Skip to main content

Anti-Slavery Day

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 Help UK state that:  “An estimated 13,000 people are being held captive in modern slavery in the UK [...] These people are coerced into forced or bonded labour, domestic servitude, prostitution, forced marriages and even child slavery. They are imprisoned, beaten, violated, threatened, blackmailed and denied their basic human rights on a daily basis.” (Migrant Help UK website)

 The GLA (Gangmasters Licensing Authority)  is a UK Government agency that works in partnership to protect vulnerable and exploited workers.  Read about how to spot the signs of modern slavery in the definitive guide from GLA here. 
Our research project explores representations of transnational human trafficking, including slavery.  The media and news bulletins depict these crimes every day, and there is an increasing awareness in politicians and the wider population of these crimes.  We examine how that awareness is shaped by depictions in the media and in fiction and true crime, thereby contributing to public debates around these matters.










Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dr Nina Muždeka explains what she will examine in her research

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Principal Investigator Dr Christiana Gregoriou on her research

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
Post a Comment
Read more

Ilse Ras reports on her research on British newspapers

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
Post a Comment
Read more