentor, for all the guidance and support that she has given me throughout this long journey. Now it’s time to finally flip the page and begin a new chapter toward growth, advocacy, and the joy of discovery through research.