It's natural for movies based on true stories to embellish events a little bit, but in the
case of Sound of Freedom, bending the truth might just cause more harm than good.
It's no secret that Sound of Freedom presents a sensationalized version of human trafficking.
After all, the movie needs to set up a plot that will hit all the usual action movie beats.
So naturally, its traffickers are shadowy villains who swoop in and snatch children
away from their families.
The movie's opening actually starts with a montage of security camera footage showing
literal shadowy figures grabbing children off the street.
The sad truth is that most victims of trafficking aren't attacked by total strangers and whisked
away into the night.
Instead, as the office for the Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation reports, they are
usually manipulated over a period of time by someone they know, whether that be a family
member, friend, or partner.
The most prevalent kind of trafficking is neither dramatic nor cinematic.
It makes sense that Sound of Freedom would emphasize this significantly rarer kind of
trafficking.
However, people need to understand that the movie's presentation of trafficking isn't
accurate.
It's less important to be worried about strangers on the streets than it is to be watching for
subtle signs of emotional and physical abuse from close friends and loved ones.
There's no denying that human trafficking is a serious worldwide problem, but people
need to have a proper understanding of the problem in order to address it.
Sound of Freedom doesn't just misconstrue how human trafficking typically happens.
It also seriously misrepresents who the victims of trafficking tend to be.
The film centers around the case of two young siblings sold into the sex trade.
In fact, almost all the victims depicted in the film are children, but that's not exactly
true to life.
"You can sell a bag of cocaine one time.
The child?
Five to ten times a day."
In reality, the ASPE office reports that victims of trafficking are just as likely to be sold
as laborers, if not more.
For this reason, people of all genders and ages can be trafficked.
What's more, trafficking victims also don't exclusively come from outside the United States.
When it comes to child trafficking specifically, most victims still don't match the movie's
representation.
Most children who are trafficked are adolescents or teenagers, with the majority falling between
the ages of 15 and 17.
They often come from underrepresented communities, and many of them are LGBTQ and find themselves
taken in by traffickers after being kicked out of their homes.
A minority of trafficking victims are young children, and the sad truth is that of those
victims, their parents are often complicit in their trafficking.
Just like the movie's representation of how trafficking works, its depiction of victims
makes sense in a cinematic context.
Audiences are going to have a deeply emotional response to seeing young children as trafficking
victims in the film.
But once again, understanding the truth about trafficking is a prerequisite to addressing
the problem in the real world.
Both in the film and in reality, Tim Ballard worked as a Department of Homeland Security
agent before going rogue to rescue trafficking victims.
In that role, Ballard's job was less about finding children and more about catching perpetrators.
Early in the film, Ballard has something of a crisis of faith and starts taking a new
initiative in his work.
Ballard pretends to be a pedophile to get close to Ernst Oshinsky, a man he just arrested.
Oshinsky eventually leads Ballard to another man named Earl Buchanan, who purchased Miguel
after the boy was stolen from his family at the beginning of the movie.
After separating Miguel from Buchanan, Ballard takes the young boy out for burgers and promises
that he'll find his sister.
The real Buchanan, however, was not a child trafficker.
Instead, he was arrested for possessing and transporting child pornography, later being
charged with child molestation by state officials as well.
Obviously, as the hero of what's ostensibly an action movie, Ballard needs plenty of opportunities
to take things into his own hands.
In real life, it's doubtful he did so much solo work with perpetrators while working
for Homeland Security.
What's more, as former Department of Justice employee Erin Albright told Rolling Stone,
Ballard's dinner with Miguel would never happen as no agent would be allowed to be alone with
a victim in a setting like that.
Miguel is arguably the most important character in Sound of Freedom.
Of course, Tim Ballard's conflicted thoughts about his job with the DHS lead him to meet
Miguel, but it was the young boy's story that drove Ballard to become a vigilante trafficking
hunter.
In the film, Ballard first meets Miguel while arresting Earl Buchanan, and the young boy
gives Ballard a necklace from his sister, Rocío, and begs Ballard to try and find his
sister.
While Sound of Freedom needed to take some liberties with the true story for cinematic
purposes, most viewers will probably be shocked to learn that almost every detail of Miguel's
story was completely fabricated for the movie.
Everything from Miguel's "kidnapping" to his connection with Ballard was entirely different
in real life.
Independent watchdog American Crime Journal investigated Buchanan's arrest and found the
details to be wildly different from what Sound of Freedom presents.
Buchanan was crossing from Mexico into the United States with a young boy when he was
captured, but Ballard wasn't present for the arrest.
Furthermore, Buchanan wasn't any kind of suspect when he made the border crossing, but he didn't
have the child with whom he was traveling's birth certificate on him, so Border Patrol
agents searched his vehicle.
They found a videotape of Buchanan sexually abusing the child and arrested him.
Ballard only got involved because he was sent by DHS to collect the tape.
The biggest change that Sound of Freedom made to the true story, though, is adding Miguel's
sister into the plot.
"What if this was your daughter?"
In real life, Buchanan's victim's sister was back at home with her family when Buchanan
was arrested, and she never ended up being trafficked herself.
Journalists and human trafficking experts didn't need to uncover every inaccuracy in
Sound of Freedom — there are some details in the movie that the filmmakers readily admit
were invented for the story.
For example, though the character of Vampiro is based on a real person, the most important
parts of his backstory in the film are fictional.
In the movie, Vampiro becomes an important partner in Ballard's mission to save child
trafficking victims.
The reformed criminal formerly spent time in jail, and, even more importantly, he once
hired someone he thought was a sex worker, only to discover later that she was 14 years
old.
Vampiro was disgusted with himself and decided to start working on behalf of trafficking
victims.
Angel Studios, the distributor behind Sound of Freedom, published a blog post comparing
some of the film's details to the true story.
According to the post, Vampiro never spent any time in jail, and he never slept with
an underage girl.
His entire motivation in the movie was made up, as was his real involvement with Ballard.
The post explains that Vampiro didn't actually work with Ballard on the mission depicted
in the film, though he did work with Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad on a different
raid in Colombia.
The ending of Sound of Freedom gives us the film's most noticeable embellishment on the
true story.
In his attempt to find Rocío, Ballard leads an operation in Colombia that recovers over
50 child trafficking victims.
The filmmakers claim that the real-life version of the mission ended up saving 123 trafficking
victims, though not all of them were children.
After the operation, the rest of the movie leaves reality behind.
In the film, Tim doesn't find Rocío among the other children, but he refuses to give
up on his promise to Miguel.
He and Vampiro discover that the girl was sold to a group that lives deep in an unmapped
jungle.
"It's all rebel territory.
No one goes in it: not the army, not the police, not us."
Almost any visitors to the area will be killed upon arrival, so Ballard and Vampiro disguise
themselves as doctors to successfully sneak into the camp.
As far as action movie climaxes go, Ballard's charge into the jungle is pretty compelling.
It's also entirely made up.
In real life, Ballard never made a solo plunge into a dangerous jungle to save a child trafficking
victim.
Furthermore, the excursion Ballard was a part of that involved posing as a U.N. doctor did
not lead to any rescued children.
We've already seen that the movie's representation of Ballard's story, and trafficking as a whole,
is much larger than life, so it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that the film's
dramatic conclusion isn't part of the true story.
Sound of Freedom puts plenty of effort into transforming Tim Ballard into an action hero.
He's depicted as a man willing to do anything to save children, and he seems to be the only
person ready to face the reality of how brutal that work can be.
During Ballard's jungle excursion at the end of the movie, he even shoots a man before
finally saving Rocío.
In the movie, Ballard's killing comes across as completely justified and even heroic.
In real life, an extrajudicial killing like that would come with some massive moral and
legal implications.
That's probably why, in its blog post addressing the film's relation to reality, Angel Studios
noted,
"Tim Ballard is committed to rescuing children [...] and operates within the boundaries of
the law, collaborating with local authorities and governments to combat child trafficking."
The real Ballard has never killed anyone, and if he had, it would have been illegal.
Having Ballard kill someone in the film's climax might make sense for an action movie,
but it's another example of how Sound of Freedom shows a distorted version of human trafficking.
The problem with this presentation is that it might convince some viewers that the solution
to trafficking is a rugged individual willing to do anything.
Real-life experts agree that actual solutions to trafficking look more like government programs
put in place to support runaway children, poor families, parents struggling with addictions,
and migrants who might be seen as easier targets for manipulation and abuse.
The movie caps off its story by making some pretty bold claims about human trafficking.
At the end of the film, title cards appear with captions explaining how the human trafficking
industry raises $150 billion annually, and that more people are being enslaved now than
at any point in human history.
Human trafficking is a serious and horrifying problem that needs to be addressed, but neither
of those claims gives audiences the best impression of reality.
Trafficking is estimated to generate roughly $150 billion in profits each year, but that
number has very little to do with the context of the movie.
The majority of trafficking victims aren't young children, nor are they sold into the
sex trade.
Instead, most of that money comes from forced labor.
In all fairness, Sound of Freedom isn't the only source to claim that more humans are
slaves today than at any other point in history — The Guardian made the same claim in a
2019 article.
Regardless of who's making the statement, there's little evidence to support the claim
and a wide range of what can be considered "slavery."
As Brayden Gerrard pointed out in a blog post, historical records of slavery do surprisingly
little to inform us how many slaves there once were.
At the same time, organizations disagree on what slavery means in a modern context, and
no matter the definition, getting exact numbers is nearly impossible.
Sound of Freedom positions Tim Ballard as an unabashed hero working to save children,
and it illustrates that he and his organization, Operation Underground Railroad, have been
undeniably effective in their work.
However, the real story is much more complicated.
In 2020, Vice published an investigation of Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad.
Their report found the organization has a long history of obscuring the presentation
of their work for the public eye, and that they have made outright false claims.
Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR, releases very few concrete details about the work that
it does or how it spends the millions it receives in donations each year.
The organization claims that it needs to keep that information confidential to continue
being effective, but some of its most sensational rescue stories have turned out to be false.
Ballard has repeatedly told stories about OUR rescuing a child trafficking victim called
Liliana.
According to Ballard, Liliana was kidnapped as a young teenager and sold into the sex
trade.
He's even used her story to argue that there needs to be a border wall between the U.S.
and Mexico.
"Lily has often asked me a simple, yet powerful, question: 'Why was there no wall or barrier
on the southern border for me?'"
However, when Vice investigated, it found that Liliana had actually known her trafficker.
As is common in these cases, he was her boyfriend at the time.
What's even more surprising is that OUR didn't rescue Liliana — she escaped her trafficker
herself when she was 17 years old.
Just like Sound of Freedom, Ballard may be well-intentioned, but you might not want to
take every one of his claims at face value.
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp
National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat
services.