Peruvian journalist Elizabeth Salazar, winner of the 2018 South American Journalism Award from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) for her reporting on human trafficking, tells us about the challenges of investigating such issues, without paternalism or sensationalism.

50 for Freedom (50FF): You have been covering forced labour issues in Peru in the past, can you tell us about your personal experience and how, as a journalist, you came to cover this issue?

Elizabeth Salazar (EZ): I started covering forced labour issues linked to human trafficking since 2008, shortly after Peru included the crime of trafficking and smuggling of migrants in the Penal Code.

Being a new topic for the media, the journalistic coverage was plagued by gender stereotypes and prejudices. For example, there were newspaper articles in which it was considered that making an adolescent girl drink liquor with bar customers was not sexual exploitation, that women in the Amazon were predisposed to prostitution or that poor women accepted sexual exploitation out of necessity; but also prejudices, such as when the sexual or social past of the victims is questioned to justify their situation of exploitation. Although the crime is still misunderstood in the profession, more and more journalists are concerned about making trafficking and forced labour visible in a responsible way.

It was constant that the media revictimized the survivors with these actions, and that erroneous interpretations are repeated and consolidated as truth, so I decided to train myself on the concepts, ethical treatment and modalities in which these crimes are presented. I decided to specialize in reporting that helps to understand this problem and serves as a tool for prevention and denunciation. Throughout these years I have interviewed victims and survivors, their families, justice officers and multiple actors involved in trafficking and forced labour. For a journalist, these are very difficult stories, but for the survivors, what they tell is part of their lives.

50FF: In your opinion, what are the main challenges that journalists currently face in reporting on these issues in Peru?

EZ: In the journalistic environment itself, the first barrier is to convince the editor or director of your media outlet that the topic is relevant in order to allocate time and resources to this type of reporting. Stories on human and labour rights violations do not usually receive the same support as if one were to propose a story on drug trafficking or political corruption, and, when they do, sometimes it is because of their sensationalist or dehumanizing approach. Therefore, another challenge is to train more journalists and editors in the treatment of forced labour, labour exploitation and human trafficking. It is necessary to end with the single source approach, where the police are the main provider of information and the story focuses on the drama of the victim or the survivor. Diverse, pluralistic sources are required, without a paternalistic approach. Added to these challenges is the risk to personal safety involved in investigating these stories, due to the nature of the crimes and the illicit circles in which they take place.

50FF: You have participated as a trainer in an ILO training on forced labour and fair recruitment, using its Toolkit for journalists. How did you benefit from this experience?

EZ: This has been a very fruitful experience to meet and exchange experiences with journalists interested in unraveling the vulnerabilities of precarious employment and how this intersect with forced labour, which is a cross-border issue, as the participants themselves evidenced in the workshop. The precarious employment of delivery workers, poultry workers, seamstresses in textile workshops and others are phenomena that are repeated in several countries and that we must begin to denounce. The training helped to shed light on these commonalities and to inspire new formats for telling these stories, including through collaborative mode.

50FF: Covid-19 has certainly affected the situation in Peru. What are the new challenges and how are you facing them?

EZ: On-site coverage is more difficult than before, definitely, and remote working has limited investigations in some institutional sources. But the scenarios where cases of forced labour, exploitation and trafficking take place have also changed. These are carried out more clandestinely and with reduced oversight by police and municipal authorities who are more focused on addressing Covid-19 and common crime. We cannot ignore in this analysis that the economic crisis has put more people in a situation of vulnerability, and made them prone to fall into job offers that result in forced labour and work under undecent conditions. These should be the important axes for journalism today: jobs and economic recovery should not be at the expense of making human exploitation invisible. Forced labour is present now more than ever.

Elizabeth Salazar is a journalist specializing in reporting on gender, inequality and economic power groups. She is a researcher and data analyst at Ojo-Publico.com and a member of the Latin American journalism platform Connectas Hub. She is winner of the 2021 Journalistic Excellence Award from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) for the special “La crisis del empleo”, which exposes women’s unpaid work in the context of the pandemic. She has also received nominations for the Gabo Awards and the UN SDG Action Awards. In addition, she teaches courses and workshops on human trafficking, migration and forced labour in Peru and other countries.

Interview by Charles Autheman.

More information: ILO Toolkit on Forced Labour and Fair Recruitment