In late May, Newsweek‘s cover featured the title “Sex, Slavery, and a Slippery Truth” alongside a photo of Somaly Mam, one of the most recognizable anti-trafficking activists in the world. The exposé, entitled “Somaly Mam: The Holy Saint (and Sinner) of Sex Trafficking,” was largely responsible for Mam’s subsequent fall from grace, though questions surrounding her credibility were raised years before. Specifically, it accused Mam of fabricating key sections of her backstory as well as persuading young girls to give false testimony. In The Road of Lost Innocence, her 2005 biography, Mam recounted her experiences of being forced into marriage with an abusive soldier and later being forced to work in a dark and filthy brothel. Yet smaller details, such as her age at the time of these events and the amount of time she spent in prostitution, remain cloudy and inconsistent. Furthermore, Mam came under fire for urging young women she rescued to tell lies, spinning ghastly tales such as the one of Long Pross, who claimed to have had her eye gouged out by an enraged brothel owner. Medical records later revealed that the eye had been removed due to a nonmalignant tumor.
As the story unraveled, Mam resigned as the head of her namesake foundation, the Somaly Mam Foundation, an organization whose mission is to “[eradicate] the trafficking and sexual exploitation of women and girls in Southeast Asia, and [empower] survivors as part of the solution.” Mam, a former activist superstar with an impressive list of supporters ranging from Queen Sofia of Spain to Hillary Clinton to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, was branded a fraud.
When the story first broke, I was defensive, disbelieving and defiant. Somaly Mam had been my hero for so many years; in my eyes, she could do no wrong. She rescued hundreds of girls from lives in brothels and gave them the opportunities to rebuild their lives. Did her fudging of a few facts here and there negate her life’s work? In the grand scheme of things, did it really matter that she was dishonest?
Slowly and begrudgingly I realized: it did matter. It does matter. Intention is not the bottom line, and the ends don’t always justify the means. The bottom line is that activism has to be rooted in honesty. We can’t afford to lose sight of the reason we are in this fight. If the ultimate goal is to give a voice to the voiceless, how is it fair that we replace their stories with ones we invent? In the struggle to make change,we must tell the truth, even when it’s ugly or unpopular or not as sensational as the fictionalized version. The truth is that there are so many real, gritty stories of struggle and triumph in the world that to fabricate them is a betrayal. It means that we have failed to acknowledge authentic stories of suffering and instead traded them in for more easily accessible but cheaper replacements.
But the most important question still remains, as contributing writer Cindy Brandt asks on her Huffington Post blog, “How much blame do we share in the Somaly Mam scandal, for being the crowd thirsty for the most heartrending tale?” What surrounds us is a media-saturated society with dozens of different things vying for our attention at any given time. It takes a lot to stand out, and it takes a lot to surprise us. It takes even more to make us act. Perhaps this is why Mam felt the need to produce over-dramatized versions of suffering. Otherwise, she feared her story and the stories of countless others would be brushed aside as insignificant or uninteresting. To be clear, this is not an attempt to excuse her actions. This is an acknowledgment that we too are responsible for being aware of injustices both far away and close to home. These injustices can be glaringly obvious or unexpectedly subtle, but we must seek them out and give them the attention they are due if we ever want peace and equality to be a reality.
The story of the modern struggle for human rights is far too compelling to be sensationalized and embellished. Activism is grounded in the everyday heroes who work for change bravely and diligently and piece by piece. These may not be attention-grabbing or headline-making stories, but they should be, and they can be if only we put more weight on stories that truly speak to us instead of ones that horrify just enough to guilt us into action.
Our motivation for achieving social change should not be based on shock value, but rather on the steady fact that all life has equal worth and we should all be accountable for each other. Let this be what guides us and inspires us to act. It’s a much more reliable source of motivation, one that can sustain us for far longer.
– By Samantha Keng
The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.
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It’s good to see freshmen taking the initiative to voice their opinion.
But, I pose some questions to you: you say that activism should be rooted in honesty. I agree, but to an extent. Doesn’t the moral value of the act itself outweigh the immoral acts of the fraud? She may have fabricated stories, but she saved a lot of peoples’ lives. In a way, her dishonesty is ironically helpful. Although her fabrications are a slap in the face to women who actually have experienced those things, I don’t think we as a society should cast away Somaly Mam as a liar and cheat, never to be heard or seen from again. Doing so would be alienating someone with so much compassion for these victims. Is that compassion not outweighing the dishonesty?
This is not to say I support lying, but these are just different perspectives to look at.