There is a human rights violation going on in Myanmar and Chinese governments because the government has failed to recognize that women from the Kachin state (located in Myanmar) rights are not being recognized, rather seen as objects. As a result, these women are being sex trafficked and sold as “brides” to families in China, who are struggling to find brides for their sons. The women in Kachin are being convinced by trusted people, including family members and close friends, that they are going to China for jobs, in hopes of a better life and opportunities. Furthering this issue is enhanced by the armed conflict between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army. The Myanmar militia has launched a military offensive invoking a mass displacement, leaving over 100,000 people internally displaced in Kachin. These people are now homeless and must resort to campsites and struggling to search for jobs. The video displayed the horrific living conditions in Kachin, which perpetuates Kachin women to accept the opportunity of a better life. Consequently, once these women are smuggled into China, they are locked into a room and repetitively raped until pregnant. To make matters worse, the Kachin people are extremely religious and do not believe in sex outside of marriage, causing most people to scorn the victims as deserving blame. Even though these women were trafficked against their will and are victims of sexual violence. The video produced by the Human Rights Watch exposes the human rights violations with testimonies of survivors and mothers of victims, counselors working with the trafficking survivors, and reveals shots of the poor living conditions the Kachin people are enduring.
The video bears witness to human rights violations by interviewing 37 victims (women, girls, and family members) who tell their story of being sex trafficked, thus providing evidence of the violations occurring is happening in Myanmar and China. As Ristovaks states, their testimonies aid in the “visual encounter with atrocity”, meaning that the video acts as a witness and a way of seeing “that helps legitimize activist claims” (Ristovska p. 216). Therefore, the victims are given a platform to speak out and expose the horrors that are continuing and help society better understand what is happening. Hence, the witness is expressed because although the video does not show the Kachin women trafficked and abused, testimonies from first-hand sufferers, victims, and their family members, can paint a picture of the anguish these women endured. Moreover, the role of testimonies in the video shows the victim's account of the trauma they endured at the hands of their oppressive government. Therefore, video testimonies are powerful because they capture both the narrative and how the narrative is told.
As Pincheviski has discussed, the camera acts as a tool to capture both the story and how the story is told. For example, in the video there is pain and agony expressed in the tone of the victim's voices, they take certain pauses when recounting their trauma (as if reflecting on their experiences is almost too hard to talk about). This can aid scholars and physiatrists in developing trauma theories while also helping the victims come to terms with the suffering they sustained. Additionally, all of the victim's faces were blurred but it is hard to ignore their pain due to the video’s ability to let one see their body language (looking away and holding themselves closely) This is extremely important to help reconstruct histories of violence and provide emotional, ethical and political tolls in the fight for human rights (Pinchevski). Furthermore, video testimonies provide, “storytelling methodologies” that “retain echoes of past approaches” (Gregory p. 1385). Meaning, that correlations of human rights violations can be compared to past violations and can be used to study the way trauma affects victims.
“Human rights discourse serves principally as a response to the witnessing of traumatic violence” meaning the violation of human rights is not noticed until “atrocity” is shown to the public (Ristovska pg. 216). Moreover, the video usage of testimonies and clips of the appalling living conditions in the Kachin state helped “presupposed the prior existence of a mass public that could witness the event” (Sliwinski p. 342). In this case, the Testimonies exposed how these women were trapped so easily, with victims detailing the specifics of their experiences and what it was like to reintegrate back into their society. For example, one woman describes how she was drugged and taken to a place she was unfamiliar with, unable to communicate with anyone around her because of the language barrier. This story was continuous with most of the other victims, taken to an unknown area, given no money, thus trapped. The similarity in the situations told by the 37 women and girls empathies the truth of the human rights violations occurring in Myanmar and China. Thus revealing to the audience the suffering undergoing and generates the audience to “assumes responsibility for the suffering of others' (Zelier 1998). Therefore, personalizing the victims and making the audience sympathize with them.
Gregory states how “distant witnesses are detached from the physical site of violence,” meaning when witnessing human rights violations when not physically there, it puts a distance between the audience (Gregory p. 1390). Moreover, there are more media documenting violations than ever which can make us feel “numb” and less likely to take action (Chouliaraki). This relates to the video because the video did not evoke away the distant witnesses that can end the Kachin women's suffering, instead eliciting hopelessness to the viewer by highlighting the hardship that the Kachin people are continuously enduring. This goes along with Chouliaraki's moral habituation of the lack of political will to do something to stop the violence. The video highlights how the law enforcement agencies on both sides of the border need to take action because police from Myanmar, China, and the Kachin Independence do little effort to recover trafficked women, girls. Meaning that people feel helpless because our political governments are not doing anything to stop this and that international organizations are weak in stopping political violence. If the Myanmar and Chinese government refuse to recognize this issue, then what can we do? The U.S. government is not doing anything about this as well. Consequently, we rely on politicians to stop this because regular people do not have the platform or power that governments and international organizations have to end human rights violations. This leaves people the “responsibility not to look if we do not plan to act” (Gregory p. 1390).
The video stresses the importance of providing opportunities to earn an adequate living in Myanmar, which would aid in ending bride trafficking. Additionally asking for the United Nations and donor governments to start supporting the work of non-governmental groups in the region, who are working to end trafficking and assisting trafficking survivors. However, the video is extremely vague with its call to action and does not state ways the audience can get involved and combat this issue. Therefore, the video does ask really anything from the audience. Only informing the audience on what is occurring across the country and pulling on their heartstrings with the usage of testimonies and footage of the poor living conditions. This is an example of a reflexive appeal because they simply call to action and focus on the broadness of the organization by ending their video with a statement saying “SHARE THIS VIDEO”, Human Rights Watch (Chouliaraki p.74). It does not focus on how or why the audience should do something to stop the suffering of the Kachin people but rather try to make the audience feel better by sharing the videos with others. This exemplifies what Chouliaraki would call “cool' activism” that keeps the audience in a “comfort zone” meaning the video does not ask the audience to act on the violations occurring in Kachin or question the state of morality (p.77). Ultimately this video gave the victims of Kachin a platform to tell their story but failed to evoke advocacy to realistically stop the cause.
Work Cited
Barr, H. (2019, March 21). Myanmar: Women, Girls Trafficked as 'Brides' to China. Retrieved November 06, 2020, from https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/video/2019/03/20/328368
Chouliaraki, L. (2013) Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press (pp. 54-77).
Gregory, S. (2015) Ubiquitous Witnesses: Who Creates the Evidence and the Lived Experience of Human Rights Violations? Information, Communication & Society, 18(11), 1378-1392.
Pinchevski, A. (2012) The Audiovisual Unconscious: Media and Trauma in the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Critical Inquiry, 39(1), 142-166.
Ristovska, S. (2018). The Purchase of Witnessing in Human Rights Activism. In Meikle, G. (Ed.), Routledge Companion to Media and Activism (pp. 216-222). New York, NY: Routledge.
Sliwinski, S. (2006) The Childhood of Human Rights: The Kodak on the Congo. Journal of Visual Culture 5(3), 333-363.
Zelizer, B. (1998) Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pp. 202-239).
