Since the release of Taken (2008), scholars have critically examined the portrayal of sex trafficking, its victims, and its perpetrators in popular media – usually finding such portrayals sorely lacking. However, this critique has had an almost exclusive focus on Western, especially, American, portrayals of sex trafficking, compounding the cultural exclusivity by examining trafficking through the same middle- and upper-class, capitalist, and gendered lenses often seen in the films. This limited perspective persists, despite a growing literature showing a connection between portrayals of human trafficking in the media and the population’s knowledge about and responses to trafficking. To address these gaps, this paper asks whether popular culture always gets the story of trafficking so wrong. Through a comparison of popular culture, particularly cinema, from three countries, this study provides a cross-national analysis of media portrayals of trafficking of women and girls for sex work. In this presentation, I will discuss the analysis of films from three case countries – the U.S., India, and Nigeria. As the homes of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Nollywood these states provide a rich and diverse set of sources for comparison. In my analysis, I evaluate the veracity with which trafficking, especially the roles of women, is portrayed in films across these three contexts as well as the impacts these portrayals – the good, the bad, and the ugly – have on their population’s understanding of sex trafficking.
