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Sound of Freedom Reflection
Maria Ramos
CCJ4694 Human Trafficking
Professor Dressler
April 13th, 2025
Introduction
Popular culture, or pop culture as it is commonly known, plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions of social problems. Films or movies are a medium used to express social issues. Sound of Freedom (2023), produced by Alejandro Monteverde, is an example of a film that sheds light on the issue of human trafficking. The film presents the story of former Homeland Security Investigations agent Tim Ballard, who dedicated his efforts to save children caught in transnational sex trafficking networks. Without a traditional studio promotion behind it, the independent film still managed to create a big surprise at the box office, which triggered active discussions between activists, journalists, and academic scholars. The cinematic representation of child exploitation leads to a justified discussion since this medium allows both the revelation of obscure child mistreatment and the perpetuation of false information. This paper explores Sound of Freedom based on the advice from Broadening the Scope of Human Trafficking Research: A Reader (Heil & Nichols, 2019) to advance research and advocacy that prioritizes survivor perspectives instead of rescue fantasies. This essay compares the movie with scholarly evidence to understand how Sound of Freedom illustrates human trafficking, along with determining where its representation matches or contrasts with academic research and what responses the movie presents alongside extra policy solutions found in the literature.
The Narrative Power and Aesthetic Choices of Sound of Freedom
Through his film, Monteverde shows the moment when a talented talent scout lures siblings Miguel and Rocío into believing in a modeling audition that emerges in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. After delivering his children to a modern apartment in Bogotá, the father learns that all contact information is useless because his children have disappeared. The authorities discover Miguel after several months of his captivity during a warehouse raid in California, which ultimately becomes the inspiration for Tim Ballard to carry on. Ballard breaks ties with federal law enforcement because of perceived organizational delays, so he starts a coalition including Colombian police officers and veterans and privatized donors to execute field missions to rescue captured children.
The film’s rapidly paced tempo mirrors an action thriller. The dramatic narrative centers around a staged extravagant resort on a Caribbean island, where Ballard’s operatives impersonate rich sexual tourists to capture traffickers and purchasers within one location. The rescue operation liberates many children, but Rocío is gone, so Ballard embarks on a deep jungle mission to reach a guerrilla camp where she plans to save her. The film reaches its finale through a family reunion followed by official title cards detailing how Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) has freed thousands of victims worldwide. Four more rescue attempts are shown toward the end of the film before the last sequence, which convinces the audience to support O.U.R. by providing financial assistance and advancing their legislative campaigns.
The film uses impressive camera movement techniques, high-contrast lighting effects, and dramatic themes to build tension. It shows children during slow-motion sequences while playing gloomy strings, which allows viewers to sense the main character’s distress. Additionally, it portrays villains through harsh shadows, which render them crueler because of their close-ups and reduced dialogue. These decisions in image presentation simplify the ethical conflict while simultaneously reducing the conceptual depth of the genuine commercial sex trade. The director follows traditional Hollywood thriller elements through covert operations and solitary superhero characters, but this approach eliminates significant story depth from the movie. At the same time, the film receives criticism for maintaining white savior tropes and failing to display the origins of trafficking in domestic social systems (NPR, 2023).
Trafficking in Scholarship: Insights from Heil and Nichols’s Reader
An assessment of the film’s portrayal of trafficking becomes more effective when being compared to the research in Broadening the Scope of Human Trafficking Research. The anthology contains multiple chapters questioning the rescue-focused story defining Sound of Freedom. According to Micetic (2019), most American minors who get trafficked for sexual exploitation do not become victims through street kidnappings or overseas glamorous job offers. Vulnerable individuals are usually exploited by close relationships, including friends, romantic partners, and, in some cases, immediate family members who take advantage of their existing circumstances, such as housing instability, sexual assault victimhood, or substance addiction. The survey from Micetic revealed that sexual trafficking affected 60 percent of homeless young people with histories of sexual abuse, affecting 80 percent of the respondents. Research developed by the filmmakers confronts the film’s primary narrative about dramatic kidnapping as the main recruitment technique.
Moreover, the analysis of demand by Levine in his 2019 chapter challenges the film’s primary focus. Levine contends that commercial sex continues to thrive due to high demand between consumers who enjoy near-impunity through the help of Internet services. In Sound of Freedom, viewers see several upper-class men waiting for their child purchases on a Caribbean island. However, the film avoids analyzing the systemic factors that protect buyers from legal consequences. The film avoids discussing how economic disparities, along with societal gender expectations and racialized social rankings, influence the market for commercial sex. Through its narrative structure, the movie presents primarily supply-side aspects about kidnappers and rescue individuals yet sets aside questions about customer behavior at the demand end of the trafficking operations.
Heil and Nichols (2019) emphasize that sensational media outlets produce false kidnapping statistics while advocating for vigilantism. According to the authors, these extravagant depictions of kidnappings lead public resources to shift away from providing services to survivors and prevention programs towards less effective military rescue operations. These warnings remain significant because journalists have debunked certain rescue operations that O.U.R. reports while also expressing doubts regarding its survivor rehabilitation efforts (Merlan & Marchman, 2023). Through their narrative, the authors prompt readers to evaluate any representation of human trafficking that provides simplistic descriptions of daring rescue operations when such rescues are conducted by outsider groups not sanctioned by state authorities or survivor-led organizations.
Solutions and Silences within the Film
The film concludes with a request for public support for four anti-trafficking actions, including financial donations to nonprofit organizations, active public lobbying to develop harsher laws, and backing international law enforcement efforts. Sound of Freedom focuses primarily on prosecution activities through major operations, although its recommendations maintain alignment with the three elements of the U.S. State Department’s “3P” paradigm. Additionally, it gives minimal attention to protection and prevention issues; there is no actual depiction of what medical evaluations and counseling services look like for children who receive rescues. The film lacks scenes illustrating how survivors reintegrate into their community or family, along with outcomes regarding bureaucratic challenges for official assistance and ongoing trauma following rescue operations.
Trafficking exists primarily as a problem that affects foreign nations based on the implications presented in the film. The location of Colombia, together with the presentation of drug traffickers as foreign enemies, creates a misunderstanding that American children need only worry about international abduction. According to Levine (2019) and Micetic (2019), studies show that trafficking mostly happens in the United States because of demand within country borders combined with systemic government neglect. By placing the action in Colombia, the film generates false impressions about the locations where human trafficking occurs while possibly causing resources to be redirected away from domestic prevention and survivor services.
Toward a More Comprehensive Policy Agenda
People who rely only on the conclusions presented in the film would donate most of their donations to rescue organizations showcasing dramatic rescue efforts. Scholarly research proposes a broader set of policies that would create lasting change. The first policy requirement should focus on providing complete care for survivors. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) has continued to obtain renewals since 2000, but housing funding, counseling, and legal aid remain insufficient (Shared Hope International, 2022). The current funding amounts for trauma-informed services require more than renewal from Congress because they need to be specifically raised to support mental health services and vocational training initiatives. States can increase federal funding for trafficking survivors by implementing Medicaid waivers, which provide adapted long-term therapy.
Equal importance should be directed towards implementing demand-side interventions. The data presented by Levine (2019) indicates that educational programs designated as “John Schools” succeed in decreasing future arrests when combined with substantial punishable offenses. Public exposure of convicted sex buyers through name publication campaigns helps to reduce customer demand in the sex trafficking market. These procedures carry out essential protections that redistribute responsibility from the trafficked victims toward the individuals who operate the market.
Thirdly, we must implement essential measures to protect workers while they migrate to make prevention possible. Through the Palermo Protocol, which the United Nations approved in 2000, member states were obliged to enhance border inspections while establishing supervision of employment recruiters and more migration programs to minimize human risk (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2000). These provisions require proper funding of labor inspector units and wage theft prosecution while establishing visa systems that enable migrant workers to switch employers while maintaining their legal status. The government program lacks the crucial socio-economic solutions needed to combat human trafficking since these steps are not present in the Sound of Freedom program.
Fourth, the use of survivor leadership needs to become an integral part of the policy development process. According to Polaris, a leading anti-trafficking NGO, awareness campaigns must become understanding campaigns prioritizing survivor voice narratives (Polaris Project, 2023). Federal anti-trafficking legislation now incorporates this shift because the Frederick Douglass Trafficking Victims Prevention and Protection Reauthorization Act of 2023 requires survivor advisory councils for all federal anti-trafficking initiatives. These councils guarantee that enacted policies match real experiences instead of relying on what one might see in films.
Lastly, technology can prevent exploitation incidents from occurring. Social media companies hold data collection, which enables them to identify grooming behaviors and questionable advertising campaigns. Tech companies working together with law enforcement agencies to uphold privacy guidelines should be able to stop exploitation from occurring before victims are recruited. The film focuses on child captivity, yet it neglects to explore the vital investigation opportunities of grooming activities combined with advertising practices during which predators seek their prey through the internet.
Weighing Awareness against Accuracy
The proposed policies do not question the powerful emotional impact that Sound of Freedom has on viewers. The high success of the film demonstrates that viewers want to acknowledge the frightening reality of child trafficking. Knowledge stands as the beginning point toward actual change. The incorrect application of awareness about human trafficking could produce moral panics as well as policy interventions that might damage the individuals they are meant to assist, explains Heil and Nichols (2019). Adult sex workers who work in consenting venues become vulnerable to arrest and violence through random police actions within environments of sex work, which results in deportation, according to Nichols (2019). When rescue efforts fail to address the issue’s complexities, they may cause more damage than good.
Furthermore, the film’s focus on a single heroic savior sidelines collective action. A single person is unable to break down the systems maintaining trafficking because its foundations include unequal economics along with gender-based norms and inadequate labor protection. When the story chooses to focus on Tim Ballard’s moral fight, it creates potential harm because it promotes outdated practices where donor capitalists save helpless receivers. The scholarship in Heil and Nichols’s anthology urges both systematic reform and survivor self-empowerment, which demands continuous government commitment, funding from the public, and active community involvement.
Conclusion
Through its success, Sound of Freedom activates public awareness about child sex trafficking so that people who would otherwise ignore the subject become engaged. The elements which create suspense in the film—black and white ethical messages coupled with dramatic rescue scenes and heroism through one person—simultaneously constrain how much the film can teach viewers. The empirical evidence gathered by Heil and Nichols (2019) reveals all the details the film ignores. The film overlooks crucial socio-economic risk factors for victimization in addition to skimming the aspects of market demands and providing limited attention to a survivor’s long-term recovery needs.
The observation does not pressure movie stories to function like academic documents since storytelling demands unique principles. Successful action needs accurate information regarding the problem being addressed through a promotional initiative. Those who become emotionally involved with Sound of Freedom should demonstrate their concerns by backing policies that match research evidence about how to prevent trafficking through effective social services coordinated with decreased demand coupled with robust labor rights and survivor leadership. The ultimate freedom that counts involves sustained survivor capabilities to rebuild their life with dignity and safety instead of the dramatic rescue moment. Audience members need to translate cinematic emotions from Sound of Freedom into informed collective actions that remain challenging.
References
Heil, E. C., & Nichols, A. J. (2019).
Broadening the scope of human trafficking research: A reader (2nd ed.). Carolina Academic Press.
Levine, J. (2019). Demand and sex trafficking. In E. C. Heil & A. J. Nichols (Eds.),
Broadening the scope of human trafficking research (pp. 121–142). Carolina Academic Press.
Merlan, A., & Marchman, T. (2023, September 26).
Operation Underground Railroad denies misleading donors. Vice News.
Micetic, S. (2019). Reducing risk of domestic minor sex trafficking among runaway and homeless youth. In E. C. Heil & A. J. Nichols (Eds.),
Broadening the scope of human trafficking research (pp. 241–257). Carolina Academic Press.
Monteverde, A. (Director). (2023).
Sound of freedom [Film]. Angel Studios.
Nichols, A. J. (2019). Sex trafficking in the United States: Theory, research, policy, and practice. In E. C. Heil & A. J. Nichols (Eds.),
Broadening the scope of human trafficking research (pp. 29–46). Carolina Academic Press.
NPR. (2023, July 20).
‘Sound of Freedom’ faces criticism for stoking conspiracy theories.
Polaris Project. (2023, January 13).
Know the story, not the signs.
Shared Hope International. (2023, June 13).
Fact sheet: Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. (2000).
Protocol to prevent, suppress and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.
U.S. Department of State. (2022).
By 3Ps: Prosecution, Protection, and Prevention.
