Jasmine Blu
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What a tough film to stomach.
Buying Back My Daughter gives an incredibly unflinching look at sex trafficking and certainly earned every bit of the trigger warning it put out at the start of the film.
No matter how cognizant we become of this pervasive issue, it never stops being shocking and abhorrent when we even glimpse what the trafficking world looks like, particularly for young women.
Meagan Good starred in, and executive produced this piece, which was undoubtedly inspired by far too many tales to give voice to regarding this particular stain on society.
She put forth an impressive and understandably heartwrenching performance as a woman utterly devoted to finding and saving her eldest daughter from a life that no mother should ever have to imagine.
Buying Back My Daughter touched on so many of the problems that arise.
For one, they did a remarkably great job of showcasing how easily one can fall victim to trafficking and how traffickers know how to exploit basic social mores and understand how people think to get what they desire from them.
It felt perfectly understandable that a young, naive Alicia would let her guard down at the sight of a suburban woman in a mom van with a car seat in the back and a bunch of snacks.
We’re conditioned to avoid creepy men in white or black vans. Our guard is naturally up for individuals who would look the part better.
But women and girls would naturally let their guard down for another woman, especially one posing as a mother, and that’s been such a common tactic used to capture children, teens, and women as human trafficking continues to rage on in this country from the city streets to the nice suburban neighborhoods.
The film also showcased how frustrating it is to deal with the police, particularly regarding a missing teenage girl.
What’s so frustrating is it never seems to matter how well you know your child, their personality, what they would and wouldn’t do, and how their disposition can’t be boxed into some stereotypical archetype of a “teen girl.”
One will always encounter someone as jaded and emotionally detached as Officer Lustig, who will disregard everything you say and know to be true about the person you love and write them off as a mishmash of tropes.
At this point, we should be far too knowledgeable and evolved as a society and law enforcement to immediately and consistently assume that every girl that goes missing must have run off with a boyfriend or wants to stay out partying for the night.
Alicia wasn’t even that type of teenager; these things should be considered instead of assuming that everyone of the same age is the same and operates the same way.
Human and sex trafficking is, in fact, a pervasive issue. Trafficking, in general, is appallingly prevalent, and law enforcement should be far too conscious of how the rings operate and how pervasive they have become to be this archaic and dismissive still when people go missing.
Lustig was so infuriating one wanted to reach through the screen and throttle him. Sure, there’s possibly an argument that when one is in law enforcement and faces many atrocities, there’s a level of emotional detachment required to function correctly and effectively still.
But he neither functioned properly or effectively nor did he have a shred of compassion or sympathy regarding this situation.
He was an asshole from the second he appeared onscreen during the noise complaint to the time he seemingly disappeared after realizing that something more serious was going on and yet not having the decency to show concern or remorse.
It was so many things at play, from how law enforcement can still respond to missing young girls and how careless they can come across, compounded by that specific lack of urgency, compassion, or concern when the missing in question is Black or Brown.
This film, falling within the same time frame as NBC’s new hit series Found premiering, hit that point home even harder.
If you haven’t already checked out the excellent series premiere of that series, I strongly urge you to do so.
It’s like Dana was up against a wall.
So much of the police ineffectiveness comes down to bureaucracy and red tape, which is frustrating. It means that law enforcement is almost predisposed to be far behind the criminals with issues like this.
In the time it took Officer Jackass to throw condescending advice and dismiss Dana and Curtis’ feeding them lines about calling all of Alicia’s friends or her maybe running away because “that’s what teens do,” telling them that they basically need to wait a while so as not to exhaust resources, Ron had already imprisoned Alicia, raped her, and put her to work as a sex worker.
It seems that even if there are law enforcement who are willing to move fast (which wasn’t the case here, sadly), traffickers move even quicker.
It’s hard to combat that, but that’s how they can take full advantage of a flawed system.
Vanderpump Rules’ Ariana Madix at least played an officer who was meant to counterbalance the apathy of her partner. But despite her moments of concern and empathy, even that didn’t seem like enough.
Karen avoided Dana’s calls most of the time, and it wasn’t until months into Alicia’s disappearance that she confided in Curtis about her own experience with trafficking when she was younger and encouraged him to work outside the law to do things on his own.
It was strangely hollow, with her casually sharing this admission with a level of detachment that didn’t feel true, and without her challenging her partner in any way, she never felt like a real and true counterbalance to him or like someone who could adequately advocate for victims and survivors as one herself.
In some ways, it was almost disappointing when she shared this piece of information because she didn’t live up to what that meant during her screen time. If anything, I expected more and better from her because of her experience.
Madix’s performance was solid, however. So at least there’s that.
The film also showcased how society’s inherent sexism and misogyny, along with gaslighting, are excellent tools for sex trafficking to even function.
Despite Alicia being nothing of the sort, Ron casually pointed to her clothes or her need to be “fast” as to why she ended up in this predicament as if her trafficking was her fault.
It hurt even more to know how sweet Alicia was, how introverted, shy, and sheltered she appeared to be. She was a new girl in a new town with no real friends, and she hadn’t broken the rules a day in her life until she let some new acquaintances talk her into sneaking out of the house.
It’s something you don’t think twice about regarding teenagers. However, to my eternal frustration, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to the basics of “Girl Code” or “we arrive together, we leave together.”
It was genuinely shocking that they let Alicia go off, didn’t want to take her back home, and didn’t think twice about not hearing from her for the rest of the night.
They didn’t even bother to check to see if she got home when they sneaked back into the house, and she happily sat at her mother’s kitchen table, eating her food without a second thought.
Every scene at Ron‘s house was worse than the previous one, and it was challenging to watch this man and the series of random Johns break Alicia down.
They robbed that poor girl of her innocence, and she wasn’t even the same person we met at the film’s start. It was quite a remarkable and horrifying transition.
The hard drugs intermingled with all of that made things so much worse.
It was nice that she found some solace with Destiny, with whom she trauma bonded, and one criticism of this film is not having any actual closure for this side character they built up.
Destiny kept Alicia alive all those months she was imprisoned at Ron’s place. She gave Alicia some semblance of hope and security.
It’s believable that another aspect of Alicia running back to Ron was out of concern and loyalty to Destiny. But then it was as if the film completely forgot about advancing Destiny’s narrative beyond her getting beaten nearly to death after her escape.
It felt incomplete.
Dana and Curtis’ crumbling marriage and home life falling apart as they unwittingly neglected their younger daughter, Cadence, added the strain these stories require to show how these issues affect more than just the traffick survivor.
It was delightful to see Bianca Lawrence in another role on the network. She previously starred in much lighter fare, Dancing Through the Snow, with her father and Virgin River star, Colin Lawrence.
My heart ached for this poor, young girl who both felt left in her sister’s shadow and had parents who thoroughly checked out amid their grief and the stress of this entire situation.
The timeline was rough in its depiction as the film relied heavily on throwaway lines referencing how much time had passed and resorted to telling, not showing, regarding the many changes happening amid all of that.
We eventually saw that thanks to the Missing Kids group and a lead from Nancy, Dana could piece together that Alicia was on that sex work site.
Again, the police felt more like an obstacle than a resource for the entire film.
While it made sense why they couldn’t move immediately on something like that, it was no less irritating to hear them spouting off about all the red tape required when they knew that there were dozens of girls getting physically and sexually assaulted — while they dotted “I’s” and crossed “T’s.”
Dana’s plan to get her daughter back by enlisting her services was fairly solid and mostly practical.
She lucked up with Ron’s wife being there, not Ron himself.
It was nerve-wracking that Ron was seemingly within the same neighborhood and had already seen what Dana looked like, which could’ve blown up that entire plan in smoke.
You couldn’t blame Dana for making a move after getting that phone call and listening to her daughter being assaulted over the line.
It was solid enough, but where things turned left was how pitiful they were at helping Alicia transition after they rescued her.
It was one of those things that felt inherently cultural in that there’s an unfortunate aversion to therapy, often in favor of faith, and this deeply rooted belief that pushing past things or praying through them is the solution to everything.
It’s generational even, as Dana confides in her daughter almost too late, implying that she experienced sexual assault herself as a youth.
It’s a heartbreaking yet raw, honest moment that serves as a reminder of the stats about sexual assault for women. Sadly, if a woman hasn’t experienced it herself, she knows at least three other women who have.
According to the CDC regarding sexual violence, one in four women has been sexually assaulted; over half of the women roaming this earth.
It’s apparent that much of how Dana carries herself is due to her own experience and how unresolved that trauma may have been for her.
Even the implication that Alicia could just “get back to normal” after everything she endured was naive and ignorant. Thrusting family and friends on her after that ordeal wasn’t the solution to perking her up and getting her in better spirits.
There was no way she could simply go back to school after a week or two of rest and get back on track.
Alicia wouldn’t be able to push past her traumas, bury them, and move on. That’s not the solution to any of this, and it’s continually frustrating that in some communities, that’s still the approach.
It was telling that it took Dana so long to go to the support group in the first place, and the second she cashed in on the tips she got from them and found her daughter, she thought she could walk away from it like everything was good and she was no longer in need of the group anymore.
The reality is that everyone in that family needed support groups and therapy. Alicia certainly needed to go straight into a psychiatric and rehab facility of some sort until she could get clean, work through her trauma, and learn all the tools she needed to move forward in her life.
Thankfully, she eventually got all that and more, and Dana and Curtis recognized the error of their actions. But it was such a close call.
They could’ve lost her all over again permanently.
The film certainly touched on many of the significant issues. The violence and sexual assault were difficult to watch.
The performances were strong, even though the coverage felt like we rushed through some things instead of letting aspects of the storyline settle and breathe a bit, making the film feel more perfunctory at tackling the topic.
Over to you, Lifetime Fanatics. Did you enjoy Buying Back My Daughter? Hit the comments with your thoughts!
Jasmine Blu is a senior staff writer for TV Fanatic. She is an insomniac who spends late nights and early mornings binge-watching way too many shows and binge-drinking way too much tea. Her eclectic taste makes her an unpredictable viewer with an appreciation for complex characters, diverse representation, dynamic duos, compelling stories, and guilty pleasures. You’ll definitely find her obsessively live-tweeting, waxing poetic, and chatting up fellow Fanatics and readers. Follow her on X.