To parody Orwell’s Animal Farm, “All victims are equal, but some are more equal than others.” E.g., we tend to have more sympathy for children who have been victimized than we do for adults etc. This may be because we believe that adults, through their “informed” decisions, whilst not directly blamable, may be somewhat responsible for being victimized e.g., if they hadn’t been drinking it wouldn’t have happened etc., and/or they had the means to prevent being victimized e.g., if only she’d fought back, it wouldn’t have happened etc. Even statements regarding victims of crime, like “that would never happen to me” casts a judgment on the “role” an individual played in the offense committed against them. In a 1986 paper Nils Christie, a Norwegian criminologist, coined the term “the perfect/ideal victim”, and listed six major characteristics of a “victim” that elicited the most sympathy from the media and the general public. These are:
They were weak.
They were blameless.
They were carrying out a noble task.
Their assailant was a stronger more culpable individual.
The victim’s background, identity, and behavior align with social expectations of innocence.
His study involved contrasting instances of rape under different circumstances e.g., he suggested that a young female virgin who was attacked and raped/sexually assaulted on her way home was more of an “ideal victim” than an older adult male sex worker who was raped by a rejected client; they weren’t engaged in a “noble task” at the time of their assault, their background, identity, and behavior doesn’t align with social expectations of innocence, because they were male we assume they had the ability to resist and fight off their attacker, and because of their line of work/occupation they’re not seen as entirely blameless. Even though the same offense – sexual assault/rape - was committed against both, we are likely to have more sympathy for the young woman.
This concept of the “ideal victim” can be seen time and time again in media reporting of crime. In 2021 the case of Gabby Petito dominated newspaper headlines and media outlets’ news reporting for weeks. Petito had been reported missing. It was later found that her fiancé/partner had murdered her and buried her body in a camping area in Wyoming. Gabby Petito was young, white, conventionally attractive, and engaged in a romanticized van life social media presence, making her a perfect victim for media storytelling. At the same time two other individuals – Lauren Cho and Jelani Day - were found missing however their stories rarely made any news coverage. Lauren Cho was 30, older than Petito, and Korean rather than white – she’d also been seen drinking heavily with her partner before she went missing i.e., not engaged in a noble task. Her body was eventually found and identified in the Yucca Valley, a desert area in California. Jelani Day was a black 25-year-old male college graduate, whose body was later found in the Illinois River, near Peru, Illinois. As a missing person there was next to no coverage regarding his disappearance – until his body was found and his death deemed strange/mysterious. In the “fight” for media coverage Gabby Petito exhibited more “ideal victim” traits/characteristics than either Cho or Day.
Sex trafficking is a form of human trafficking where individuals are coerced, forced, or deceived into commercial sex acts against their will. It is considered a modern form of slavery, where traffickers use threats, violence, manipulation, or false promises to exploit victims. Many people think that sex-trafficking is purely an international endeavor with victims being brought to the US from Southeast Asia or South America etc., however it often happens at the local level, with victims being moved around a city or county etc. A runaway teenager or vulnerable adult may be trafficked just miles from their home, without ever crossing any state or national borders. I have been involved (whilst training police in surveillance tactics) in cases where parents trafficked family members both within their own homes and between villages in a very small geographic area (it was effectively a network of families sharing their children between them to perform sexual acts). Traffickers will often target vulnerable teenagers coming from broken homes where they get little attention or support. These teenagers are “groomed”, receiving gifts, sometimes believing that their groomer is romantically interested in them, before being forced to engage in commercial sex acts.
Sex Trafficking is largely a commercial endeavor, and gay teenage boys/men make up one population that is routinely targeted. Members of this population are often vulnerable because they may be shunned from their families and even evicted from their houses, finding themselves homeless. This makes such individuals ideal targets for sex traffickers. A 2020 study found that LGBTQ+ youth are 7.4 times more likely to experience trafficking than non-LGBTQ+ youth (and the real figure is probably significantly higher due to under-reporting issues amongst the LGBTQ+ communities). However, the US government this year (2025) has ordered law enforcement agencies, the state department and some non-profit organizations who receive federal funding to remove any references to victims’ LGBTQ+ identities and race, from their media, as part of its anti-DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion - initiative(s). For people to understand the true nature of sex trafficking, gender/sexual identities and race are extremely important attributes. They are not presented due to political correctness but rather as data points for scientific enquiry, without which a true picture of sex trafficking can never be presented, and this affects and harms all victims regardless of race and gender identity.
Unfortunately, when it comes to sex trafficking, the current Federal DEI initiative/policy is going to help create an “ideal victim” i.e., one who is white and straight, and non-representative of a large number of sex-trafficking victims. If a victim who is Asian can’t be named as such it makes it extremely difficult to talk about and understand international sex-trafficking of Vietnamese teenagers to the US etc., unless we want to ignore/pretend it doesn’t happen. It is naive to believe that commercial sex traffickers see and operate in the world this way i.e., they are gender and race blind, for them money is money, and a body is a body etc. Unfortunately, the public and the media may have more interest in those individuals who use the services of sex-trafficked victims, than the victims themselves, especially when they are successful businesspeople, as is happening with the current reporting of the Cambridge/Watertown sex-ring case in Massachusetts, where I live.