Why is 'Sound of Freedom' controversial? Experts slam unexpected summer blockbuster about child trafficking
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Alejandro Gomez Monteverde’s ‘Sound of Freedom’ is getting a lot of red flags from anti-trafficking experts. The flick focuses on the sensitive subject of sex trafficking and it is based on the story of Operation Underground Railroad’s Tim Ballard. The lead character Jim Caviezel works as a Department of Homeland Security agent where he arrests pedophiles. A former FBI agent, Suzanne Lewis-Johnson said on the movie, “It’s great that [the film] is raising awareness. But if we become too hyper-focused on what we think trafficking looks like, we miss the real thing. We tend to base our programs and approaches on the anomaly. … We’re going to miss what’s under our noses if we think it’s these people overseas moving through networks.”
The ‘Sound of Freedom’ showcases a side that may be quite different from reality, explains Beck Sullivan, “We’ve had survivors say to us, ‘I didn’t know I was trafficked because it didn’t look like what it looks like in the movies.’” A chief program officer at Restore, an anti-trafficking organization, added, “It’s important for people to get educated on what it looks like in their town.”
Why is 'Sound of Freedom 'controversial?
Though the actor quotes Mark 9:42, “It would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck …” while arresting one of them, the movie is not religious in nature. However, the Christian audience is still concerned with the film on the issue of trafficking. It is being distributed by Angel Studios, the same umbrella under which the movie ‘The Chosen’ was distributed.
The controversy arose as in real life, Ballard’s anti-trafficking organization, Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), also runs the Nazarene Fund, rescuing Yazidis, and was also in privately airlifting the rescued persecuted Afghans out of Afghanistan after the US military exited in 2021.
'They’re resistant to being rescued'
The experts with experience in anti-trafficking ministries told CT that they understand that it is a movie, with lots of parts being dramatized, but they fear the false perception will be forwarded through the flick.
“We’re not taking doors down. We’re not taking people over our shoulder,” said Jeff Shaw, a chief program officer for Frontline Response. He was ‘blown away’ by the film ‘Sound of Freedom,’ as he said “Even child trafficking victims that have been ‘taken,’ most of the time, they’re resistant to being rescued, because they’re not in that psychological space, either. So a big part of our training is deprogramming our volunteers into what their expectation should be about how people are going to respond to them, and what sex trafficking looks like.”