In the opening of “The Abolitionists,” founder of Operation Underground Rescue (OUR) Tim Ballard talks about why he decided to lead a taskforce against child sex trafficking during his time at the Department of Homeland Security. Initially, he says, he was unsure about if he could handle being exposed to trafficked minors and their suffering every day, so he looked to Harriet Beecher Stowe for inspiration and decided to join the task force. After leaving DHS, he started OUR to fight child sex slavery as a private citizen. “The Abolitionists” follows Tim Ballard and his anti-child sex slavery group OUR on three raids over the span of a few months.
Unfortunately for viewers, the movie as well seems to take inspiration from Harriet Beecher Stowe. The documentary does not have the gonzo gritty first person feel of embed documentaries, like those of Vice. It as well does not capture the complexities of its issue in a way that makes its audience learn something nuanced about sex trafficking. Rather it is a sentimentalist rant a la Uncle Tom’s Cabin against the horrors of child sex trafficking.
In the style of Stowe, the documentary is filled with emotional melodrama. We regularly watch Ballard break down with tears over the horrors of child sex trafficking, or get angry about the horrors of child sex trafficking or pray to god asking for the strength to combat the horrors of child sex trafficking. Emotional overtures are stuffed in at every moment, often with music, often with crying and occasionally with crying and music. Rather than reinforce the gravity of the situation each additional scene seemingly meant to invoke emotion in the audience makes the entire movie feel more and more saccharine. Inflated tension and emotion take the place of nuanced and interesting portraits of people involved with this terrible industry.
The movie seems to hit you over the head and demand you feel awful about child sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is awful and efforts that reduce it are undoubtedly good, however, that does not make a movie about it automatically good. Most of the characters brought out are cheap caricatures of evil perpetrators, incompetent officials or helpless victims.
The stories of actual victims of child sex slavery play an ancillary role to that of Ballard and his team of American rescuers. Ballard and his team parachute in to help local law enforcement stop sex traffickers. An unfortunate sense of white savior complex pervades the movie. The local agents all play supporting roles to Ballard and his team. The only time a raid fails, it is because the Columbian prosecutor calls it off as he cannot secure a warrant. Then we watch Ballard mope about all the red tape he and his team have to deal with and how it gets in the way of doing good.
The movie ends with a Columbian fixer telling Ballard, who is posing as a tourist, about how it is no longer safe to hire child prostitutes and that there was a big raid a few months earlier, Ballard’s raid. The movie ends with a sense of unreserved happiness the feels very wrong for the ending of a child sex slavery documentary. Even as the ending dialogue talks about the persistent problem of sex slavery, the music and sunny visuals.
-Shiva Darshan
