Celebrities - Help or Hinderance?

Celebrities Ricky Martin and Emma Thompson are two among many well-known, active supporters of the fight against human trafficking. The UN estimates that there are 2.5 million in forced labor world wide and that annually close to 10 billion dollars are earned by traffickers which makes human trafficking in the world third only to trafficking in drugs and arms.
Ricky Martin has been most vocal about the need to protect children from abuse worldwide and more specifically their and their mothers’ need for protection against human trafficking. In 2002 he opened the Ricky Martin Foundation in Puerto Rico to advocate for the welfare of children everywhere and launched in 2004 the campaign “People for Children” a global initiative linking NGOs and other grassroots groups with an endeavor to educate the world about trafficking and to expose the inhumane practice more widely around the world. In 2005, Martin participated in the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) campaign “Llama e Vive” (Call and Live) which established a telephone hotline for potential victims to call and receive assistance. As recently as 2008, Martin traveled to Cambodia to hear first hand from child victims of trafficking about their ordeals and warned Cambodian officials to open their eyes to the trafficking problem in their country citing that an undeniable problem must exist if there are over 200 NGOs working in their country to combat trafficking.
Emma Thompson is also a human rights advocate but in more general terms than Martin. Her support for women’s rights has led her to work with the Ellen Bamber Foundation in 2007 in a campaign designed to “offer hope to the living disappeared” who are victims of trafficking in the West.
While it is beyond the scope of this blog post to delve deeply into Martin and Thompson’s endeavors, I may speculate about the extent of their impact on the issues/campaigns they support based on our class readings by Daniel Drezner, Heribert Dieter and Rajiv Kuman, and Andrew F. Cooper. First, in regards to the issue of human trafficking, Drezner notes that celebrities have had a better track record heightening the profile of human rights abuses throughout the world than the abuses resulting from military operations and although there is growing hostility towards celebrity activism, it would appear that Martin’s focus on helpless children and his focus on straight-forward solutions (such as the campaign to launch the OIM’s hotline for potential victims of human trafficking) are likely to meet with public approval. Where Martin might earn the ire of policy makers and diplomats is his poorly-couched and very public scolding of Cambodian officials. This shaming may earn him points with his fans, but diplomats who must maintain a working relationship with Cambodian officials may find their work more difficult as a result. If Cambodia becomes resentful of the West’s hypocritical criticism, Martin’s efforts might be blamed for causing more problems than solutions.
Emma Thompson’s advocacy for the rights of the “living disappeared”, victims of Western greed and consumption, may be an entirely different situation. However, from what I have been able to gather, this emphasis on human trafficking victims in the West is only part of Thompson’s larger human rights agenda and she may be hitting the right balance between what Drezner calls “sustained focus and righteous indignation.”
As Dieter and Kuman point out, another pitfall that both Martin and Thompson may face is the problem that results from overly simplistic framing and solutions. In their efforts to make the issue of human trafficking come across clear and strong to the public, they are proposing solutions that are too simplistic. Human trafficking is not only about punishing traffickers, but also about complex push-pull factors that directly relate to mammoth problems such as global inequality and the capitalist system. And although celebrities can come under fire for lacking a global mandate, Martin and Thompson are both advocating arguably for the world’s most vulnerable, abused, and silenced human beings. Thompson, because she is advocating on her home turf about a problem most citizens choose to overlook, is in a particularly legitimate position as a concerned citizen giving back, as it were, to the community for all the fame and fortune her fans and country have blessed her with.
No one can argue with Andrew Cooper who points out how valuable celebrity issue endorsements are for diplomacy; they garner extended face time with elites and are able to reach mass publics in a way that politicians can only dream of. Celebrities have become “ascendant diplomatic actors in a global system that is open to their inclusion in ways that very few would have anticipated.” Certainly, no one would deny that global capitalism, marketing, and design have all contributed to the proliferation of specialized media making entertainment one of the most important facets of both developed and “underdeveloped” economies throughout the world. Celebrities like Martin and Thompson are able to allie with global “fixers” (as opposed to the “nixers”) and to take advantage of the media spotlight focused on international events such as the G8 summits. Martin helps to put a face on a large, faceless NGOs like IOM and the UN and both Thompson and Martin are able to breath new life into networks of fatigued activists.
Interestingly, Cooper refers to Bono as the “charmer” and Geldorf as the “provocateur” at the G8 summits. Granted, Martin and Thompson do not have the cache nor the power that Bono or Geldorf have in humanitarian issues (although their reputation may be increasingly criticized), I would contend that Ricky Martin must surely play an effective role as charmer and the Latin with a big heart (raising awareness and much needed funds for his cause in the west while increasing his positive image) but should perhaps watch his step when he attempts to play the provocateur with foreign countries. Thompson, on the other hand, seems better positioned, as a white woman of privilege and fame, to be the provocateur, awakening fellow citizen’s consciences to a problem which exists in their own back yard.