Representation of transnational human trafficking in present-day news media, true crime, and fiction

I used slavery as one of the core search terms for my data collection (http://representinghumantrafficking.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/ilse-ras-reports-on-her-research-on.html). 2013 marked the 150 th anniversary of Lincoln’s signing of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves, so as a result of this anniversary and the use of this search term, there is a substantial number of articles in the human trafficking corpus discussing historical slavery, rather than contemporary human trafficking.   One definitional concern, therefore, is whether historical slavery, as in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and, in particular, the exploitation of African people on American plantations, could be considered a form of human trafficking. It certainly should be, if the principles of the Palermo Protocol are followed – historical slavery entailed the transnational movement of people, using coercion (in particular physical bondage and violence) as well as deception, for the purposes o

As a complex issue, transnational human trafficking invites  debate facilitated by the role of media as both a contemporary watchdog and a modern forum for showcasing diverse viewpoints. In the analysis of the transnational human trafficking coverage in the news media within the domain of narrative theory and the theoretical framework of poststructuralism, the following two aspects appear to be crucial: (1)  The role of news media, as a forum for expressing different opinions in relation to the causes and solutions to human trafficking, in the construction of public opinion and response to the issue, as well as in the formation and implementation of policy on human trafficking, exemplified by the choices they make in reporting on the issue, and (2)  The application of the contemporary narrative theory to the analysis of news media texts as means to construct meaning and reality, which details and explains the importance of the process of story-telling and the structural elements

My part in this project is to conduct more intensely case-study based qualitative textual analysis of a small number of key texts in the non-fictional or ‘true crime’ genre. The main focus will be on popular documentary televisual representations of human trafficking in the UK today. The primary source I will be analysing is the narrative construction of present day human trafficking in the UK in the recent Al Jazeera produced documentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade – Al Jazeera Investigates (2016). These narratives will be compared and contrasted to others presented in contemporary popular audio-visual representations of human trafficking in the true crime format and how these shape and influence, and are shaped and influenced by, popular epistemologies and mythologies of human trafficking. In this context, I will also be exploring the development and evolution in the ‘true crime’ genre in the context of present day representations of human trafficking. The main themes I w

As principal investigator of the project, I am analysing English print media-specific human trafficking representation. The analysis is critical discourse analytic and qualitative. For this part of the project, a sample corpus needed to be extracted from the large English language media text corpus (of around 80,000 texts) Ilse Ras’s research method generated (http://representinghumantrafficking.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/ilse-ras-reports-on-her-research-on.html). We looked at graph spikes where large numbers of these human trafficking-related texts were generated; from the 2000-2016 period, the sample corpus texts were hence limited to the periods of April 2001, March 2007, November 2013, Summer 2015 and May 2016. Employing Laurence Anthony’s ProtAnt software so as to trace prototypical corpus texts within these spikes enabled the generation of a sample corpus of a manageable set of 67 news texts of various length and spike-distribution. The literature review around human trafficking

My role in the project is to collect and analyse a corpus of British newspaper articles, published between 2000 and 2016, on the topic of human trafficking. A corpus is nothing more than a collection of texts, and corpus linguistics is the field that uses corpora (the plural of corpus) to draw conclusions about language use. Collecting corpora is not always a straightforward endeavour, in particular when the topic under investigation is sometimes misunderstood by the public, the media, and even legislators. For instance, human trafficking may also be known as ‘modern slavery’, and may encompass such crimes such as organ harvesting, forced labour, and domestic servitude. Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate about whether sex work should always be considered a form of exploitation and trafficking. Finally, it may not always be clear whether someone has been trafficked (i.e. moved using coercion or deception for the purposes of exploitation), or smuggled (i.e. voluntarily but ir

Today is  Anti-Slavery Day, which falls on 18 October in the United Kingdom.  Modern slavery is closely linked to human trafficking and transnational organised crime. Slavery is one of the topics we  investigate on  our research project, as part of examining representations of human trafficking and slavery in representations from media, true crime and crime fiction.   Anti-Slavery Day was created to raise greater awareness of the crime of modern slavery, and to urge government, business and individuals to eliminate it.   (image from  http://www.antislaveryday.com/ ) The horrors of modern slavery are put under spotlight at Migrant Help UK exhibition .  The exhibition will be on show at London’s Victoria Station on Monday 17 October. It will move to Bristol Temple Meads station on Anti-Slavery Day, Tuesday (18); Birmingham New Street station on Wednesday (19); Liverpool Lime Street station on Thursday (20) and Edinburgh Waverley station on Friday (21).    Migrant He

On 3 October our team of investigators launched our PaCCS Research Innovation Award project entitled "Representation of transnational human trafficking in present-day news media, true crime & fiction."    PaCCS stands for Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.  Our project is awarded under th e  Transnational Organised Crime theme. Our project Facebook page can be found  here .  We tweet from  @TransNatCrime  which can be found  here . Our Principal Investigator, Dr Christiana Gregoriou, summarises the aims of the research project: " The primary purpose of this research is to investigate the portrayal of transnational human trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, the genre of true crime, and news media, given that fictional and supposed factual representations, and media coverage, help shape public knowledge of such crime. This research will investigate how aligned such representations of trafficking are, whilst assuming that ficti