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 will focus on in
this and other texts are the various ‘absences’, that is to say what usually
gets ignored, taken for granted, or otherwise alluded to as if it was already
fully understood because it’s ‘obvious’—what ‘everybody knows’. From a social
science perspective, these sorts of common sense notions ignite what C. Wright
Mills [1959] (1999) famously called ‘the sociological imagination’ and more
recently what Jock Young (2011) has interpreted more provocatively as ‘the
criminological imagination’. This approach takes criminological research into
more interdisciplinary, critical and interpretive ‘cultural’ modes of analysis,
adopting perspectives and theories that are less allied to the conventional policy
orientation of positivist and empirical research, instead linking the
micro-ethnographies of the private lives of individuals with the broad macro
scope of history to get a more nuanced understanding of the criminogenesis of
human trafficking.
Much of the narrative focus in human
trafficking texts is victim-oriented, and that is largely understandable, given
the scale and degree of trauma and harm caused to them. But the delineation of the
roles of victim/perpetrator in human trafficking as in many other types of crime
while often obvious at first sight, is at the same time extremely complex when viewed
in more depth. Hence the roles of the ‘traffickers’ in the true crime
genre in terms of who they are and why they commit their crimes is generally
less well represented, glossed over entirely, or reified under the labels of
evil or villainy. Similarly, the demand for the services of the victims
of human trafficking tends not to be focused upon in popular narrative
accounts, often left out altogether. But nevertheless the question remains, who
fuels the trade in human beings by purchasing them or their services? What are
the biographies of these actors, how are they represented
in present day narratives of human trafficking, and what does this tell us
about this form of crime and victimization at the micro level and also within
the broader history of the modern slave trade?
References:
Al
Jazeera (2016) Britain’s
Modern Slave Trade – Al Jazeera Investigates. http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/uk-slavery-sex-slave-smuggling-investigation/index.html
[accessed 29/11/2016].
Boyle,
Sheron (1995) Working Girls and Their Men: the sexual secrets of the women
who sell their bodies and the men who pay them’. London: Smith Gryphon
Limited.
Earle,
Sarah and Sharp, Keith (2007) Sex in Cyberspace: Men who pay for sex.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Malarek, Victor (2009, 2011) The Johns: sex for
sale and the men who buy it. New York: Arcade Publishing.
Mills, C. Wright [1959] (1999) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
WISE (2015, 2016) Stolen Lives [DVD].
Wilberforce Institute: University of Hull.
Young, Jock (2011)
The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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