Taken Provides a Look into Sex Trafficking
Liam Neeson Film Offers Unrealistic Outcome of Sex Traffic
Feb 1, 2009
Liam Neeson plays Bryan Mills, an ex-government agent who is trying to get more involved in his daughter’s life. When spoiled 17-year-old daughter Kim, played by Maggie Grace, travels to Paris with a friend, she doesn’t follow the safety advice from her father. A few bad choices quickly lead to a kidnapping. Luckily, her father is on the phone with her when it happens, and he’s able to gather enough information and intelligence to begin tracking her down.
Portrayal of Sex Trafficking in Taken
Although Taken is a fictional film, the portrayal of sex trafficking is potentially accurate. There are many recruitment tactics of sex traffickers (see below), and one such tactic does involve preying on naïve tourists and young girls.
As Kim and her friend leave the airport, they make it very obvious they are tourists. An attractive young man waiting in the taxi line offers to take their picture, and after a few flirtatious moments, he asks if they would like to share a cab. The girls foolishly agree, showing the stranger exactly where they live. Upon arrival, the young man walks them to the door where the girls inform him they are staying in an apartment all by themselves. He invites them to a party, and they tell him exactly where their apartment is so he can pick them up later. After leaving, he calls his people and informs them where to get the girls. Within moments, men arrive and kidnap them both.
As Bryan Mills hunts down his daughter, he quickly learns that she has been taken by people involved in sex trafficking. He is given a 96-hour time frame to find her before never seeing her again (based on statistical evidence of previous cases). These particular sex traffickers drug their victims, get them addicted, and sell them for sex. Some are kept in local houses and others are sold to high paying customers at high class auctions.
Unrealistic Plot of Father Saving Daughter
Liam Neeson plays a man who used to work for the government as some sort of agent. He describes what he used to do as “preventing” – he prevented bad things from happening. He tells the kidnappers over the phone that he has a certain set of skills that makes him a nightmare for people like them. It’s implied that he knows how to torture, kill, and generally get things done.
When his daughter tells him that her friend is being taken, he knows that his daughter is about to be kidnapped. He snaps his phone into a handy recorder, and is able to get enough information from hearing them speak in the room to identify them. Once he arrives in Paris, he wastes no time in tracking down the young man they shared a cab with at the airport. He then works his way through the sex trafficking world (by killing a lot of people) until he eventually finds his daughter. Liam Neeson does a lot of chopping and kicking to necks and shoots a lot of guys before eventually rescuing his daughter.
Despite the high entertainment value in watching Liam Neeson beat up bad guys, the action is far from reality. Most people don’t have the particular set of skills that Liam Neeson’s character clearly has. And once a woman is trapped in foreign sex trafficking, the chances of finding her are slim.
Beware Recruitment Tactics of Sex Traffickers
- Ads for lucrative jobs in foreign countries to be waitresses or nannies
- Marriage agencies – mail order brides
- Drafting by female friends or relatives already caught up in sex trafficking
- Boys befriending young girls at malls and other public places
- Lured promises of jobs, money, modeling
- Blatant kidnapping
Taken provides a look into sex trafficking via an exciting, yet fairly unrealistic, tale of a father rescuing his daughter. Hopefully this movie will serve as a conversation starter for the realistic problem of both human trafficking and sex trafficking, which is not limited to foreign countries. Sex trafficking occurs in the United States, and it’s time people started acknowledging it and talking about.
Source:
Hughes, D.M. (2000). The “Natasha” trade: The transnational shadow market of trafficking in women, Journal of International Affairs.
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