Latin American Child Migrants and Mainstream Media Half-Truths Laura Carlsen - CIP Americas
go to original June 24, 2014

Children on the Run: Download the full report (PDF)

There’s been a blitz of stories over the past couple of weeks on child migrants arriving on the U.S.’s southern border. For many of us in Mexico, this is not new. But US press attention to it is relatively new, as one major media outlet after another features stories on the plight of unaccompanied minors.

It’s certainly positive that these children do not remain invisible. What they go through should be cause for indignation on a global level. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees issued a report last March that found that half had experienced or been threatened with serious harm on the journey north.

But most of these mainstream press stories are telling half-truths about child victims, while muddling or downright manipulating the question of who and what is responsible.

The New York Times, AP and others outlets have been running stories that follow a pattern of emphasizing two general conclusions. One, that parents in the United States are selfishly and irresponsibly encouraging this phenomenon and putting their own children at risk by sending them north and, two, that more children are migrating to the United States because they perceive Obama administration policies and practices as lenient on child migrants and think they have a good chance of staying–even if they get caught.

Although most of these stories mention conditions of poverty and violence in the places where the children come from, they almost never mention how these places have become so poor and violent, or much less the direct role that U.S. foreign policy has played in making them that way and forcing the children to leave.

Read the rest at CIP Americas

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