Investigative journalism using visual media has become a dominant mode of knowledge production both in popular understanding of human trafficking and 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 and 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 and its truth power. The author also seeks to illuminate how news reports may decontextualize and make ahistorical generalizations about sex work and 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?

Muckraking and Stories Untold

With a focus on HIV/AIDS prevention, the commentary focuses the marginalization of migrant sex workers’ right to health by both the state and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Korea (henceforth “Korea”). It first examines how state policy on migrant workers and migrant entertainers, in the sex industry in particular engenders human rights violations on multiple fronts. It then explores how relevant NGOs fail to intervene because of both ideological and practical preoccupations.

Interrogating the Absence of HIV_AIDS Prevention for Migrant Sex Workers in South Korea

Review of the article “Modern-Day Comfort Women: The U.S. Military, Transnational Crime, and the Trafficking of Women,” by Donna M. Hughes, Katherine Y. Chon, and Derek P. Ellerman, in the September 2007 issue of Violence Against Women.

Commentary on Hughes

The Korean beverage market is saturated with male tonics. A 1999 TV commercial of one such tonic featured a gigantic bottle of drink making a thunderous landing onto the city, upon which toppled buildings become erected, together with throngs of Korean office men’s arms raised to the sky, cheering in unison to the male voice-over, “Korean Men! Rise! Korean Men! Rise!” The theme of rise from ruins in national and commercial propaganda has been prominent following the “IMF crisis,” a local interpretation of the Asian economic crisis and its effects on Korea. Together with the slogan “Glory and Might” athletic male body, the advertising campaign offers the promise not only of male virility but also reinvigoration of national honour through the revitalization of the male body.

Assuming Manhood Prostitution and Patriotic Passions in Korea