US news coverage fails unaccompanied minors
OPINION Why are so many children fleeing from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to the United States, and why dont more U.S. English-language news organizations…
Marta Beltran, 19, of El Salvador, holds her 18-month-old son on the 4th of July as they ride a city shuttle bus from the McAllen city bus station to the Sacred Heart Catholic Church Shelter. About 90 Hondurans a day cross illegally from Mexico at the Rio Grande near McAllen, but many children make the trek unaccompanied. (AP Photo/Austin American-Statesman, Rodolfo Gonzalez)
Why would children, many of them unaccompanied, risk assault, sex traffickers, drug dealers and rickety trains that have left some dismembered?
Leaving the nightmarish conditions in their home countries is often worth taking the sometimes-fatal risks.
SEE ALL: The Border, a country all unto its own
However, if you watch or read much of the English-language coverage of the crisis, it seems more preoccupied with framing the coverage solely as the Obama versus Congress debate over immigration. But is this an immigration story or a story about a refugee crisis, if the media were to refocus on the central part of the story?
Honduras is even singled out by many observers as the most violent nation in the Western Hemisphere, and some human rights advocates have referred to San Pedro Sula as the murder capital of the world.
To be sure, some U.S. English-language journalists have done justice to the subject matter and captured some of the horrific scenes playing out in those Central American nations.
Here are some of their stories:
Gang slayings in Honduras include children
In this May 28, 2013 file photo, a masked member of the 18th Street gang peers from behind a window of a prison door as other gang members give a press conference inside the San Pedro Sula prison in Honduras. Even though this gang declared a truce, gang violence continues to take lives in Honduras through 2014. (AP Photo/Esteban Felix, File)
In the Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, a 7-year-old boy was tortured and beaten with sticks and rocks, murdered when he went to look for his missing 13-year-old brother, who was also been killed along with another teen, according to reporter Frances Robles of the “New York Times.”
Gangs strong-arm teens into joining
This NBC report on gangs in Honduras depicts how this 17-year-old ended in a coma after refusing to join a gang. (NBC News)
In that same city, NBC News Stephanie Gosk reports on a 17-year-old clinging to life support, shot in the head because he refused to join a gang.
More forced gang recruitment in El Salvador
In this March 26, 2012 photo, an inmate belonging to the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13 gang stands inside the prison in Ciudad Barrios, El Salvador. (AP Photo/Luis Romero)
Amanda Taub reports for Vox.com on the problem in El Salvador, The street gangs known as maras – M-18 or Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13 – target kids for forced recruitment, usually in their early teenage years, but sometimes as young as kindergarten. They also forcibly recruit girls as girlfriends, a euphemistic term for a non-consensual relationship that involves rape by one or more gang members.
Driving forces of the unaccompanied minors crisis
Undocumented migrant detainees sleep in a holding cell at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville,Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, Pool)
The Pew Center recently released detailed reports that show crime and poverty throughout Central America are the driving forces behind this crisis.
Unfortunately the above examples represent only a handful of English-language news stories that try to look at what these children want to get away from and why they would risk life and limb to get here.
The children involved here are not teeming over our borders because they seek jobs. They are coming here out of dire fear. If they stay in their home countries, they face violence and death. Daily.
Thats not conservative. Thats not liberal. Thats not even politics. That is the story. Why is that not being reported more often to Americans?
SEE ALSO: Advocates fear unaccompanied minors lack immigration attorneys
