2018 Book Representations of Transnational

REPRESENTATIONS
OF TRANSNATIONAL
HUMAN
TRAFFICKING
Present-day News Media,
True Crime, and Fiction
Edited by
Christiana Gregoriou
Representations of Transnational Human
Trafficking
Editor
Representations of
Transnational Human
Trafficking
Present-day News Media, True Crime, and Fiction
Editor
School of English
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-78213-3 ISBN 978-3-319-78214-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78214-0
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Editor’s Preface, Acknowledgments and
Recommendations
In September 2017, we convened a group of human trafficking specialist

academics, police officers, third sector, Home Office and media reps, cre-
ative writers, and filmmakers to discuss findings from the AHRC and
ESRC-funded ‘Media Human Trafficking Representation’ project (under
the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research), findings this
book showcases in detail. We take this opportunity to thank our invited
speakers: the Police and Crime Commissioner and Chair of the National
Anti-Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery Network Mark Burns-
Williamson, journalist/writer/filmmaker Paul Kenyon, crime writer Matt
Johnson, academic/writer/‘Free the Slaves’ Foundation founder Professor
Kevin Bales (University of Nottingham) and academic/filmmaker
Professor Nicola Mai (Kingston University), whose film Travel, featuring
and produced alongside trafficked women, was screened. Our symposium
also featured a talk by project partner Special Policing Consultant Bernie
Gravett, who offered comments on the extent to which the described pop-
ular media portrayals reflect the realities of trafficking. The input and sub-
sequent discussion highlighted the subject’s complexity and brought to
light several controversial issues, including media distortions shaped by
economic forces that compel creative producers to turn human trafficking
accounts into ‘newsworthy’ stories, and the challenge of communicating
these stories in translation. We also identified trends and practices that
generate stereotypes, clichés, and reductively formulaic human trafficking
narratives. At the same time, documentaries offer powerful and affective
representations, while language has the power not just to manipulate but
also open up and enable deep understandings.
v
vi EDITOR’S PREFACE, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Given the need for stronger and more effective press regulation, we
propose instituting human-trafficking-specific guidance documents, and/
or a code of practice for all who report on the issue, who need to fully
appreciate the term’s legal meaning and relevant ideological implications
of their linguistic choices, and avoid seeing stories as mere commodities/
entertainment and as areas where truth can be manipulated. Seeking the
support of those who can influence the discussion on media accuracy and
encourage responsible reporting is key. We propose developing research-
led material that can be used for online or in-person training/workshops
for relevant practitioners in all fields (including police officers, media rep-
resentatives, educationalists, and film/soap script writers), but also A-level
and university students. We would also recommend generating research-
led media footage or actively contributing to mainstream audience films
that more accurately and sensitively report on the issue, and seek out to do
briefings for various committees, foundations, and even airport/airline
staff, helping identify concerning situations/individuals, improving rele-
vant information posters (say, at airports), and ultimately informing better
policy development. Lastly, there is a need to encourage and enable vic-
tims to represent themselves, in their own words/forums, devolving power
down from the conventional editor/journalist decision- and programme-
makers. Third-sector representatives, but also migrant rights and sex
worker rights organisations, with sensitivity and access to such victims,
could help them collaborate with researchers in gaining that power.
Leeds, UK Christiana Gregoriou

Contents
1 Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking:

A Critical Review 1
Christiana Gregoriou and Ilse A. Ras
2 ‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’: An Investigation

into British Newspapers’ Representation of Transnational
Human Trafficking, 2000–2016 25
3 Not All Human Trafficking is Created Equal:

Transnational Human Trafficking in the UK and Serbian
News Media Texts—Narratological and Media Studies
Approaches 61
Nina Muždeka
4 “In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational

Child Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction 89
Charlotte Beyer
vii
viii Contents
5 Who are the Traffickers? A Cultural Criminological

Analysis of Traffickers as Represented in the Al Jazeera
Documentary Series Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first
Century Evil 117
Melissa Dearey
Conclusion 143
Index 147
Notes on Contributors
Charlotte Beyer is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University

of Gloucestershire. Her forthcoming crime fiction publications include
editing Teaching Crime Fiction for Palgrave, and a monograph on the
crime short story (McFarland). She is also co-editing three Demeter
Press books, Mothers Without Their Children with Andrea Robertson;
Travellin’ Mama: Mothers, Mothering and Travel with Janet MacLennan,
Dorsía Smith Silva, and Marjorie Tesser, and Mothers Who Kill/
Infanticide with Josephine Savarese. Charlotte is on the Steering
Committee for the Crime Studies Network and on the Editorial
Boards for Feminist Encounters, The New Americanist, and American,
British and Canadian Studies.
Melissa Dearey is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of
Social Sciences and Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education at the
University of Hull in the UK. Her academic background is in philosophy
and cultural theory, focusing on the link between politics, art/aesthetics,
deviance and social change. She has published research on a broad number
of topics including radicalisation, political imprisonment, diabolical evil
and the moving, somatic body. She is especially interested in interdisciplin-
ary and cultural criminology, and has adapted methodologies and con-
cepts from dance, and popular cultural forms like auto/biography, true
crime, reality TV, and game shows into her research. She is also interested
in green criminology, that is, corporate and state crimes against nature and
non-human animals.
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Christiana Gregoriou is an Associate Professor in English Language at

Leeds University. She is a crime fiction stylistics specialist and ran the
2016–2017 AHRC/ESRC-funded project on the representation of
transnational human trafficking in news media, true crime, and fiction.
Most notable are her three monographs (Crime Fiction Migration:
Crossing Languages, Cultures, Media, 2017; Language, Ideology and
Identity in Serial Killer Narratives, 2011; Deviance in Contemporary
Crime Fiction, 2007), and her edited collections (Constructing Crime:
Discourse and Cultural Representations of Crime and ‘Deviance’, 2012;
Language and Literature, ‘Investigating Contemporary Crime Writing’
special edition 21(3), 2012).
Nina Muždeka is an Associate Professor of Anglophone literatures at the
University of Novi Sad, in Serbia. Her areas of interest include contempo-
rary literature in English with a special focus on theory of genre, narratol-
ogy, postmodern theory, and translation theory. She is the author of
monographs on the issue of genre in Julian Barnes’s novels (2006)
and magical realism in Angela Carter’s novels (2016). She is cur-
rently preparing a monograph on twentieth-century British detective
fiction written by women. As a literary translator, Nina has trans-
lated and published over 35 full-length books of mostly contempo-
rary Anglophone fiction.
Ilse A. Ras completed her PhD in English Language at the University of
Leeds. She also holds an MSc in Criminology from the University of
Leicester and is a co-founder of the Poetics and Linguistics Association
Special Interest Group on Crime Writing. Her work and teaching often
crosses the boundaries between English language and Criminology,
focusing on the use of language to express, maintain, and reinforce
(capitalist) power structures, using corpus-assisted critical discourse
analysis and critical stylistics to examine this language.
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK

newspapers between 01/2000 and 09/2016 28
Table 2.2 Events concurrent with ‘spikes’ in the number of human
trafficking-related articles published by UK newspapers 30
Table 2.3 Breakdown of the composition of the ‘spike’ sample corpora 31
Table 2.4 Categorisation of c-collocates to ‘trafficking’ 40
Table 2.5 Categorisation of c-collocates of trafficking and smuggling,
with overlapping words in italics 42
xi
CHAPTER 1
Representations of Transnational Human

Trafficking: A Critical Review
Abstract The collection introduction defines human trafficking and pro-

ceeds to offer an in-depth literature review that assesses the significance of
attention to the collection topic, suggests new directions for research, and
provides a synopsis and integrative analysis of the collective contributions
of manuscripts within the collection. It starts by detailing the story of
human trafficking (the types, causes, and frames of trafficking), then dis-
cusses the effects of misrepresentation on the directly affected (draws on
victim hierarchy, criminalisation and secondary victimisation), and then
deals with the socio-political causes and effects of misrepresentation (gen-
der and wealth inequality, global and local politics, and secondary exploi-
tation). It ends by providing a rationale as to the nature of the case studies
the book and its contributors consider.
Keywords Criminalisation • Human trafficking • (Mis)representation •

Transnational organised crime • Victim hierarchy
C. Gregoriou (*) • I. A. Ras

School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
e-mail: c.gregoriou@leeds.ac.uk; i.a.ras@leeds.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 1

C. Gregoriou (ed.), Representations of Transnational Human
Trafficking, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78214-0_1
2 C. GREGORIOU AND I. A. RAS
Introduction
This collection’s various studies examine representations of human traffick-
ing (henceforth HT), traffickers, and victims in media ranging from British
and Serbian newspapers, British and Scandinavian crime novels, and a docu-
mentary series, before questioning the extent to which these portrayals
actually reflect the realities of trafficking. We show that media reporting on
HT matters, and is impactful; HT victims are idealised, with those not
according to this ideal being criminalised. Selected official source aspects of
HT take priority over others that are neglected, and hence frame HT in
problematic ways. Instead, fictional and factional representations of this
crime can be better used as tools with which change in HT victim treatment
can be engendered. Our studies focus on news articles, crime fiction, and
documentaries published and released post-2000, the year in which the UN
Office on Drugs and Crime Protocol to the Convention on Transnational
Organised Crime, on trafficking (nicknamed the Palermo Protocol), was
passed, and covers a time period in which the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was
passed and the refugee and migrant crisis spread across Europe. Whilst we
primarily focus on British news, fiction, and documentaries, we have also
included Scandinavian crime fiction and Serbian news to facilitate compari-
sons with, respectively, a literary tradition that focuses on social realist
themes (Brunsdale, 2016), and news from a country affected by trafficking
in three dimensions (origin, transfer, and destination) and on the route of
refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq (European Commission, 2017).
We adopt the definition of trafficking set out in the Anti-Slavery
International RACE Project report on ‘Trafficking for Forced Criminal
Activities and Begging in Europe’ (2014, p. 86):
Trafficking involves bringing people away from the communities in which

they live and forcing them into work against their will using violence, decep-
tion or coercion. When children are trafficked, no violence, deception or
coercion needs to be involved: simply transporting them into exploitative
conditions constitutes trafficking.
This definition follows the UN (Palermo) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress

and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, sup-
plementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime (UNODC, 2016, passed in 2000). We acknowledge
that this definition is problematic, as its terms are difficult to define, and it
REPRESENTATIONS OF TRANSNATIONAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING… 3
is difficult to establish where the thresholds of the lack of consent, and the
level of deception, exploitation, coercion, and movement are located.
Previous research on the representations of HT shows that these narra-
tives are often overly focused on only one form of HT and one particular
type of victim, with the highly damaging effect of ignoring or even crimi-
nalising (other) victims of other types of HT. As such, we are critical of
representations that serve to limit those forms of exploitation, force,
deception, or movement, that are considered ‘proper’ forms of HT, and
that serve to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ victims of HT. We
argue that the characteristics of the HT narrative sustain the global struc-
tures that make people vulnerable to being trafficked in the first place.
These include gender and wealth inequality, and the geopolitical power
balance that primarily benefits the global West.
This introductory chapter first examines the commonly accepted defini-
tions and narratives of HT, as found in previous studies. It then traces the
effects of these stories on those vulnerable people who are trafficked, or
smuggled and exploited at their destinations. Finally, it considers the
global inequalities that are perpetuated by these narratives, before this col-
lection’s chapters are outlined.
The Story and Truth(s) of Human Trafficking

Media representations inform public and practitioners as to the nature of
HT: they are seen and referenced by policymakers and therefore shape
discourse on HT (Small, 2012). The increasing ‘celebritisation’ of the
problem, with the rise of celebrity activists as rescuers, ‘ambassadors’, and
(often ill-informed) ‘experts’, also signals pop culture’s powerful role in
anti-trafficking movements (Haynes, 2014, cited in Kinney, 2015, p. 90;
see also Steele, 2015). Wylie (2016) traces the rise of a particular version
of the story of human trafficking, and its adoption into ‘common knowl-
edge’, drawing on the concept of the norm lifecycle in International
Relations (Finnemore & Sikkink, 1998, in Wylie, 2016). In this lifecycle,
a norm is first campaigned for by moral entrepreneurs, then supported by
global actors (ibid.). If enough global actors support the new norm, oth-
ers are pushed to accept it also (ibid.). The norm is then enacted on local
levels, and finally becomes ‘common knowledge’ (ibid.). Wylie (2016)
points out that the norm only successfully completes this lifecycle if it is in
line with pre-existing norms, and can be used to support the material and
immaterial interests of global and local actors.
Wylie (2016, p. 2) notes that in the past 20 years, a particular version
of the human trafficking story has become the new normal. Winterdyk,
Reichel, and Perrin (2012, p. 9) indicate that the first decade of the
twenty-first century met with ‘an explosion of media coverage’ of HT,
which they partially attribute to the passing of the Palermo Protocol in
2000. Wylie (2016) instead identifies the Palermo Protocol as part of the
lifecycle. This increase in reporting would, initially, appear to be a positive
development, as the public’s and (untrained) practitioners’ understanding
of what HT is, and who the victims are, is dependent on media representa-
tions (De Shalit, Heynen, & Van der Meulen, 2014; Denton, 2010; Farrell
& Fahy, 2009; Papadouka, Evangelopoulos, & Ignatow, 2016; Sanford,
Martínez, & Weitzer, 2016; Sobel, 2016). Problematically, however, the
‘master’ narrative of HT (Snajdr, 2013; see also Wilson & O’Brien, 2016),
or the version of the story of human trafficking that has become the new
normal (Wylie, 2016), is full of, and based on, unreliable statistics, maps,
and visual images, and selective, binary, and simplified representations
(ibid.). The RACE Project report suggests that most HT cases go unre-
ported in the media, but even when they are reported, they are often
devoid of details such as nationality, age, outcome/sentence length of
those convicted, and indicators of trafficking (e.g., confinement, passport
loss, and no or minimal pay).
Simplification
The difficulty in representing HT accurately is illustrated by the misuse of
labels such as ‘trafficking’ and ‘smuggling’. Legally, the former is a crime
against an individual and can be intranational, while the latter is a crime
against the state and is, necessarily, transnational. Unlike trafficking, smug-
gling is presumed to be consensual on the part of the smuggled (Lobasz,
2009, p. 328). The reality of trafficking/smuggling is not quite so clear.
‘[S]ome argue that human trafficking and migrant smuggling are better
thought of as two ends of a continuum’ (Lobasz, 2009, p. 328), the con-
cepts being ‘intricately intertwined’ (Aronowitz, 2009, p. 4). Consent
may be blurry or absent at various stages of either process. Both those
trafficked and those smuggled are susceptible to exploitation (O’Connell
Davidson, 2010, p. 249; Piper, Segrave, & Napier-Moore, 2015). Those
who have been smuggled and are exploited later are, legally, victims of
trafficking, even if, at the border, they are considered as having been
smuggled (Kara, 2010, p. 189; Lobasz, 2009, p. 328; Wylie, 2016, p. 6).
Kelly (2005) indicates that the length of the journey increases the proba-
bility that a person is coerced or deceived, as well as exploited, as longer
journeys increase people’s vulnerability. Exploitation may also be done by
people other than the smugglers, due to the undocumented status of
those smuggled (Wylie, 2016, p. 6). This interconnection might explain
why the media and the public tend to conflate the two (Dando, Walsh, &
Brierley, 2016; Denton, 2010; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Marchionni, 2012;
Papadouka et al., 2016; Winterdyk et al., 2012).
The problem does not just lie with the media conflating the two con-
cepts, but with how the distinction is made. Male irregular migrants are
generally presumed smuggled, thus presumed as having consented to their
movement, whereas female irregular migrants are generally presumed traf-
ficked, as not having consented to movement (De Shalit et al., 2014;
Musto, 2009). As a result, the (male) smuggled migrant is criminalised,
whilst the (female) trafficked migrant is assigned victim-status (Hua &
Nigorizawa, 2010, pp. 406–407). The differentiation between trafficked
and smuggled migrant may also depend on whether they are perceived as
having been ‘exploited enough’, creating a distinction between ‘deserv-
ing’ and ‘undeserving’ migrants (Wylie, 2016, p. 6). This distinction also
distracts from the fact that both smuggled and trafficked people are often
vulnerable, escaping a local environment plagued by poverty, conflict,
disaster, or all of the above, searching, despite the many risks involved, for
a better place in which to live and work.
Types of Trafficking
The Palermo Protocol refers to all forms of labour as potential forms of
exploitation (De Shalit et al., 2014, p. 392), even though it privileges sex
trafficking (Wylie, 2016). Throughout media representations, the focus
tends to be on sex trafficking (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Buckley, 2009;
Denton, 2010; Dijk, 2013; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Kelly, 2005; Lobasz,
2009; Marchionni, 2012; Moore & Goldberg, 2015; Papadouka et al.,
2016; Segrave, 2009; Wylie, 2016; Yick, 2010), an assessment statistically
supported by Marchionni’s (2012) classification of the types of trafficking
normally reported:
• Sex: 51.5%
• Labour: 4.1%
• Domestic: 2.3%
• Other: 9.4%
• Several: 4.9%
• Non-specific: 27.8%
Academic work on trafficking is similarly skewed toward analyses of

discourses on the sexual exploitation of women (Duong, 2014), a focus
that Szörényi and Eate (2014) attribute to sex trafficking being easily sen-
sationalised. Lobasz (2009) similarly claims that sex trafficking is a ‘sexy’
topic. This focus on sex is particularly problematic when it results in the
underrepresentation of other forms of HT.
In reality, most victims are trafficked for labour exploitation (O’Brien,
2016, p. 210; Feingold, 2005), and HT mainly exists in highly labour-
intensive, insecure industries, such as agriculture and the gig-economy
(Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Coghlan & Wylie, 2011; Kara, 2010; Kelly,
2005; O’Brien, 2016). Trafficking for domestic services also receives little
attention. Given its domestic nature, it is difficult to estimate how much
such trafficking actually takes place (Kelly, 2005). Other underreported
forms of trafficking include fraudulent marriages, illegal adoption, and
pregnancy surrogacy (Duong, 2014).
Victims and Traffickers
The stereotypical global victim of trafficking is ‘[a] young, naïve woman
who seeks a better life away from her rural home by answering an adver-
tisement to become a waitress or a nanny and then ends up a sex slave,
repeatedly raped, brutalised, and resold to other mafia pimps’ (Lobasz,
2009, p. 340): she is female (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Andrijasevic & Mai,
2016; Columb, 2015; De Shalit et al., 2014; de Villiers, 2016; Dijk, 2013;
Duong, 2014; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Hall, 2015; Johnston, Friedman, &
Sobel, 2015; Lobasz, 2009; O’Brien, 2016; Pajnik, 2010; Plambech,
2016; Russell, 2014; Sanchez, 2016; Sanford et al., 2016; Sharma, 2005;
Small, 2012; Sobel, 2016; Szörényi & Eate, 2014; Wilson & O’Brien,
2016; Yick, 2010), young (Andrijasevic & Mai, 2016; de Villiers, 2016;
Dijk, 2013; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Hall, 2015; Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010;
Johnston et al., 2015; Kara, 2010; Lobasz, 2009; O’Brien, 2016; Sanchez,
2016; Sanford et al., 2016; Small, 2012; Szörényi & Eate, 2014; Wilson
& O’Brien, 2016; Yick, 2010), and unwilling to perform the work she is
doing, but coerced (Andrijasevic & Mai, 2016; Farrell & Fahy, 2009;
Lobasz, 2009; O’Brien, 2016; Sanchez, 2016). Alternatively, children
may be identified as victims (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Johnston et al., 2015;
Plambech, 2016; Sanford et al., 2016; Sharma, 2005; Sobel, 2014; Wilson
& O’Brien, 2016); they too are portrayed as weak/vulnerable, and gener-
ally presumed blameless/trafficked against their will. Further to being
common in news media and pop culture, these stereotypes are also shared
by policy makers and the public (Buckley, 2009; Dando et al., 2016;
Gould, 2010; Musto, 2009). Even more so, these characteristics are also
consistent with Christie’s (1986) ‘ideal victim’.
One can argue that the focus on women and children as victims reflects
reality; official figures do indicate that it is women and children that are
most often labelled as trafficked, presumably due to the focus on sex traf-
ficking (Cunningham & DeMarni Cromer, 2016; Dijk, 2013; Duong,
2014; Marchionni, 2012, Musto, 2009). Males, more often trafficked for
labour exploitation, tend to be considered as having been ‘smuggled’,
rather than ‘trafficked’, and tend to be classified as (illegal) labour migrants,
rather than as victims of HT (Lobasz, 2009, p. 339). Wylie (2016, p. 5)
similarly points out that many different people and institutions contribute
to these figures, and each contribution is filtered through idiosyncratic
understandings of what trafficking is, and who can be trafficked. Either
way, men are seldom considered as victims, meaning that male victims are
generally overlooked (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012; Duong, 2014; Sharma,
2005). In fact, under Thai law, it has been assumed that men cannot be
victims of trafficking (Feingold, 2005).
The trafficker, in the meanwhile, is painted as ‘big and bad’, a shadowy,
mysterious, powerful figure, often male (De Shalit et al., 2014; de Villiers,
2016; Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010; Lobasz, 2009; Moore & Goldberg,
2015; O’Brien, 2016; Pajnik, 2010; Plambech, 2016; Sanford et al., 2016;
Sobel, 2016; Wilson & O’Brien, 2016; Yick, 2010), with generally no
mention of whether the victim and trafficker had any prior relation. The
offender is simply established as the polar opposite of the victim (Szörényi
& Eate, 2014), even though in reality, this distinction may be unclear.
There are indicators that a substantial number of traffickers have previ-
ously been trafficked (De Shalit et al., 2014; Moore & Goldberg, 2015).
Lastly, ‘Johns’, or the consumers of sex work, are only occasionally men-
tioned (O’Brien, 2016; Sobel, 2016), only occasionally held responsible
for sex trafficking, and are generally identified as male (Kara, 2010; Moore
& Goldberg, 2015; Sanchez, 2016).
Causes of Trafficking
In media reporting and legislation, structural causes that leave people vul-
nerable to being trafficked as well as smuggled are systematically ignored
(Coghlan & Wylie, 2011; Johnston et al., 2015; O’Brien, 2016; Piper
et al., 2015; Sanford et al., 2016; Sharma, 2005; Steele, 2015; Szörényi &
Eate, 2014; Weitzer, 2007; Wilson & O’Brien, 2016). Wilson and O’Brien
(2016, pp. 33, 40) argue that the US Annual Trafficking in Persons Report
reinforces ‘the representation of human trafficking as a criminal justice
issue, constructing victims as passive agents of the criminal behaviour of
offenders’, ‘as opposed to [treating HT as] an economic and political
human rights issue’. Officials prefer to focus on the individuals that are
directly involved than on structural causes (see also Wylie, 2016).
Structural push factors include local poverty (Duong, 2014; Farrell &
Fahy, 2009; Feingold, 2005; Howard, 2012; Kara, 2010; Kelly, 2005;
Moore & Goldberg, 2015; Sharma, 2005; Sobel, 2014), gender and eco-
nomic inequality (Avendaño & Fanning, 2013; Columb, 2015; Farrell &
Fahy, 2009; Hoefinger, 2016; Howard, 2012; Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010;
Kara, 2010; Kelly, 2005; Moore & Goldberg, 2015; Sobel, 2014), globali-
sation (Avendaño & Fanning, 2013; Hoefinger, 2016; Segrave, 2009;
Sharma, 2005), conflicts and violence (Feingold, 2005; Kelly, 2005;
Limoncelli, 2009; Sharma, 2005) and the difficulty in obtaining work per-
mits, which leaves migrant workers vulnerable to exploitation (Limoncelli,
2009; Moore & Goldberg, 2015).
Similarly, there is little attention, in both the media and legislation, to
pull factors, including the global demand for cheap labour (Avendaño &
Fanning, 2013; Duong, 2014; Feingold, 2005; Kelly, 2005; Kara, 2010;
Limoncelli, 2009; O’Brien, 2016; Segrave, 2009; Sharma, 2005) and
cheap sex (Kara, 2010; Limoncelli, 2009; Moore & Goldberg, 2015;
Russell, 2014; Segrave, 2009; Sharma, 2005). Even in academic research
on trafficking, ‘demand’ is often only addressed almost incidentally, with a
few notable exceptions (see Kara, 2010).
Framing
The reasons given as to why HT must be addressed change in line with
changing political priorities. Farrell and Fahy (2009) show that histori-
cally, at least in the USA, HT was framed as a woman’s rights issue, osten-
sibly aiming to protect women, though more likely aiming to keep women
docile and at home. More recently, HT has been re-framed as a criminal

issue, with the result that the USA has passed various laws aimed at crimi-
nalising traffickers (and indeed some victims). Post-9/11, the issue has
been re-framed again, now as a matter of national security. US policies
changed correspondingly, aiming to secure borders, thereby actually
increasing the vulnerability of both victims of trafficking and irregular
migrants. Marchionni (2012) found that in Britain, HT has become part
of discourses about policing and border control.
As Hua and Nigorizawa (2010, p. 402) put it, official discourses on
trafficking
create a dominant narrative of victimization that helps define who is ‘genu-

inely’ trafficked (and who is not). These dominant narratives rely on and
reproduce troubling gender–race–nation discourses of victimization, which
construct a stereotype of the ‘helpless victim’ that links femininity to depen-
dency and racial ‘otherness’ to cultural deviancy.
In general, victims are portrayed as helpless and trapped. Meanwhile,

nation states and state-sanctioned (male) actors responding to threats
within their borders are set up as ‘saviours’ (De Shalit et al., 2014; de
Villiers, 2016; Hill, 2016; Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010; Krsmanovic, 2016;
O’Brien, 2016; Pajnik, 2010; Russell, 2014; Szörényi & Eate, 2014; Van
der Pijl, Oude Breuil, & Siegel, 2011).
The effect of this dominant narrative is not just that the sex trafficking
of young females is prioritised above all others, although that is in itself an
issue. More problematically, it harms those victims who do not conform to
these stereotypes.
Effects of Misrepresentation on the Directly

Affected
The misrepresentation of HT means that many cases of trafficking are not
recognised as such by the public (see Dando et al., 2016). The prioritisa-
tion of sex trafficking means that issues such as labour exploitation are
pushed to the background (Duong, 2014; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Lobasz,
2009; Mendel & Sharapov, 2016, p. 674; Wilson & O’Brien, 2016,
p. 41), both in terms of media attention and in terms of policy. Even more
concerningly, the representation of victims creates a victim hierarchy,
resulting in many non-ideal, but real, victims being denied services and
rights, to the extent where they are prosecuted (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012;
Chuang, 2015; Coghlan & Wylie, 2011; Cunningham & DeMarni
Cromer, 2016; Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Feingold, 2005; McAdam, 2013;
Meshkovska, Mickovski, Bos, & Siegel, 2016; Piper et al., 2015; Sanford
et al., 2016; Segrave, 2009; Sharma, 2005; Stepnitz, 2012; Szörényi &
Eate, 2014; Wijers, 2015; Wilson & O’Brien, 2016, p. 41). In fact, Kelly
(2005, p. 243) estimates that only half of those who need assistance actu-
ally receive it.
The Victim Hierarchy

The problem of this stereotyping is that it creates a scale against which the
affected are measured. As a result, even when recognised as victims, non-
or less-ideal, but no less real ones, are either offered less support, or denied
any altogether. Individuals denied victimhood include those victims traf-
ficked by people they know, which in reality includes a sizeable proportion
of total victims (Marchionni, 2012; Sharma, 2005).
One requirement is for the victim to have done nothing that can be
considered as having contributed to their being trafficked. This means that
if one wishes to be seen as a victim, one must deny all agency. Once a per-
son is a designated ‘victim’, their agency is also not acknowledged in sub-
sequent proceedings, as victims are presumed unable to speak for
themselves (De Shalit et al., 2014; Dijk, 2013; Sobel, 2016). Even more
so, the characteristic of lacking agency and having victim-status are circu-
lar; Alvarez and Alessi (2012), Chuang (2015), and Columb (2015) sug-
gest that the victim-status itself implies a lack of agency, while the (assumed)
lack of agency facilitates victim-status.
Particularly problematic is the gendered interpretation of who can and
cannot consent to their movement and exploitation, which relates to the
gendered assumption of who can and cannot be deemed a victim, and is
not unrelated to cultural constructions of men as active and women as
passive (see Marchionni, 2012; Wylie, 2016): women are constructed as
victims of male sexual violence (Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010).
Criminalisation
Those who fail to qualify as victims are not just denied support and sym-
pathy. They are often criminalised, even though Aronowitz’s (2009, p. xii)
exposition highlights the need to approach all trafficked/smuggled people
as the victims they are. Stigmatisation and criminalisation occur both

informally and formally.
Informally, socially, many less-ideal victims find themselves blamed for
their own victimisation, stigmatised, and even ostracised. Such responses
are relatively constant across nations. Buckley (2009) indicates that previ-
ous research on Russian responses to victims of trafficking indicates that
these victims are rejected by their families and communities. Cunningham
and DeMarni Cromer (2016) show that US males also tend to blame vic-
tims. In Krsmanovic’s (2016, pp. 159–160) article engaging with Serbian
newspaper texts about sex trafficking, photography serves to simplify the
matter of trafficking and dehumanise, even blame the victim, either for her
naiveté, or her willing engagement in the sex industry. Even when the
victim is not explicitly blamed, Sobel (2016) suggests that by not men-
tioning the trafficker, victims are implicitly held responsible for their
victimisation.
Formal responses often go beyond simple victim-blaming. For instance,
the US Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (TVPA) distinguishes
between ‘good’ victims (of trafficking), and ‘bad’ victims (of smuggling).
As a result of this Act, the voluntarily smuggled worker is criminalised,
whereas the supposedly involuntarily trafficked slave is considered a victim
(Hua & Nigorizawa, 2010, pp. 406–407), despite the fact that many
smuggled workers end up exploited upon arrival, and are often deceived
or coerced into this exploitation (meaning that, legally, they become vic-
tims of trafficking). As Hua and Nigorizawa (2010, p. 407) put it:
Trafficking cases […] may involve many potential victims, but only those
who are able to prove their authenticity by fitting into pre-existing assump-
tions tied to the category ‘trafficked victim’ are officially granted victim sta-
tus. Similar to other immigration practices, the TVPA continues in a
tradition where ‘worthy victims’ are sorted from complicit and therefore
illegal immigrants.
Columb (2015) shows that organ donors who are not recognised as organ
trafficking victims are criminalised by the international protocols on the
organ trade. In one case, the judges acknowledged the victim’s exploita-
tion and even note ‘the suspect had been trafficked’, but sentenced them
regardless (Anti-Slavery International, 2014, p. 30). Generally, people
who have, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, been moved across borders
are, if not recognised as victims of trafficking, branded illegal migrants,
and as a result criminalised.
As the Anti-Slavery International (2014) report also suggests, misiden-

tifying victims as offenders not only generates secondary victimisation and
vulnerability (with victims having a criminal record and being at an
increased risk of going ‘missing’, deportation, and re-trafficking). It also
generates fear of the authorities, reducing the victim’s cooperativeness and
assistance with further investigations. Criminalisation often has the effect
of making victims’ situations more precarious by putting them at risk of
arrest and prosecution, enhancing exploiters’ and traffickers’ hold over
them (Feingold, 2005; Kelly, 2005; Sharma, 2005; Weitzer, 2007).
Secondary Victimisation
Even if the victim is successfully recognised as such, and even if practitio-
ners are suitably trained and sufficiently supportive during their ‘rescue’,
many legal systems entail (unintentional) secondary victimisation. For
instance, police raids of sex workplaces are violent, traumatising events,
harming possible survivors of sex trafficking through interrogation, deten-
tion, prosecution, and deportation (Hill, 2016, p. 46). Where sex workers
are being ‘rescued’ by police, ‘[f]orce, it seems, has become protection,
just as war became peace, slavery freedom and ignorance strength, in
George Orwell’s 1984’ (O’Connell Davidson, 2015, p. 205).
Further secondary victimisation occurs after the ‘rescue’, during the
investigation and prosecution, by forcing witnesses and victims to re-live
traumatic experiences through repeated interview/interrogation and tes-
tifying in court (Meshkovska et al., 2016; Wijers, 2015). Police and judges
are often insufficiently trained to understand and respond to the primary
trauma suffered by victims (Dijk, 2013; Meshkovska et al., 2016), leading
to (unintentionally) harmful practices. The burden of proof is on the pros-
ecuting party, meaning that victims’ testimony is put under thorough
scrutiny by the defending party (Meshkovska et al., 2016). Criminal pro-
ceedings may take years (Meshkovska et al., 2016), during which the vic-
tim lives in a state of uncertainty about their legal (immigration) status,
and they do not automatically receive compensation from those success-
fully prosecuted as traffickers. In fact, in order to receive compensation,
the victim would have to initiate civil proceedings, which entails another
long and arduous legal process (Meshkovska et al., 2016).
Regardless of whether a victim is successfully recognised as a victim and
is successfully used by the state in prosecuting traffickers, state responses
often include repatriation (Dijk, 2013; Wijers, 2015). This often puts vic-
tims in the same situation they (were) moved from in the first place
(Feingold, 2005), but with additional stigma and possible debt (Kelly,
2005), thereby increasing their vulnerability and the likelihood of their
being re-trafficked.
Socio-Political Causes and Effects

of Misrepresentation
The modern slavery narrative is simplistic and fairy-tale-like, a narrative of

good and bad. While simplifying complex events is essential in raising the
news value of a story (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Jewkes, 2011), the harmful
effects are numerous. As the earlier section shows, many truly affected
persons are, as a result of the victimhood-threshold sustained by the nar-
rative, not offered sufficient support. Wylie (2016) describes in much
detail the interests of both global and local parties in adopting and per-
petuating this oversimplified and misdirected narrative, which include
material power, soft power, and a perpetuation of other norms such as
those relating to gender/sex.
The Focus on Female Victims and Sex Trafficking

The HT narrative sustains gender inequality by perpetuating the myth
that men act and women are acted upon (Sobel, 2016; Szörényi & Eate,
2014; Wylie, 2016). Women are vulnerable, naïve victims, who must be
saved by heroic (male) saviours. This gender bias can be traced back to the
historical ‘white slavery’ campaign (Farrell & Fahy, 2009; Krsmanovic,
2016; Lobasz, 2009) and to cultural attitudes toward female empower-
ment and sexuality (Attwood, 2016; Hall, 2015; Szörényi & Eate, 2014).
Those parts of the story that are most illustrative of these sexist atti-
tudes focus on female victims of sexual exploitation. Not only does this
focus reiterate the notion that victims are primarily female, that is, women
are acted upon, but it is also indicative of a male gaze, whereby women’s
bodies are objectified as instruments of (male) sexual thrill, not just directly
through the sexual abuse of these bodies, but also through the titillating
reporting of this abuse.
Through this narrative, it is suggested that the safest place for a woman
is to remain at home and to not undertake any supposed risky activities in
the pursuit of a better future. This is also evident in counter-trafficking
campaigns’ exaggeration of the perils of migration, which indeed ‘advo-
cate the private sphere as the safest location for [particularly] women’
(Andrijasevic, 2007, p. 41). These narratives are reminiscent of children’s
literature, where ‘home’ is seen as the place where we ought to stay or
come back to, as opposed to adult literature which sees home as the place
we must escape or grow away from (see Clausen 1982, p. 142).
Female migrants are not the only ones held back by this narrative.
While female migrants are perceived as trafficked, subsequently stigma-
tised, and often deported after being used to prosecute their traffickers,
male migrants are either perceived as traffickers, or as voluntarily smug-
gled, criminalised, and then similarly deported after prosecution.
The Lack of Focus on Labour Trafficking and Domestic

Trafficking
The needs of victims (both of trafficking and of global inequality) are sec-
ondary to the needs of those with vested interests in maintaining a status
quo (Segrave, 2009), such as the ready supply of cheap, exploitable labour.
(Western) individuals and states benefit from the current narrative of HT,
which glosses over the topic of labour exploitation by focusing on sex traf-
ficking instead (Wylie, 2016). Labour trafficking enables the exploitation
of the global poor, which results in lower prices (Szörényi, 2016). There
is a general lack of attention to consumers demanding cheap products,
thereby increasing demand for cheap labour (Kara, 2010; Mendel &
Sharapov, 2016; O’Brien, 2016).
Global wealth inequality is one of the main structural causes of traffick-
ing. Globalisation has led to global wealth and inequality having become
more visible, meaning that the desire to migrate has also increased (Russell,
2014, p. 537). As migrants have relatively few options, they often have no
choice but to engage in exploitative labour in order to survive (Lewis &
Waite, 2015, p. 3). Indeed, many HT victims are undocumented migrants
(Lobasz, 2009, p. 327). In other words, the current version of the story
of human trafficking is used to justify policing the (transnational) move-
ment of the dispossessed when politically expedient (Sharma, 2005), but
simultaneously glosses over those forms of trafficking that serve Western
interests (Wylie, 2016).
Addressing gender inequality is politically and ideologically difficult, as
is also evidenced by broader ongoing struggles for gender equality.
Similarly, relieving poverty and insecurity of those people at risk of traffick-
ing and smuggling would result in a more empowered and less desperate
workforce, which would diminish global inequality. In turn, many cur-

rently powerful parties, both as nations and as individuals, would lose their
ability to exploit this workforce.
Global and Local Politics (as Cause and Effect)

In both the USA and the UK, the anti-HT discourse constructs traffick-
ing as an imported problem and often criminalises all transnational move-
ment except of the most ‘worthy’ (Sharma, 2005; Andrijasevic, 2007,
p. 43; Wylie, 2016), legitimising strict border control and migration poli-
cies (Wylie, 2016). However, Kara (2010, p. 117) warns that creating
tougher laws pushes trafficking and smuggling further underground,
increasing victim vulnerability. At the same time, ‘tough’ border control
and migration policies are seen as vote winning, as is also evident in the
popularity of border control television programmes (Szörényi, 2016,
p. 86). Wylie (2016) traces the popularity of border control to the need
for national governments to signal control in a globalising and globalised
world.
Furthermore, the characterisation of trafficking as a foreign and
imported problem distracts from the fact that many local causes of traffick-
ing (e.g., poverty, conflict) are the result of the foreign policies of coun-
tries such as the USA and the UK. Through foreign policies specifically
aimed at ‘combating’ trafficking, such as the USA’s TVPA, these nations
are able to maintain the illusion of being ‘the good guys’ (Wylie, 2016).
In awareness campaigns, too, developed nations are positioned as the
‘powerful saviour, rather than recognising any impact that developed
economies may have in causing or perpetuating systems of global inequal-
ity’ (O’Brien, 2016, p. 216; see also Pajnik’s 2010 media framing analysis’
similar finding). As Wilson and O’Brien (2016, p. 42) put it,
[t]hrough constructing the victims of human trafficking as entirely passive

actors that lack rational agency, states can position themselves as patriarchal
protectors of the weak and innocent, thereby expanding their internal and
external policing powers [which] allows wealthy states to maintain the
global imbalance of economic and political capital, as human migration
from impoverished states to wealthy states is conflated with human traffick-
ing via a fantastical narrative of deception and exploitation.
Rather than addressing their responsibilities in terms of re-evaluating

damaging foreign policies, these nations focus on the type of symptom
control that appears well-intentioned. Ultimately, this focus results in the
re-victimisation of affected people, while this re-victimisation results in
perpetuating the inequalities from which these nations benefit. In other
words, other versions of the story of human trafficking, that would per-
haps focus more on labour trafficking, might result in the examination of
the global socio-economic and political inequalities and the supply of
cheap(er) labour that benefits these countries, which would be contrary to
their interests. It is, indeed, also these states that most intensely reproduce
and police the currently dominant version of the story of human
trafficking.
Perhaps the most powerful tool in actually maintaining this story, and
thereby economic and gender inequalities, is the USA’s Trafficking Victims
Protection Act (see Wylie, 2016). The TVPA is used to award, and penal-
ise, nations and NGOs who either support and follow, or fail to follow, the
USA’s conception of what trafficking entails, and which measures are sup-
posed to be taken to fight it (Cojocaru, 2016; Dijk, 2013; Hua &
Nigorizawa, 2010; Small, 2012; Snajdr, 2013; Weitzer, 2007; Wilson &
O’Brien, 2016). A number of analysts (Cojocaru, 2016; Farrell & Fahy,
2009; Hall, 2015; Lobasz, 2009; Marchionni, 2012; O’Brien, 2016;
Small, 2012; Weitzer, 2007) state that the TVPA in turn is influenced by
what they argue is the alliance between certain right-wing Christian groups
and conservative-abolitionist feminist groups, and that this alliance is
based on a consideration that all sex work is inherently problematic. Wylie
(2016) indeed traces the current version of the story of HT, which focuses
on sex trafficking of women and children, to the activism of this unlikely
alliance united in the pursuit of the abolition of prostitution. The USA use
their economic power to impose, narrowly, their narrative of HT, and
broadly, a gender-related ideology, upon other actors (Wylie, 2016). A
vivid example is Howard’s (2012) ethnographic case study of trafficking in
Benin. Though acknowledging that global economic inequality is an
important trafficking structural factor in trafficking, addressing it would
mean that local NGOs would lose their US (-backed) funding, and Benin
would suffer politically (Howard, 2012).
In short, the story of HT has political use. The ‘heroism’ of ‘saviours’
identifies certain states, such as the USA, as the ‘good guys’, legitimated
by their pursuit of alleviating the ‘plight’ of certain ‘victims’, conveniently
glossing over the structural and global factors that put certain populations
at a higher risk of exploitation than others (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012;

Johnston et al., 2015; Szörényi & Eate, 2014; Weitzer, 2007; Wylie,
2016) and maintaining the economic benefits of having an exploitable,
dispossessed workforce that can be policed when it is politically expedient
to do so.
Secondary Exploitation
(Western) nations, consumers and employers are not the only ones benefit-
ing from perpetuating the factors that put people at risk of trafficking.
Wylie (2016, pp. 7–9) describes the vast range of institutions that have
been tasked, or have tasked themselves, with responding to human traffick-
ing. These exist on levels varying from the local to the supra-national, and
include bureaucratic, non-profit, and academic institutions (ibid.). They
benefit both monetarily and socially. They are, for instance, rewarded for
their adoption of the ‘saviour’ role (Cojocaru, 2016; Hoefinger, 2016;
Steele, 2015). This role allows them to advance their careers and social
status, and, in the case of NGOs, continue to receive funding from, among
others, the US government (Cojocaru, 2016). One particularly overt form
of this ‘secondary exploitation’ (Cojocaru, 2016) is described by Bernstein
and Shih (2014) in their ethnographical account of a for-profit ‘reality tour’
organised by two anti-trafficking organisations to enable (Western) tourists
to visit and explore (and be seen to condemn) the Thai sex industry.
Conclusion
As this introduction has shown, only those who fulfil a very strict set of
requirements are successfully identified as victims in contemporary anti-
trafficking discourse. They must be female, young, preferably exploited in
the sex trade, and moved without consent. This (very high) threshold
means that many real victims are unrecognised, and as a result do not
receive the appropriate support. In fact, they are often criminalised.
The main problem with this story is that it distracts from the structural
factors that put people at risk of being trafficked, such as poverty and the
global demand for cheap labour. As a result, the global West maintains its
economically and ideologically dominant position and maintains existing
gender norms (and thereby gender inequalities). These inequalities are, in
a circular fashion, also at the root of trafficking. In short, the representa-
tion of trafficking does not aim to eradicate trafficking—it is a key factor
in its perpetuation.
In this Collection
Given the contemporaneous nature of this project, the studies that follow
all utilised material produced after 2000, and material consistent with the
HT definition previously outlined.
Gregoriou and Ras’s chapter (Chap. 2) draws on corpus linguistic anal-
ysis of a 61.5-million-word corpus of UK news texts published during
2000–2016, and on qualitative critical discourse analysis of a 67-article
sub-corpus thereof. Both approaches analyse naming strategies, meta-
phors, grammar, and participants’ speech, though the sub-corpus analysis
also engages with the accompanying images multimodally. Our findings
show an over-reporting of sexual exploitation, and an insistence on victims
being young, female, and vulnerable. As a result, non-stereotypical victims
of crimes like forced begging and domestic servitude are not readily rec-
ognised as victims and are deprived of opportunities for assistance.
Muždeka’s chapter (Chap. 3) compares the representation of transna-
tional HT in news media texts in English and Serbian by adopting con-
temporary narrative, cultural, and media theory. The second chapter’s UK
sample corpus is here compared with a similarly compiled corpus of
Serbian human trafficking news texts. It is worth comparing these two
differing countries’ outputs; unlike the UK, which serves as a HT destina-
tion country, Serbia serves as a country of origin, a destination country,
and a key transit country in the Balkans, and lies on the route of refugees
from the Middle East. Differences and similarities in representations
between these two countries can highlight the roles of national politics,
economics, and the realities of HT in shaping the narrative. This chapter’s
analysis identifies the narrative strategies (pertaining to the text, story,
fabula, authorship, voice, and ideological positioning) that not only shape
the news media texts but also function as a semiotic code through which
reality is itself constructed. The chapter explores the construction of
meaning as a socially and culturally conditioned process due to which par-
ticular aspects of transnational HT are prioritised (i.e., use of official
sources), while other are neglected and/or completely excluded (i.e., vic-
tims’ future), thus influencing the public perception and responses.
Beyer (Chap. 4) uses British and Scandinavian crime fiction to investi-
gate the social implications of illegal movements of people, including
Transnational Human Trafficking (THT), into Western Europe, specifi-
cally focusing on transnational child trafficking (TCT) and its representa-
tion. The inclusion of Scandinavian crime fiction in this analysis is crucial
to its findings. Post-2000 Danish crime fiction has been actively at the
forefront of treating social realist themes such as human trafficking and
modern slavery (Brunsdale, 2016), and these trends extend to Swedish
and British crime fiction. British and Scandinavian crime novels are
employed in Beyer’s analysis to demonstrate how countries, which are dif-
ferently positioned geographically, are affected by HT from the Global
South and in the aftermath of the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and specifically
how their national crime literatures absorb and represent the theme of
HT. The chapter argues that crime fiction can be seen to engage explicitly
in public and private debates around HT, and effect change, and that this
didactic dimension demonstrates the power of genre fiction not merely to
entertain, but also importantly to heighten awareness and open up new
debates.
Dearey (Chap. 5) analyses and interrogates the identities of ‘traffickers’
as represented within a series of television documentaries on modern slav-
ery. The subject of analysis is specifically to depart from the UK/‘Western’
view or gaze and to consider the perspective from the global East/South.
That this series is presented by Al Jazeera English and by a former BBC
presenter who is of Muslim origin adds further dimensionality to this text.
Furthermore, the types of human trafficking featured, as well as traffickers
and victims, span the globe. Analysis of trafficker identities within the dif-
ferent typologies represented in the documentary series are shown—
bridal, charcoal, prison, sex, food, child, bonded slavery/trafficking. These
are represented within a complex geo-cultural televisual gaze (Al Jazeera
English) upon the global north/west as ultimately the source of the slav-
ery problem.
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CHAPTER 2
‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’:

An Investigation into British Newspapers’
Representation of Transnational Human
Trafficking, 2000–2016
Abstract Gregoriou and Ras draw on corpus linguistics and critical dis-
course analysis to examine a 61.5 million-word corpus of articles pub-
lished by UK newspapers between 2000 and 2016, and on qualitative
critical discourse analysis of a sixty-seven-article sample corpus in depth.
Both approaches analyse the naming and describing of victims and traf-
fickers, metaphors, transitivity, and speech and writing presentation, while
the in-depth qualitative approach furthermore analyses the text (images)
(multi)modally. Their findings conclude that trafficking for sexual exploi-
tation is over-reported compared to other forms of trafficking, and that
victims are generally presented as young, female, and vulnerable. As a
result, non-stereotypical victims, of crimes like forced begging and domes-
tic servitude, are not readily recognised as victims, and thereby are deprived
of opportunities for assistance.
C. Gregoriou (*) • I. A. Ras

School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
e-mail: c.gregoriou@leeds.ac.uk; i.a.ras@leeds.ac.uk

Keywords Critical discourse analysis • Corpus linguistics • Human

trafficking • Newspapers • Transnational organised crime
Introduction
To analyse UK media representations of human trafficking (henceforth
HT), certain research questions must be answered. How are trafficking,
traffickers, and HT victims represented, and to what extent are victims
criminalised and victimised,1 sex trafficking overrepresented, and smug-
gling and trafficking conflated by the UK press? Such overarching research
questions are designed to shed light on underlying ideologies relating to
agency, responsibility, and vulnerability, and will respectively guide the
critical discourse analysis of the whole corpus2 (quantitatively) and the
spike sample corpus (qualitatively).
Data Collection
Given the ‘present day’ focus of this project, the time frame was restricted
to 2000–2016; we focus on UK articles published after 2000 as this was
the year of the ratification of the Palermo Protocol.3 This 16-year period
also covers the years running up to the UK Parliament passing the Modern
Slavery Act 2015, which defines HT, slavery, and exploitation as applicable
to the English and Welsh criminal justice system. The dataset was limited
to UK national daily and Sunday newspapers alone.
To address corpus compilation considerations with regard to the rele-
vance of the included texts and the exhaustiveness of the corpus, we drew
on Gabrielatos’ (2007) data collection method, which he developed as
1
We distinguish primary victimisation (which directly affects the victim) from secondary
victimisation (such as in the form of victim blaming), re-victimisation (such as falling victim
to re-trafficking), indirect victimisation (such as with reference to detrimental effects on
one’s family) and secondary exploitation (in the form of anyone benefitting from the prob-
lem’s existence).
2
‘A corpus is a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form, selected according
to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language or language variety as a source
of data for linguistic research’ (Sinclair, 2005).
3
United Nation’s Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially
Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime (UNODC, 2016).
‘CALL FOR PURGE ON THE PEOPLE TRAFFICKERS’: AN INVESTIGATION… 27
part of a research project examining UK media representations of refu-

gees, asylum seekers, and (im)migrants. Our resultant search terms were:
bonded labour, child labour, debt bondage, domestic servitude, exploitation,
exploitative labour, forced criminality, forced labour, forced prostitution,
human trafficker, human trafficking, labour trafficking, organ harvesting,
raid-and-rescue, sex slave, sex slaves, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, sex-
ual servitude, slave, slave trade, slaves, trafficked, trafficked victims, traffick-
ers, trafficking (in/of) persons, trafficking (in/of) human being/s, and
woman trafficking.4
The Corpus
Our method generated a resulting corpus of 80,608 articles. It contains
61,571,641 tokens (as in ‘words’) and 388,834 types (of words). As
Table 2.1 shows, relatively large numbers of articles were published in The
Guardian, The Times and The Independent, which suggests that results are
skewed toward the representation of HT by British broadsheets. As such,
the corpus is not representative of what the British public reads about HT,
but of what the British press writes about HT.
4
Gabrielatos’ (2007) method works by first selecting a limited set of search terms that are
then used to generate several sample corpora. Our initial search terms were human traffick-
ing, human trafficker, trafficking (in/of) human being/s, slavery, sexual exploitation, sex traf-
ficking, sexual trafficking, sex slave, and forced labour. We first collected sample corpora (i.e.,
a selection of the intended final, full corpus) from Lexis Nexis for the periods
1/1/2000–30/9/2000, 1/1/2008–30/9/2008, and 1/1/2016–30/9/2016, to ensure
that our results would not be unduly skewed toward either end, or indeed the middle, of the
overall time frame. Each initial sample corpus was then uploaded to Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009)
and compared to a reference corpus (a corpus that serves as the benchmark against which the
primary corpus is, or our sample corpora were, compared), which in our case was the BNC
Written Sampler (a corpus intended to be representative of written British English), to gener-
ate three keyword (words used significantly less or more often in the primary corpus than in
the reference corpus) lists, one for each sample corpus, which were then combined. The
potential usefulness of each keyword was evaluated by calculating RQTR scores (a mathe-
matical measure indicating the potential relevance of a keyword as a search term) following
Gabrielatos (2007). Further potential search terms were selected introspectively by members
of the project team, based on their reading of the relevant literature. These potential search
terms were also evaluated using Gabrielatos’ (2007) RQTR score. It was the resultant list of
search terms that was used to collect articles from Lexis Nexis over the full time frame
1/1/2000–30/9/2016.
Table 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK news-

papers between 01/2000 and 09/2016
Newspaper Articles
Business 62
Daily Edition 180
Daily Mail 4,695
Daily Star 3,892
Daily Star Sunday 311
Daily Telegraph 6,151
Express 2,739
Guardian 17,127
Independent 8,187
Independent on Sunday 1,493
Mail on Sunday 1,025
Mirror 5,330
New Review 139
Observer 3,757
People 623
Saturday Magazine 19
Sun 5,879
Sunday Business 92
Sunday Express 1,050
Sunday Mirror 677
Sunday Telegraph 1,906
Sunday Times 4,806
Times 10,468
Total 80,608
Diachronic Change and Spike Sample Corpus Construction

Figure 2.1 shows that the number of articles over time has steadily climbed,
which is in line with Winterdyk, Reichel, and Perrin’s (2012, p. 9) notion
of an ‘explosion of media coverage’ of HT during this time.5
Further to indicating that more texts were published in later years com-
pared to the earlier ones, Fig. 2.1 also shows sizeable fluctuations in the
number of articles published on HT. Even though dips in the graph are
also worth examining, we here keep our focus on the graph’s particularly
5
The figure’s vertical, y-axis, shows the number of texts generated during the period, while
the horizontal, x-axis, indicates the months of each of these 16 years, from January 2000 at
the far left to September 2016 at the far right. All relevant data points are accounted for in
the graph, though space constraints dictate that not all month-labels are visible on the x-axis.
Fig. 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK newspa-

pers between 01/2000 and 09/2016
large ‘spikes’ or increases in HT reporting, which occur in the months of April

2001, March 2007, November 2013, the summer of 2015, and May 2016.
Table 2.2 shows which concurrent events are potentially associated with these
spikes. Such concurrent events include the migrant crisis, certain countries
joining the EU, the UK referendum and campaigns on UK membership of
the EU, and (the anniversary of) events relating to HT-related legislation.
Quantitative methods of analysis are used to examine the full corpus,
but qualitative methods, which are required to triangulate and comple-
ment the quantitative methods, cannot practically be used to examine a
multi-million-word corpus. As such, we created another sample corpus, of
prototypical6 texts from each of these five spikes. The total number of
articles in this spike sample corpus is sixty-seven.
For each spike, Table 2.3 indicates the total number of articles, the
number and percentage of articles sampled, the numbers of tokens per
spike, and the number and percentage of the number of words in the
sample generated. As the table shows, even with our focus on spikes, and
hence periods in which media reported on HT the most, our qualitative
analysis was limited to 18,000 words in total, out of the 61.6 m words avail-
able. For the multimodal part of the analysis, which explores the images
6
ProtAnt (Anthony, 2015) was first used to generate a list of the most prototypical articles in
each spike, after which random articles were selected using Excel, to reduce each list to 1%. This
percentage generated a set of sixty-seven articles, and hence a sample corpus manageable for
manual analysis. For a final check, these articles were manually evaluated to ensure relevance.
Table 2.2 Events concurrent with ‘spikes’ in the number of human trafficking-
related articles published by UK newspapers
Period Events
April 2001 Potentially linked to the passing of the Palermo Protocol at the end of 2000
March: Bomb explosion at BBC Television Centre by the new IRA
April: Yugoslavian ex-President Milošević surrenders to be tried for war
crimes
March 2007 200 years anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.
January: Romania and Bulgaria join the European Union
February: ICJ finds Serbia guilty of failing to prevent Srebrenica genocide
November 150 years anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in the US
2013 April: Boston Marathon bombing
May: The Conservative Party publishes a draft European Union
Referendum Bill
June: Snowden leaks news of US mass surveillance operations, Murder of
Lee Rigby
July: Croatia joins the EU, President Morsi is deposed in Egypt
October: Modern Slavery Act introduced in draft to the House of
Commons
November: President Yanukovych of Ukraine rejects closer ties to the EU
Start of the Lee Rigby murder trial
Summer European refugee crisis and Eurotunnel migrant crisis
2015 Daesh/ISIS continues to commit bombings and is under attack from the
American, Canadian, Russian, Turkish, and Egyptian airforces.
February: Ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, then broken
March: UK Modern Slavery Act becomes law
May: UK general elections
July: Greece misses payments to IMF, Tenth anniversary of the 7/7
attacks
September: PM Cameron refuses to make reparations for Britain’s role in
the transatlantic slave trade
May 2016 February: PM Cameron announces that a referendum on EU membership
will be held in May, Several Rotherham offenders are sentenced
March: Brussels bombings
April: Egypt Aircrash over the Mediterranean, Brexit campaigns start
June: Britain votes to leave the EU
accompanying the spike sample corpus, we obtained facsimiles and online

newspaper website article versions of 53,7 (i.e., 80%), of these 67 articles.
7
Facsimiles were required to facilitate a multimodal analysis of the sample corpus texts’
accompanying images. Most articles were available from the British Library Newsroom in
digital form, on microfilm, or in the original newspaper, although about half a dozen were
Table 2.3 Breakdown of the composition of the ‘spike’ sample corpora

Spike Total Articles Articles Total tokens Sample Sample token
articles sampled sampled token percentage
(%) count
April 2001 471 5 1.06 347,078 1,337 0.39

March 2007 696 7 1.01 454,288 2,465 0.54
November 709 7 0.99 462,281 1,427 0.31
2013
Summer 4,060 41 1.01 3,162,473 11,277 0.36
2015
May 2016 737 7 0.95 616,217 2,177 0.35
Corpus Total 80,608 67 0.08 61,571,641 18,683 0.03
Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis8

This study examines the linguistic characteristics of UK newspaper report-
ing on HT that are normally also examined by critical discourse analysts/
stylisticians in relation to media texts (Fairclough, 1992; Gregoriou &
Paterson, 2017; Jeffries, 2010; Mayr & Machin, 2012). Given our research
questions, we prioritise the investigation of metaphors, the naming and
describing of HT, its victims, traffickers, and other HT perpetrators, but
also examine transitivity,9 modality,10 and the reporting of speech and writ-
ing. We adopted a ‘mixed methods’ approach by manually analysing our
spike sample corpus of sixty-seven articles, supported by a corpus linguistic
approach to the whole 80,608 text corpus. The qualitative analysis was
conducted independently of the quantitative analysis to pre-empt the criti-
cism of ‘cherry-picking’ (see Poole, 2010; Widdowson, 1995, p. 169,
1998, pp. 143–146, 2004, pp. 103–110, 157) that critical discourse ana-
lysts often face.
In metaphor, one cognitive domain is mapped against another (see
Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). We adopt the traditional linguistic means of
referring to metaphors using small capitals. We first focused on the spike
only available as online articles from the newspaper websites. A further fifteen, including nine
from The Mirror, were simply unavailable for reasons including the fact that only one edition
of a newspaper, of multiple, is actually stored and digitised by the British Library.
8
See Baker et al. (2008, p. 295).
9
Answering the question of who is doing what to whom/what, how and with what? (Mayr
& Machin, 2012, p. 52; Richardson, 2007, p. 54).
10
An examination of words and phrases relating to the author’s notion of what is true,
what is possible, and what is desirable.
sample corpus to find sustained, or mega, metaphors, and explored these

further across the whole of our data set via corpus analysis, using a method
similar to the one advocated by Koller, Hardie, Rayson, and Semino
(2008).11
The corpus linguistic methods that were used to examine which topics
were most important in the corpus and how various participants and con-
cepts were (metaphorically, at times) described included the generation of
a key word list.12 These key words were subsequently categorised with the
help of concordances. Categories include ‘Participants’, ‘Acts of Abuse
and Exploitation’, and ‘Movement’.
Various methods were used to examine the modification of the target
nouns/lemmas included in this key word list. Concordance displays,
c-collocate13 lists (derived using the method set out by Gabrielatos &
Baker, 200814), and 2-gram lists (an n-gram is a word group of n size, and
in this case we refer to word pairs) were particularly useful.
11
Koller et al. (2008) take (unexpected) semantic categories, that is, groupings of broadly
related words, a list of which is generated through Wmatrix, as indicative of source domains.
They advocate that when source domains of interest are established prior to the examination
of the corpus through Wmatrix, its ‘domain push’ function is used to ‘push’ to the fore-
ground secondary semantic domain tags.
12
To generate a key word list of the human trafficking news corpus, the British National
Corpus Written Sampler that forms part of Wmatrix was used as a reference corpus. Two
cut-off points were selected to shrink the list to a manageable length. Gabrielatos and Baker
(2008) set their log-likelihood (LL; a statistical measure often used to indicate keyness) cut-
off at p < 0.000000000000001, which they indicate as an ‘extremely low’ value, or an
extremely high threshold. The threshold for the current key word list was set at LL > 15.13,
p < 0.001. A further threshold of relative frequency was set, to ensure that all interpreted key
words are used relatively often. Given the fact that the BNC was, at the time of the present
study, 20 years old, and includes texts that are older, it is possible that certain words that are
used by current-day newspapers simply did not appear in the time that many BNC texts were
written.
13
A concordance displays a word of interest in its co-text, usually 50 characters to the left
and the right, for every instance of this word of interest in the corpus. A collocate is a word
that occurs within a certain number of words to the left or right (usually 4 or 5) of the word
of interest. Collocates of interest are those that occur at a certain (relative) frequency. A
c-collocate, short for ‘constant collocate’, re-occurs above a certain threshold over a pre-
defined number of years.
14
The main issue in defining a c-collocate list is defining ‘consistency’. Gabrielatos and
Baker (2008) indicate that a collocate is consistent when it occurs in 7 years, at a minimum
frequency of 5. As their corpus spans a decade, whereas ours spans 17 years, the minimum
number of years was raised to 75%. As this, however, would mean that a collocate has to
occur at least 65 times (compared to Gabrielatos and Baker’s (2008) minimum overall fre-
As Jeffries (2010, p. 47) points out, through transitivity choices, the
reader is presented with ‘clear notions of who is in control, who is a victim
and so on’. Most researchers only examine transitivity in small corpora,
semi-manually.15 As the key word analysis already distinguished between
pertinent processes (e.g., acts of abuse and exploitation) and participants
(e.g., survivors/victims and traffickers/offenders), this transitivity analysis
focuses on a limited set of words. We took key words referring to acts of
trafficking and exploitation and noted whether they are in nominalised
form (‘trafficking’), are past participles (‘trafficked’), or have another form.
We work with a more traditional understanding of transitivity (see
Jeffries, 2010, p. 38), rather than Halliday’s (1994) transitivity model. Our
approach is, in some ways, a throwback to critical linguistics, as proposed
by Fowler, Hodge, Kress, and Trew (1979), and driven primarily by the
limitations of SketchEngine as experienced by us. We used SketchEngine’s
word sketch functionality, which shows how often a target lemma is used
as a subject, as an object, and is preceded by the prepositions ‘by’ (for an
approximation of how often lemmas were used as agents in agentive pas-
sives). For each target lemma, these frequencies were simply recorded in an
Excel file. Unfortunately, word sketches cannot show how often the target
lemma is used as the subject of a passive sentence. We used CQL to exam-
ine how often a target lemma was the subject of a passive sentence. In
CQL, the search for a standard passive construction, [noun] [auxiliary verb
(phrase)] [past participle verb], is as follows:
[lemma = “…”] [tag = “V.*”]{0,1} [tag = “VB.*”] [word = “.*d” &

tag = “V.*”]16
The query produced above was run a second time for each lemma, with
the following sequence attached, to examine how often these passives
included an agent17:
quency of 35), the minimum frequency was dropped to 3 (resulting in a minimum overall
frequency of 39). Like Gabrielatos and Baker, collocates were collected from the span 5L-5R,
with the target word at position 0.
15
For instance, Rodrigues Jr. (2005), de Lima-Lopes (2014), Tabbert (2015), Bartley and
Hidalgo-Tenorio (2015), and Lee (2016) manually annotate concordance lines.
16
We acknowledge that this query only produces results for regular past participles and
passive constructions created with a version of ‘to be’. The best approximation of the num-
ber of agentless passives was reached by calculating the number of passive constructions that
include an agent.
17
It adds the sequence [‘by’ as preposition] to the original query.
[] {0,4} [word = “by” & tag = “IN”]18
Frequencies were recorded on a year-by-year basis to facilitate future

diachronic analyses, complementary to the current synchronic analysis.
As indicated, we also examine modality, the linguistic area of analysis
that investigates the attitude toward the propositions that speakers/writ-
ers express. Features of interest include modal verbs (like ‘could’), lexical
verbs (‘try’), but also nouns (‘possibility’), adjectives (‘possible’) and
adverbs (‘likely’). The modal systems that are of particular interest in rela-
tion to the HT corpus are the deontic, concerned with one’s ‘attitude to
the degree of obligation attaching to the performance of certain actions’,
the epistemic, concerned with one’s ‘confidence or lack of confidence in
the truth of an expressed proposition’, and the perception, also communi-
cated through a degree of commitment to the truth of a proposition, but
a degree given specifically by some reference to (mostly visual) perception
(Simpson, 1993, p. 47, 48, 50).
Finally, we also analyse some noteworthy images of the manageable, yet
representative, set of fifty-three media texts on HT in either its original
print or online form multimodally, in an approach consistent with the
social semiotic multimodal analytical paradigm, covering aspects relating
to the relevant photographs’ representational, interactional, and composi-
tional meaning (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006). Besides, much like the
surrounding verbal text, photographs make a significant contribution to a
news story’s meaning, and are deserving of the same scrutiny as the verbal
text (Caple, 2013, p. 3).
Results
Metaphors
One frequent conceptual mega metaphor is that of Trafficking Is A
Trade. See, for instance, references to people as ‘cargo’, ‘commodities’, or
‘investment’ to be ‘bought’ and ‘sold’ in a ‘trade’, ‘market’ or ‘business’.
In ‘“well stocked” orphanages were seen as a successful business ven-
ture’, people are conceptualised along the lines of goods with ‘worth’, or
as livestock worth exploiting. This qualitative finding is supported by the
18
As these automated methods cannot account for subtleties and irregularities in the
English language, quantitative results are only to be taken as an approximation.
categorisation of key words, as at least 0.5% of corpus tokens19 have been

categorised as Trade-related. Given that at least 0.85% of tokens are cate-
gorised as Abuse/Exploitation-related, and 0.63% as Movement-related,
the Trade-related percentage is high; Trade is clearly an important seman-
tic category. Wmatrix similarly shows that a full 2.4% of all items in a
100,000-word sample corpus are in the semantic domain of ‘Business’.
When considering pushed domains, following Koller et al. (2008), this
number rises to 3.3%. The majority of key words categorised as Trade-
related are to do with acts of trading, such as buying and selling. This Trade
metaphor is clearly grounded in the everyday practices of human traffick-
ers; since trafficking literally involves the illegal trade of people as stock,
one may question whether Trafficking Is A Trade is metaphorical at all.
The following excerpt illustrates the difficulty in distinguishing between
the metaphorical and actual trade in human beings:
Anyone with the slightest degree of worldliness would have thrown the deal
back in the Calcutta Wallah’s face but, partly through ignorance, partly
through short-term greed, and partly because he persuaded himself it might
be in the girls’ best interests, Chandra signed the contract of indentures. By
doing so, he sold his daughters into seven years of slavery and almost certain
sexual degradation. (Darbyshire, 2000, emphasis added)
The full article describes how these girls’ father, Chandra, in a time of grief
and in a very difficult economic position, was persuaded to give up two of
his daughters, in exchange for an up-front sum, future monthly payments,
and the promise that they would be trained and cared for. This complex
situation is then simplistically described as a trade of money for girls.
Regardless of whether this use of Trade is metaphorical or literal, the
press adopting this metaphor invites an acceptance of the ideology whereby
people are commodities. News texts focusing on the trade-element of traf-
ficking, rather than, for instance, survivors’ suffering or how to recognise
trafficking, perpetuates the idea that human beings can be treated as
goods. Though highly conventional (see Kövecses, 2010, p. 211), this
mega metaphor still requires a critical response; it contributes to the ongo-
ing objectification of victims/survivors, and to the erasure of HT victims’
agency.
This is the total number of words in the corpus.

19
A second cluster of conceptual metaphors revolves around the nature of

trafficking and how to respond to it. Trafficking is frequently conceptu-
alised as A Spreading Unwanted Substance and as one which Can Be
Broken, and indeed common responses to trafficking are in line with the
metaphor Responding To Trafficking Is War. These metaphors are
related in the sense that the representation of trafficking as a threatening
physical matter creates a matter that can physically be fought. They also
oversimplify responding mechanisms and suggest that HT is something to
deal with in a reactionary rather than preventative manner.
The Trafficking Is A Spreading Unwanted Substance metaphor is
found in references to trafficking as ‘epidemic’, ‘widespread’, or ‘ram-
pant’. What spreads seems to be both the victims and the perpetrators of
this crime; there is an ‘influx’ of those prone to trafficking ‘pour[ing]’ into
the UK, all the while trafficking ‘parasites’ need to be ‘curb[ed]’ or
‘root[ed] out’. The overwhelming and indeed growing matter of traffick-
ing is emphasised throughout the corpus. Of collocates to trafficking,
14.56% indicate either growth (more, rise) or imply largeness (most, scale).
Wmatrix shows that 0.37% of items in the Wmatrix sample corpus are
tagged N3.2+, indicating largeness and growth. Furthermore, numbers,
such as billion, millions, thousands, and hundreds form another 1.69% of
the Wmatrix sample corpus. These words can refer to numbers of victims
as well as profits made through trafficking, but nonetheless underscore the
scale of this problem.
The metaphor Trafficking Is A Substance which Can Be Broken is
found in references to ‘strong’ units to ‘crackdown’, ‘break up’, ‘rap’,
‘stamp out’, ‘smash’, or ‘crush’ the gangs or HT problem. Responding To
Trafficking Is War is found in the texts’ reference to a need for an ‘inter-
national onslaught’ to ‘tackle’, ‘combat’, ‘fight’, ‘target’, ‘confront’,
‘attack’, ‘purge’ or ‘spearhead’ against trafficking. See, for instance, dis-
cussions of ‘Britain defeat[ing] the slave trade in the nineteenth century
[…] by striking directly at the traffickers’. As indicated by the section on
Topics, Responses to Trafficking are mentioned throughout newspaper
reporting. A substantial number of these Responses are indeed Fight- or
War-related. At 0.26% of all tokens, Fight-related Responses are not quite
as conventional as Trade-metaphors, but nonetheless noteworthy.
Furthermore, 13.40% of collocates associated with trafficking indicate
Fight-related Responses, compared to 19.14% Legal Process-related
Responses. In fact, in the Wmatrix sample corpus, 0.15% of all items are
tagged G3, ‘War’, which rises to a full 1.19% when considering G3 as a
pushed domain.
We most often conceptualise war as a violent conflict that engages soci-

eties as large as nations. Though the War metaphor suggests there being
different sides, who features on each is unclear/hidden. War-related refer-
ences also problematically conceptualise trafficking as an issue specific
nations cause and other nations have to deal with, when the realities of
trafficking suggest otherwise. Even more so, metaphorical constructions,
such as the one that refers to a telephone hotline as ‘the latest weapon in
the fight against human trafficking’, portray responses to trafficking as a
battle against an overwhelming matter, and allow state actors to portray
themselves as saviours, with survivors as acted upon, in other words, saved.
Such references to trafficking also establish links between trafficking, on
the one hand, and masculinity, power and violence on the other. Violence,
such metaphorical constructions suggest, legitimises police violent reac-
tions to HT, not to mention reducing HT victims to war collateral dam-
age. By focusing on the Fight, survivors’ responses to trafficking are, lastly,
limited. They are either ‘useful’ in this fight, by contributing statements
and evidence, or they are not. This limitation on options further erases
survivors’ agency and can actually contribute to their secondary victimisa-
tion. Not unlike the notoriously flawed War on Drugs, the trafficking
media metaphors fail to focus on structural factors, and instead only
respond to symptoms.
Less prominent and hence micro metaphorical spike sample corpus
excerpts draw on various other source domains. These include the
Trafficking is Drama/Spectacle metaphor20 (‘Children forced into
Oliver twist thieving’, ‘Oliver Twist Scenarios happening in our streets
and cities’, a trafficking case ‘could have ended in tragedy’, a raid is ‘dra-
matic’); indeed, in the Wmatrix sample corpus, the semantic domain K4,
‘drama, the theatre’, has a relative frequency of 0.15%. This rises to 0.41%
when K4 is a pushed domain. Another is the Trafficking is Hidden/Not
Visible metaphor (‘turned a blind eye to trafficking’, ‘A report entitled
Young Invisible Slaves’, ‘They are effectively invisible, isolated behind the
closed doors of private households’), the related semantic domain, A10
(‘hiding, showing’) making up 0.54% of items in the Wmatrix sample
20
Exploring the gender and age dimensions of this metaphor would be interesting tasks in
themselves. Are women and children victims more prone to be referred to via drama meta-
phors compared to men? Are men more prone to animal metaphors, perhaps? Such questions
merit investigation through the use of concordances of Wmatrix examples, though doing so
is beyond the scope of the present chapter.
c orpus, 1.23% as a pushed domain. A final metaphor, the Trafficking is

Animated and Beastly (‘Halt this evil trade’, ‘we all thought that [slavery]
was gone and in the past, but actually it’s alive and kicking in London’,
‘the trade’s dark underbelly’, ‘Sex trafficker known as The Snake’) and, in
Pope Francis’ terms, even Vampiric metaphor (‘Bloodsucker [trafficking]
bosses’, ‘[l]iving on the blood of the people’), is less clearly present in the
Wmatrix sample corpus, as there are no directly corresponding semantic
tags. Related tags, however, include L1+ (‘alive’), L2 (‘animals’), and S9
(‘religion and the supernatural’), which occur at relative frequencies of
respectively 0.12%, 0.38%, and 0.36%. Note, however, that the first seman-
tic domain, L1+, also includes instances in which someone is literally alive
after life-threatening events, and the use of ‘life’ to indicate someone’s
daily routines and habits, whilst the last, S9, also includes many instances
in which someone’s religion is identified. Though each of these metaphors
is not prominent individually in the sample corpora, this micro metaphori-
cal set can altogether be read along the lines of the Trafficking is Horror
Story metaphor, which itself suggests an audience in need of entertain-
ment of something mysterious, disturbing and fictional. By relating the
problem to narratives of horror, stories with binary portrayals of goodness
and badness, it is, once, again, simplified.
Metaphorical portrayals of trafficking signal state actors as heroes and
reduce victims to the measure of value/usefulness; as such, the media traf-
ficking metaphors prove ultimately unhelpful in responding to the HT
problem.
Naming and Describing HT
HT tends to be described as a large, imported, serious problem, which
must be responded to urgently. People’s suffering tends to be fore-
grounded, as the section on ‘Agency and Focus’ also shows, and this suf-
fering is made particularly salient through the use of (negative)
sensory-related words.
Spike sample corpus descriptors refer to HT as a sometimes neutral
‘phenomenon’ (‘institution’, ‘state of affairs’, ‘issue’, ‘practice’, ‘area’,
‘experience’) that is present-day (‘modern day’/‘twenty-first century’),
far-reaching (‘global’), even ‘necessary’. It’s ‘really big’ and hard to respond
to (‘very complicated’, ‘challenging and complex’), ‘organised’ (‘opera-
tion’, ‘networks’, ‘cartels’, ‘syndicates’, ‘gang’), and ‘a very lucrative busi-
ness’ (‘form of commerce’, ‘trade’, ‘market’, ‘auctions’). It is low-skill
migrant work-related (‘labour’, ‘employers’, ‘work(ers)’, ‘low-skilled

migrants’), morally ‘wrong’ (‘scandal’, ‘problem’, ‘exploitation’, ‘abuse’,
‘bad’, ‘mis/maltreatment’, ‘vice’, ‘unfair’, ‘terrible’, ‘sham’), ‘en/forced’,
‘cheap’ (‘low/poverty pay’, ‘expendable commodities’) and involves
‘enslavement’ (‘slavery’, ‘servitude’, ‘handlers’). It is also criminal (‘fraud-
sters’, ‘assault’, ‘crime’, ‘offence’, ‘criminal operations’, ‘criminality’,
‘guilty’, ‘violence’), often ‘sex/ual’ (‘prostitution’, ‘rape’), hidden (‘invis-
ible’, ‘isolated’, ‘domestic’), unsightly (‘monstrous’, ‘monsters’, ‘specta-
cle’, ‘gruesome’), ‘cruel’ (‘the evil’, ‘nastiest’, ‘barbaric’, ‘ordeal’,
‘suffering’, ‘wicked’, ‘snared’, ‘sordid’, ‘trap’), ‘terrible’ (‘vile’, ‘despica-
ble’, ‘appalling’, ‘sordid’), vomit-inducing (‘revulsion’, ‘disgusting’) and
miserable (‘dreadful’, ‘vulnerability,’ and ‘misery’).
Quantitative results are largely similar, as shown in Table 2.4, in which
we categorise c-collocates to human trafficking:
C-collocates categorised as ‘other’ (articles, pronouns, verbs such as
‘said’ and ‘make’), 61% of all c-collocates to trafficking, have been excluded
from this table. The percentages in this table represent the share each cat-
egory has of the remaining c-collocates. Certain categories are newly intro-
duced or replace others compared to the categories found through the
qualitative analysis. These include ‘foreign’, replacing ‘migrant’, which
includes words like ‘migrant’ as well as ‘Europe’ and ‘Britain’, indicating
trafficking to be an imported issue. New categories relate to those involved,
‘people’ and ‘responders’, including words such as ‘woman’ and ‘police’.
Other new categories relate to official responses, categorised as either ‘fight’
(‘crackdown’) or ‘law’, indicating legal responses (‘court’, ‘evidence’).
Overall, some terms and descriptors vary from neutral, suggesting that
there is no problem whatsoever (at least not when looking at them in iso-
lation), to those that, like the metaphor-related analysis showed, relate to
a business or trade, to those that suggest there is something wrong (but
not necessarily criminal), to those that suggest there is indeed something
criminal going on and to those that strongly negatively (and metaphori-
cally) evaluate the issue. The fact that some of these are perception (sight-
and taste-) related is interesting. And as the quantitative analysis also
suggests, most characterisations of trafficking mark it as a large, modern,
imported problem, which is very bad and must be fought. Much like the
horror-related metaphor previously touched on, these findings support
O’Connell Davidson’s (2010) argument as to the modern slavery narra-
tive being fairy-tale-like; a narrative of innocence and evil, its figures prob-
lematically ‘stripped of ambivalence’.
Table 2.4 Categorisation of c-collocates to ‘trafficking’

Category Frequency Percentage
Foreign 80,323 17.66

Big 66,312 14.58
Present-day 39,578 8.70
Criminal 39,123 8.60
Number 37,759 8.30
People 31,034 6.82
Fight 27,577 6.06
Organised 21,012 4.62
Neutral 16,640 3.66
Law 15,736 3.46
Lucrative 14,763 3.25
Responder 13,362 2.94
Enslavement 8,299 1.82
Wrong 6,905 1.52
Work 15,811 3.48
Youth 5,378 1.18
Cruel 4,949 1.09
Sexual 4,232 0.93
Hidden 3,774 0.83
Forced 2,263 0.50
Other 710,003
Total 1,164,833
Total without ‘Other’ 444,830
Trafficking and Smuggling
As earlier research shows, trafficking and smuggling are, to a certain
extent, conflated. An example of this conflation is found in The Daily
Mail: ‘[NCIS director general Abbott] said the smuggled immigrants
were often victims misled by traffickers about conditions [in Britain]’
(Hinckley, 2000). In line with such research, an examination of our spike
sample corpus also reveals a close correlation, even conflation, between
(potentially illegal) immigration/smuggling and trafficking. See, for
instance references to ‘a crackdown on people traffickers [following the
Home Secretary’s promise to] crack down on illegal immigrants’, to
‘[t]raffickers hid[ing] among migrants’, to Cameron wanting to ‘disrupt
the trafficking and smuggling gangs’, and to the London Olympics as a
‘magnet for people traffickers smuggling sex slaves and illegal workers into
Britain’. Similarly, the press reports a man confessing to ‘trying to have his
son smuggled’ while being ‘arrested on suspicion of human trafficking’,

and another mentions ‘[t]he role of Thai officials in human trafficking
[having] been highlighted in a new report. [Thailand] is on the list of
worst people-smuggling centres in the world’. Such fusions are particu-
larly problematic in reference to the tabloids’ reporting of the migrant
crisis of 2015. The article headlined ‘The Sun says Evil Traffickers’ opens
with reference to ‘[t]he real villains of the migrant crisis [being] the people
smugglers’. The Sun elsewhere adds that ‘[m]ilitary strikes against people
traffickers causing the Mediterranean migrant crisis could begin in weeks’.
These two examples respectively suggest that smuggling/trafficking
resulted from, and also caused, the migrant crisis, rather than acknowledg-
ing the conditions leading to these migrants’ vulnerability in the first place.
Elsewhere, a Sun headline refers to the Special Boat Service ‘trail[ing]
traffickers’, the article’s opening sentence referring to Britain’s special
forces ‘being sent to blow up death-trap ships used by people smugglers’,
with no sympathy for the predicament those in the boats are in. Lastly, one
2001 Independent article even conflates trafficking with not only smug-
gling but also, additionally, asylum-seeking: ‘The number of people being
smuggled into Britain […] has been cut […] [P]enalties of £2000 per
illegal entrant had reduced human trafficking at Channel ports […] [A]
sylum seekers [resort] to desperate measures to gain access to Britain’.
Similarly, as Table 2.5 shows, smuggling is used in almost the exact
same way as trafficking in the wider corpus, with three exceptions; ‘routes’,
‘immigrants’ and, perhaps most surprisingly, ‘traffickers’, are not
c-collocates to trafficking.
When considering the c-collocates to keywords categorised as ‘partici-
pants’, a similar picture is drawn. The majority of participants with either
‘trafficked’ or ‘smuggled’ as a c-collocate are described as having been
trafficked. Intriguingly, this also includes ‘immigrants’ and ‘workers’. Only
‘women’ and ‘people’ are consistently described as having been smuggled,
which is contrary to Musto’s (2009) and Shalit, Heynen, and Van der
Meulen’s (2014) findings showing that men are generally represented as
having been smuggled, whereas women are normally considered having
been trafficked. An optimistic interpretation of the use of these descriptors
would be that newspaper writers recognise the scope for exploitation in
economic migration, and are offering these people the ‘trafficking-
victimhood’ status in order to make sure they receive assistance and support.
However, given the rhetoric of tabloids like The Daily Mail and The Sun,
Table 2.5 Categorisation of c-collocates of trafficking and smuggling, with over-

lapping words in italics
Categories Trafficking c-collocates Smuggling
c-collocates
Abuse Abuse, exploitation, forced, labour, sex, sexual,

slavery, violence, work
Age Young
Commodity Arms, cocaine, drug, drugs, heroin Cocaine, drug,
drugs, heroin
Communication Said, say, says, told Said
Deviance Corruption, fraud, illegal, laundering, offences, Crime, criminal,
pornography, problem, prostitution, terrorism, illegal
crime, crimes, criminal
Geography Britain, British, centre, countries, country, Britain, Europe,
eastern, Europe, European, foreign, home, international
international, Ireland, London, national, UK,
USA, world
Morality Evil
Movement Immigration, smuggling, trafficking Trafficking, routes
Number Many, more, most, rise, scale, number, one, some, Two
three, two
Participants Beings, child, children, criminals, gang, gangs, Gang, gangs,
girls, government, group, human, man, men, human,
network, networks, office, officers, organisations, immigrants, people,
people, police, ring, rings, slave, unit, victim, police, traffickers,
victims, women, workers ring
Response Charged, charges, combat, combating, control, Jailed, operation
crackdown, face, fight, operation, operations, stop,
tackle, tackling, accused, alleged, arrested, case,
cases, convicted, court, evidence, investigating,
investigation, jailed, law, laws, legislation,
suspected, suspicion, anti, dealing, help, issue,
report
Status New, organised, serious Organised
Time Now, time, year, years, yesterday Years
Trade Trade, business, industry, money Money, trade
this seems an unlikely interpretation. For instance, in an article in The

Daily Mail about NCIS warnings about the trafficking and smuggling of
people into the UK, the following, only tenuously related, was added:
Asylum seekers are putting overwhelming strain on some GPs’ surgeries,

doctors complained yesterday. Practices in Gateshead said they are having to
organise extra care without extra resources after the arrival of 600 asylum
seekers. And a practice in Leicester has threatened to close its list after 430
asylum seekers were moved into its catchment area. (Hinckley, 2000)
One explanation for this discrepancy is that newspapers do not refer to

cases of smuggling and trafficking following legal definitions, but instead
use trafficking as simply the weightier, more loaded term. The loaded
trafficking, to refer to all movement of people into the UK, is instead used
to communicate newspapers’ ideology that economic migration is a very
serious problem; trafficking evidently has more serious connotations than
the more accurate but less sensational smuggling.
Description of Victims/Survivors
Victims tend to be described in a stereotypical way: as female, young, and
coerced, creating an ideal victim.
In the sample of articles that were qualitatively analysed, survivors are
mostly unnamed but, when named (‘Ms Lin’), tend to be first named
(‘Abou’, ‘Anna’, ‘Favor’, ‘Han’), which creates a close, intimate relation-
ship with them as opposed to a distant/official one. The spike sample
corpus also refers to HT victims being numerous. There is very much a
focus on their high volume with either reference to them in terms of
groups of a specific number (‘eleven’, ‘thirty’, ‘fifty-eight’) or indeed large
numbers (‘dozens’, ‘hundreds’, ‘thousands’, ‘million’). The fact that vic-
tims are generally perceived as numerous is tied with the notion of traffick-
ing as a large, and growing, problem. In fact, Dijk (2013) notes that the
Polish legislature debated whether HT necessarily involved a plurality of
victims, as the Polish translation of this phrase, ‘handel ludźmi’, refers to
people as plural. Of the full corpus key words referring to victims, 65.58%
are indeed plural (e.g., girls). This multitude of victims is also evident in
concordance lines, which show results such as ‘[t]he International Labour
Organisation estimates that 20.9 million people are victims of forced
labour globally, including victims of human trafficking for sexual exploita-
tion. “While it is not known how many of these victims were trafficked,
the estimate implies that there are millions of trafficking victims in the
world,” said Mr Fedotov’ (The Morning Star, 2013).
Qualitative analysis of the spike sample corpus also shows that victims
are foreign (‘mostly from eastern Europe but also Africa, Asia and south
America’), ‘poor’ (‘from poor country communities’), ‘illegal’ (‘uncertain
legal status’), ‘low-skilled’ ‘jobseekers’ (‘promised them a job in the UK’)

or ‘labourers’ (‘workers’, ‘cheap and expendable labour’, ‘manicurists’).
Most are ‘adult’, with a focus on those who are female (‘women’) and
young (‘youngsters’, ‘underage’, ‘40 children, including babies’), or both
(‘young women’, ‘[t]he youngest known girl victim was just 14’, ‘little
girls crying for their mothers’).
Several of the key words applied to victims throughout the full corpus
indeed indicate a non-British origin: these are immigrant, migrant, and
refugee. Other victims, too, are often identified as non-British: 26% of
c-collocates indicating nationality or origin of victim keywords refer to
Britain (e.g. British, London, here), whereas 58% indicate a non-British
location, most often Eastern Europe and Africa. These c-collocates also
include words such as illegal, across, and foreign, and support the notion
that trafficking is framed as an ‘imported’ problem (see Johnston,
Friedman, & Sobel, 2015). It should also be noted that immigrants,
migrants, refugees, and workers are often young (57% of age-related
c-collocates), and workers are explicitly identified as vulnerable. One pos-
sible interpretation is that these modifiers are used to negotiate the nega-
tive evaluation of migrants in general by British newspapers (see Gabrielatos
& Baker, 2008) and the fact that these people may be considered victims
of trafficking. However, as the qualitative analysis shows, British newspa-
pers can nonetheless be ruthless about these victims.
The corpus linguistic findings also refer to victims as female. Of the
keywords that are used to refer to victims of trafficking and that inherently
indicate gender, 60% are female (e.g., girls, daughter, woman). Having said
that, those victim-labelling related keywords that do not inherently indi-
cate gender (e.g., victim) have 54% masculine gender-related c-collocates,
a result that can be explained by the fact that gender collocates can indi-
cate deviations from a perceived norm, in the sense that ‘lady doctor’ and
‘male nurse’ indicate that doctors and nurses are expected to be respec-
tively male and female. If the majority of c-collocates indicate masculinity,
it is possible that survivors are inherently presumed female and their occa-
sional male-ness is noteworthy.
Another trafficking finding from the qualitative analysis is that victims
are young. The quantitative analysis supports this finding: 24.58% of all
key words applied to victims in the full corpus inherently indicate youth
(e.g., girl, boy, baby, children) while, for the remaining three-quarters of
key words that do not inherently indicate youth, 46% of gender-related
c-collocates imply youth (e.g., young, teenage). A further 29% of age-related
c-collocates are generic indicators of age, and even those c-collocates that
appear to imply a lack of youth (e.g., old) may also be taken as generic, as
in the phrase ‘X years old’. Concordances show that this is, in fact, how old
is to be interpreted. According to concordances, victims are generally
under the age of twenty-five, although more so in the case of those traf-
ficked for sexual exploitation than those trafficked for labour exploitation.
One notable exception is the case of Elizabeth Fritzl, who was forty-two
at the time of her release (see for instance Hall, 2009; Milmo & Peachey,
2013; Nicks, 2008; The Mirror, 2008).
According to the qualitative analysis of spike sample corpus data, HT
victims tend to be sexualised (females are ‘forced to prostitute
themselves’/‘forced into sex work’, or referred to as ‘sex slaves’, ‘sex abuse
victims’) and defined by their vulnerability (‘mental disorder’, ‘disability’,
‘in trouble’, ‘fleeing’, ‘no protection’, ‘patient’, ‘undocumented’, ‘stranded’,
‘wretched’, ‘damaged’, ‘desperate’, ‘survivor’, ‘lone mothers’, ‘boys in their
care’, ‘separated from their families, exposed to hazards and illnesses or left
alone on city streets’, ‘rescued’, ‘flimsy boats’, ‘protection’, ‘starving’, ‘have
to eat air’) and captivity ( ‘captive’, ‘held’, ‘(virtual) prisoners’, ‘indentured’,
‘escaped’). They are hidden (‘domestic’, ‘invisible’ and ‘isolated’), enslaved
(‘virtual slaves’, ‘child slaves’, ‘life of servitude’), violently acted upon
(‘forced’, ‘abuse victims’) or even referred to as inanimate, things,
‘commod[ities]’ (‘worth less than a shoe’, ‘cargo’, ‘cheap and expendable’,
‘ripe victims’). Those articles referring to specific trafficking cases often do
not specify why victims were trafficked and who was behind the operation,
a matter we return to shortly in the ‘Agency and Focus’ section.
These results are unsurprising given that the stereotypical victim of HT
is, as noted in this collection’s introduction, female, young, unwilling to
perform the work she is doing, but coerced, portrayals not just common in
news media and pop culture, but also shared by policy makers and the
public (Buckley, 2009; Dando, Walsh, & Brierley, 2016; Gould, 2010;
Musto, 2009). In short, victims of HT are often described in line with
Christie’s (1986) theory of the ideal victim; she is young and she is female.
Furthermore, in line with the representation of HT as a large and growing
problem, victims are represented as numerous. Finally, in accordance with
the idea that HT is an imported problem and a threat to national security,
victims are described as foreign. The stereotypical victim of trafficking is
therefore perhaps best described in the following excerpt from The Daily
Mail: ‘[a]ccording to information given by the traffickers, many of the
victims smuggled into Britain are “vulnerable” young women from poor
or broken families’ (Borland, 2009).
Description of Traffickers and Related HT-Perpetrators

Traffickers and other perpetrators are less clearly defined. Newspapers
appear to focus on victims and their suffering, neglecting to discuss traf-
fickers in depth.
Traffickers are sometimes identified as ‘families forced to sell their chil-
dren to survive’ (‘Romanian Fana Moses, 32, had given birth and sold the
boy’ to a ‘French’ ‘childless couple’), but mostly as ‘recruitment agencies
solely for overseas workers’, ‘firms’, ‘businesses’, ‘traders’, ‘businessmen
looking for cheap and expendable labour’, ‘salon’ owners, ‘employers who
exploit migrant workers and pay less than the minimum wage’, and ‘gangs
who sell false dreams and trade on the free borders within the EU’. They
are ‘masters’, ‘owners’, ‘captors’, ‘abusers’, and ‘slavers of our day’; in
other words, they are defined by their ownership of the victims they have
‘control and power over’.
They are a ‘vice ring’: organised, powerful, and criminal, described as
‘jungle’/‘human’/‘people’/‘sex’/‘Med’ ‘traffickers’, ‘trafficking syndi-
cates’, ‘operations’, ‘criminal’ ‘gangs’ or ‘elements’, ‘thugs’ and also as ‘very
powerful’ ‘masterminds’, ‘politicians and other Establishment/government’
‘figures’/‘officials’ or ‘paedophile rings’, selling unwilling victims to ‘sex’
buyers/‘clients’/’young’ and ‘unknown men’. Those transporting the vic-
tims are ‘haulier’, ‘lorry’/‘van’ drivers.
Quantitative analysis also suggests that, like victims, traffickers are
numerous. In fact, traffickers are more often plural than victims (at 69.32%
compared to 58%). This use of plurals may help to signify the ‘large threat’
of trafficking, justifying Fight-responses and newspapers’ ongoing atten-
tion to migration/trafficking. The use of this strategy is illustrated by the
following quote from The Daily Express, discussing migrants choosing to
camp at Zeebrugge rather than Calais: ‘Belgian authorities have stopped
890 migrants without residency papers since January—450 of whom trav-
elled to Zeebrugge which is seven miles from Bruges. Dozens of traffickers
have also been detained’ (Sykes, 2016, emphasis added). This excerpt also
displays a conflation of trafficking and smuggling, as it is unclear whether
these supposed traffickers simply worked to transport people across bor-
ders, or did so with the intent of exploiting them.
In the sample corpora, traffickers’ foreign nationality is often high-
lighted (‘four Libyans and one Tunisian’, ‘ten other Hungarians’, ‘Ivorian’,
‘Dutchman’) or indicated merely by their full, and most often foreign,
name (‘Wei Yu—a naturalised Irish citizen who lives in Limerick’; ‘Razvan
Ursu’; ‘Zoltan Raffael’; ‘Toi Van Le’, and ‘Perry Wacker’, who was actu-
ally smuggling rather than trafficking immigrants into the UK) or surname
(‘Blaga’), the latter suggesting formality and also distance. Indeed, only
26% of c-collocates referring to nationality or origin to keywords identify-
ing traffickers refer to Britain. This is equal to the proportion of ‘local’
c-collocates associated with victims. 58% of c-collocates referring to
nationality or origin indicates that traffickers are associated with other
countries or are foreign. This is also similar to the proportion of ‘foreign’
c-collocates associated with victims. This finding again underlines the
interpretation that trafficking is framed as an imported problem. Reporting
on the rise in prostitution, for instance, The Daily Star claims: ‘Large num-
bers of women are also being trafficked by foreign gangs into prostitution’
(Malley, 2006).
Other than these, however, there are few characteristics that traffickers
have in common. They include gangs, family members (father, mother),
men and women. However, most traffickers in the spike sample corpus data
are indeed male (‘four men’, ‘42-year-old man’), some are female (a
‘Nigerian woman’, a ‘19/38-year-old woman’), with their age ranging
from nineteen to fifty-seven when specified. In terms of their evaluation,
such individuals are ‘dubious’ and ‘unscrupulous’ at best, and ‘(true)
bloodsucker bosses’, ‘callous’, ‘evil’, ‘brutal’, and ‘heartless’ ‘monsters’/‘
parasites’/‘villains’ at worst.
In short, it is difficult to establish whether newspapers actually create a
‘big, bad’ trafficker, as the characteristics of the represented individuals
actually vary. Likewise, in her 6-month corpus containing 354 trafficking
cases in news texts, Denton (2010) found that all possible gender- and
role-combinations were present. Sobel (2016) also found that while vic-
tims are primarily presented as female, traffickers are either mixed, or with
their gender unmentioned, something that, for Sobel, is indicative of the
gender of traffickers being male, by default. Instead, newspapers appear to
focus on the experiences and characteristics of victims. By doing so, they
fail to address the structural factors that cause people be involved in traf-
ficking, either as victims or as traffickers.
Agency and Focus
This section argues that there is a general obscuring of agency in acts of
trafficking. Furthermore, victims are presented as having little agency. As
5.39% of keywords relate to an act of trafficking and/or abuse, this overall
lack of agency suggests that newspapers tend to focus on the suffering of

victims, rather than on those parties who cause such suffering in the first
place. Having said that, traffickers are generally identified as actors and
agents; they are not acted upon either.
This focus on suffering, that does not specify who caused this suffering,
is clear when considering the form of those keywords categorised as ‘acts
of trafficking and abuse’. They are generally nouns (abuse, death, exploita-
tion, issue, labour, marriage, prostitution, sex, slavery, threat, violence),
intransitive verbs (died, worked), or adjectives relating to these nouns
(hard labour, modern slavery, sexual exploitation, sexual violence). Those
transitive verbs that have been included (forced, trafficked, killed) are all in
the past participle form, meaning that they can also be used to form
(agentless) passives, in which the focus is on the subject undergoing the
act, rather than on the object performing the act (if at all included).
Qualitative analysis of corpus data revealed many nominalisations.
Some are found in the reference to ‘economic migration having led to
“conditions in which […] enforced labour could occur”’. Here, the active
voice is employed; the nominalised migration causes conditions that could
lead to enforced labour, rather than identifying the global socio-economic
and political factors related to migration. Also notice the nominalisation of
‘enforced labour’, which leaves it up to the reader to determine who forces
labour. Similarly, there is ‘abuse’ (‘cocoa farm abuse’, ‘suffered’/‘subjected
to (terrible) abuse’), ‘exploitation’ (‘the exploitation of migrant workers’),
violence (‘subject to threats of violence’) and a ‘demand for these crimes’,
again leaving it unclear who performs these acts. Lastly, in ‘[s]ex traffick-
ing and illegal workers threaten Olympics’, illegal workers are presumably
victims of trafficking, but are presented as agents of threat, and as some-
thing to be dealt with. They are presented as problem-causing individuals
that threaten the major institution that is the Olympics. As these workers
are illegal, they are simply stripped of their victim-status.
The sample dataset is also full of agentless passives that do not require
the agent to be referred to. Vehicles carrying victims are ‘destined’ and
‘being used’ with no indication as to who is behind the act. As taken in by
deception, victims are ‘promised’, ‘told’ lies, ‘cruelly snared’ and ‘duped’.
As goods, victims are ‘handpicked’, ‘scooped up’, ‘taken’/‘separated from
their families’, ‘being b(r)ought’, ‘sent out’ to engage in forced criminal-
ity, ‘delivered’, ‘sold’, ‘trafficked’ (sometimes conflated with ‘smuggled’)
and ‘sent’ to live elsewhere. As kept against their will, they are ‘kidnapped’,
‘held hostage’, ‘locked (up)’, ‘held’, ‘tied (up)’, ‘hidden’, ‘imprisoned’,
and ‘crammed’ into small spaces. They are also vulnerable when ‘exposed
to hazards and illnesses or left alone on city streets’ and come to be ‘used’,
‘groomed’, ‘exploited’, ‘coerced’, ‘mistreated’, ‘enslaved’, ‘given no
money’, ‘denied’/‘not afforded’/‘robbed’/‘deprived of’ ‘legal’/‘basic
rights’ and ‘discriminated against’. As violently acted upon, they are
‘forced to work […] not being given food or paid for their work’,
‘attacked’, ‘(sexually) abused’, ‘molested’, ‘raped’, ‘beaten’ and end up
‘traumatised’, their lives ‘ruined’. Victims are ‘stranded’, cases are some-
times eventually ‘uncovered’ and the victims ‘found’/‘discovered’ and
‘freed’/‘rescued’/‘taken to a place of safety’. In other words, victims are
always ‘done to’, whether by the perpetrators or the police. They lack
agency. As these forms allow the actor to be discarded (Jeffries, 2010),
newspapers do indeed appear to focus more on the acts of trafficking and
abuse than on those performing these acts.
Some of the keywords in this category have an ambiguous form, that is,
it is unclear whether they should be read as adjective, noun, or verb.
Domestic, for instance, can refer to a person working as a domestic servant,
but can also be used to refer to domestic slavery. More striking is the set of
words that can technically be read either as a noun or a verb. These are
attack, force, murder, rape, work, services, hit, and trafficking. If taken to
be verbs, they would mostly be present tense first person ones, a form not
commonly used in newspaper writing; the most straightforward interpre-
tation is that these are actually nouns.
When considering the grammar of those target words that specifically
refer to traffickers, another pattern emerges. Despite a general lack of
focus on traffickers (traffickers are also only explicitly referred to half as
much as victims), traffickers are assigned much more agency than victims.
They are the grammatical subject more often than victims are, at 39.58%
against 31.77%. Victims, on the other hand, are more often the grammati-
cal object. More importantly, traffickers are identified as agents (through
the collocating preposition ‘by’) at 2.46%, against victims’ 1.46%. These
tendencies are especially pronounced in the target nouns trafficker and
victims. At 7.52%, trafficker is particularly often indicated as an agent in
passive sentences. Furthermore, a trafficker is often the grammatical sub-
ject of an active, rather than a passive, sentence.
In other words, nominalisations and transitivity analysis reveal that traf-
fickers act, victims are powerless and acted upon, and victims’ suffering
remains the focus of these texts. Traffickers’ direct responsibility for this
suffering lacks exposure.
Modality
This section turns to the attitudinal study of the language used in the spike
sample corpus texts specifically. It shows that the use of deontic modality
suggests that HT is presented as something that must urgently be dealt
with, whereas the use of epistemic modality is used by journalists to over-
state the scale of the problem and to present the problem as (excessively)
serious, without having to write untruths.
The deontic modality system, that of duty, is expressed through verbs
like ‘should’ (‘members states should step up’, ‘The harrowing testimony
of a woman forced into sex slavery as a teen in Ireland should be a wake-up
call’), ‘let’ (‘Police let them walk away’), ‘must’ (‘We must make sure they
are aware there are women held against their will’, ‘they must prostitute
themselves’, ‘A FIRM deadline must be put in place’), ‘need’ (‘Consumers
also need to be aware of potential exploitation of nail bar workers’, ‘People
really need to open their eyes’, ‘a fuller package of proposals is needed’),
‘commit’ (‘the European Convention on Human trafficking commits sig-
natories to tackling the traffickers’), ‘allow’ (‘In future domestic workers
will only be allowed in on non-renewable business visas’; ‘freed victims of
trafficking will be allowed to stay’, ‘allowing her to be raped by a string of
men’, ‘allowed employees to be paid appropriately’) and ‘oblige’ (‘Britain
[…] is not obliged to take refugees’). Overall, deontic expressions are very
often to do with what victims and potential victims are and are not
‘allowed’ to do, what ‘we’/the politicians/police/states should be doing,
and what laws commit/allow people to do things. The news texts suggest
that there is urgency, commitment, and necessity to respond to the HT
problem.
The epistemic system deals with (un)certainty. Certainty is often com-
municated through the verb ‘will’ (‘[trafficking] will continue to exist’;
‘Illegal immigrants will continue to pour into the UK’, ‘Britain will remain
the number one destination for sex-slave traffickers’). Uncertainty, on the
other hand, is expressed through verbs like ‘may’ (‘The slave traders may
dump [their cargo of children] overboard’; ‘Criminals may make prom-
ises’, ‘what may be hundreds of people’), ‘can’ (‘child labour can involve
youngsters’, ‘[t]he type of work children can be involved in differs greatly’,
‘slavery can involve sexual exploitation’, ‘someone can make £1 million a
year out of 10 women’), ‘could’ (‘She could then earn her buyer £800 a
day’, ‘Migrant workers […] could become virtual slaves’, ‘It could have
ended in tragedy/be abused by illegal immigrants’), ‘would’ (‘patrolling
the African sea-lanes would be a far wiser policy than […]’, ‘the conven-
tion would help Britain’, ‘it is just inconceivable they would give evidence
to trial’, ‘They would leave migrant workers […] destitute and homeless’;
‘Changing employers would not be appropriate’, ‘Home office policy
reversal would strip them of their right […]’) and ‘might’ (‘might have
been involved in the human trafficking syndicates’, ‘might have become a
watery grave’). This first set of epistemic phrases presents human traffick-
ing as a very serious, large, problem, without the journalist having to pres-
ent precise numbers. This also allows them to increase the threshold value
(see Galtung & Ruge, 1965) of this news.
Uncertainty is also communicated through nouns (‘a possibility for
sexual exploitation’, ‘allegations that they treat their workers [… like]
slaves’), adjectives (‘possible/alleged victim/abuse/people trafficking’,
‘suspected traffickers/victims of human trafficking’), and adverbs like
‘allegedly’ (‘allegedly held as slaves’) and ‘likely’ (‘Gangs are likely to tar-
get’, ‘the migrant crisis was likely to make people-trafficking globally eas-
ier’, ‘more likely to be in unpaid family work’). Such uncertainty is also
expressed through (visual) perception modality (‘If you see a car wash,
and it is clear that people look like potentially being exploited’, ‘workers
look hungry’, ‘who doesn’t look like he works in that world’, ‘clearly the
problem is most serious in lower income countries’, ‘she seemed uncer-
tain’). Uncertainty can also be communicated through cognition modal-
ity, that is, uncertainty through belief (‘officers believe women are
frequently raped’, ‘cages believed to have been used’). As epistemically
modalised expressions allow the writer to say things that might not be true
and are often (legally) necessary, their overuse exaggerates the nature/
extent of the problem, again increasing threshold value, and can even gen-
erate panic.
Speech and Writing Presentation

This section turns to the voices behind such urgency and uncertainty.
Other than the reporting voice, who/what else is quoted? It shows that
primarily powerful people are quoted. This is problematic, as by reporting
certain opinions over others, reporters lend legitimacy to these viewpoints
over others (Louw, 2005). This may not be intentional, but journalists
often report the viewpoints of people who are perceived as authoritative
sources, who also tend to be socially powerful (Cottle, 2003; Kuhn, 2007;
Machin & Niblock, 2006).21
21
Two particular matters should also be considered in this regard: news values, and chur-
nalism. News values are those aspects of a story that editors assume spark interest in readers
(Bednarek & Caple, 2012, p. 40); stories with those elements tend to be overrepresented
When exploring the spike sample corpus data in terms of who does and
does not talk and write, we found that the reported tend to be either
police officers (such as Detective Superintendents, Deputy Chiefs and
Inspectors), and also various senior government members and ministers.
The latter range from the Prime Minister (or their spokesperson/advisor),
the (Shadow) Home Secretary, various (foreign office/immigration/
defence) ministers, Home office/UN reports, chief council executives,
party (candidate) leaders/(European) Parliament Members, advisers to
the parliamentary committee on HT, the anti-slavery commissioner, and
even the Governor of New York. Also reported are those parties whose
interests lie in protecting victims (including the Pope, judges, community
support workers, charity/Union spokespeople, International Labour
Organisation specialists/data, ‘Save the Children’, European Commission
reports/working documents), with little said by those parties whose inter-
ests lie in protecting those accused of HT (there is just one instance of
‘their lawyer said’).
Readers also hear nothing from the HT perpetrators and very little
from the HT victims themselves (quotes attributed to ‘the boy’ found in
a suitcase and ‘a child sex abuse victim’ reporting on a UK intranational
compared to stories without. Incidentally, many news values are also those aspects of HT
news that are problematically overreported: unambiguity (Galtung & Ruge, 1965)/simplifi-
cation (Jewkes, 2011), or the binary representation of victims and offenders; sex; violence or
conflict; visuals, and the inclusion of/a focus on children (Jewkes, 2011). In other words,
problematic representations of HT are perpetuated as they are perceived to resonate with
readers, with the result that global inequalities are maintained (Gregoriou & Ras, Chap. 1 in
this book). Churnalism is the increasing tendency for journalists to publish any story,
‘whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false’ (Davies, 2008, p. 59).
This trend is due to the increased commercialisation of the British press, which led to staff
cuts despite growing revenues, and an increased pressure on remaining staff to ‘churn out’ as
many stories as possible, reducing the ability to (fact) check stories and actually do investiga-
tive journalism (Davies, 2008). As a result of these pressures, much of modern journalism is
little more than the recycling of PR, press office, and wire agency outputs (ibid.). The prob-
lem with PR and press offices, however, is that they work for institutions and individuals with
their own agenda, such as the police, political parties, the government, and corporations
(ibid.). When churnalism and news values are considered together, what becomes clear is that
newspapers are given stories that represent events in a way that benefits the establishment—
particularly politics and business; have no time to fact check these stories and uncover differ-
ent perspectives, and are, due to an increasing demand for revenue and readers, pushed to
highlight reader-friendly aspects. This becomes more sinister when considering that high-
lighting these aspects also benefits those organisations whose press offices put out these
stories in the first place.
trafficking case are exceptions). In fact, there is reference to the latter

being unable to provide necessary evidence altogether (‘these women are
so traumatised that it is just inconceivable they would give evidence in a
trial’). Even though language/communication often proves problematic
for victims, and legal consequences may arise when victims do away with
their anonymity, the tendency is to silence them completely and
regardless.
Multimodality
Lastly, we turn to look at those fifty-three texts we were able to trace the
facsimiles (45)/online (8) newspaper article versions of, questioning first
the placing of the text among others on the page/relevant newspaper, and
second the choice and nature of any accompanying images only some of
which are printed, or at least made available to us, in colour.
We were able to locate forty-five of the spike sample corpus articles in
the form of facsimiles, which enabled an examination of the journalistic
context surrounding the HT articles as originally printed, telling as it
might be to consider how the relevant stories relate ‘to other stories on the
page which are also competing for the reader’s attention’ (Caple, 2013,
p. 160). Surrounding texts mostly dealt with people movement in general
(smuggling, refugees and asylum seekers, migrants and deportation), poli-
tics, finance, national crises, international relations/conflict, crime (includ-
ing abuse, murder, and fraud), various other unfortunate events (such as
scandals, disasters, and suicides) and, lastly, sex and celebrity. None of
these HT-related articles appeared on newspaper front pages. On average,
these featured around page 15 in each newspaper and were about 269
words long; these articles’ placing far into the paper and short length sug-
gests they are not flagged up as of the utmost importance (see Chermak,
1994), however newsworthy they may be.
Only twenty of the spike sample corpus articles located (fourteen fac-
similes, and six online) had any accompanying images. Several of these
twenty merely contained photographs of the officials reporting or
reported, the victims/perpetrators/officers involved in the cases reported,
or displayed HT-related means (lorries, boats, a suitcase) or stereotypical
circumstantial scenes (cages, houses, farms, stations and camps, and stock
images of workplaces such as nail salons and car washes). Most note-
worthy in terms of their relatively large size and enactment of temporal
relations/provision of narrative progression (see Caple, 2013, p. 177), are
pairs/series of images: that depicting a capsized boat of migrants, that of

two women being questioned when found ‘crammed’ in the back of a van
by bight-yellowed servicemen (the attire hence emphasising the latter’s
official role, see Caple, 2013, p. 49), and that with red-circled supposed
traffickers ‘hiding’ in a group of migrants on a Navy ship. Perhaps most
striking, however, are those images depicting (ideal victim) children. One
pair of shots depicts a child physically seen inside a suitcase (with one of
these shots being an airport scanner image); in another, a colourfully
dressed isolated child breaks tiles outdoor in Mumbai; in a third, a group
of four ‘unaccompanied’, the caption says) children walk next to a pond in
a refugee camp in Greece at dusk, their reflection seen across the water.
This last one adopts the ‘iterating’, ‘matching’, and ‘mirroring’ composi-
tional configuration (Caple, 2013, p. 99) and can be read along meta-
phorical lines—the life of these children can take several forms, and it is up
to us (Guardian) readers perhaps, to help them find the right one.
Similarly, an image accompanying a Guardian article of domestic workers
depicts two Filipino women wiping a wooden floor on their knees, and
hence also adopts the ‘iterating’ and ‘matching’ configuration (though
not the ‘mirroring’ one). Unlike all other images in the sample the per-
spective of which is horizontal, the camera angle is here high, the two
participants are photographed from above, and the viewer is hence placed
in a dominant position (Caple, 2013, p. 39); the viewing perspective here
suggests a master/employer literally looking down on, and hence meta-
phorically taking advantage of, the women. In one last image, a man, head
cropped off the stock image, is shown washing a car, the sky’s slightly
cloudy blueness suggesting optimism for one’s future.
Such HT-related photojournalism depicts mostly groups rather than
individuals, which suggests mid/low compositional salience, construes
the news values of ‘Impact, emphasising the consequences of an event,
but also Superlativeness [as in the maximised or intensified aspects of an
event]’ (Caple, 2013, p. 41) while, even where subjects are seen in isola-
tion or in pairs, there is a distinct lack of focus on actors’ faces or emo-
tional responses. Such images being mostly long shot, with actor faces
being obscured and facial features mostly indiscernible or with ‘neutral
and negative facial affect’ (Caple, 2013, p. 79), is suggestive of these
foreign-looking migrants (possibly involved in trafficking) being a faceless
and nameless group, and one hard for the viewer to relate to or sym-
pathise with; the relationship between the viewer and those viewed is
impersonal, detached. There are no frontal angles and no direct gaze at,
or acknowledgment of, the viewer, no ‘demand’ (Kress & Van Leeuwen

2006, p. 118) for the viewer to do anything in response to the image.
Represented participants are instead in oblique angles, and merely on
‘offer’ (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006, p. 119) for the invisible viewer’s
contemplation. The depicted actors are shown mostly engaged in what
Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006, p. 79) describe as ‘Narrative Structure’,
that is, ‘unfolding actions and events, processes of change, transitory spa-
tial arrangements’. Here, actors are working, walking, falling into the sea,
or swimming. Though depicted as agents, the image cropping/framing
suggests that it is others who are imposing these actions on those depicted,
in fact. Where masses of immigrants are seen crammed in a fishing boat,
they are passively being carried, with little indication of who the agent of
this potentially criminal action is. Similarly, in those few images where the
depicted actors are shown as standing or sitting, these individuals are por-
trayed as waiting for others to make life-altering decisions as to their
future. In sum, the images suggest that all those (potential victims)
depicted are ultimately all agentless.
Conclusion
Our quantitative and qualitative critical discourse analysis of 2000–2016
British news media reveals a close correlation/conflation between transna-
tional HT and smuggling (concepts also blurred with those of immigra-
tion and asylum seeking), which contributes to HT victim criminalisation.
Where female, victims are sexualised, which supports the notion of sexual
exploitation being over-reported. Both HT perpetrators and victims are
seen as numerous, illegal and non-British. Where the victims are young,
vulnerable, coerced, agentless, silenced, unrelatable, and offered merely
for reflection, perpetrators of the HT problem vary, are not focused on/
identified, and are not acted upon. HT itself is represented as an imported,
perhaps exaggerated problem, which is very bad and must be fought,
urgently. Such journalism foregrounding official responses is the result of
vested interests, while state actors are shown to be heroes, its victims
reduced to the measure of mere usefulness or value.
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CHAPTER 3
Not All Human Trafficking is Created Equal:

Transnational Human Trafficking in the UK
and Serbian News Media Texts—
Narratological and Media Studies Approaches
Nina Muždeka
Abstract This chapter investigates the representation of transnational

human trafficking in news texts in English and Serbian (published between
2000–2016 and 2003–2016 respectively) by adopting contemporary narra-
tive and media theories. The identified narrative strategies and narrative
elements (pertaining to the fabula, story, and text) not only shape the news
texts, but also function as a semiotic code through which reality is itself
constructed. In both sets of news texts, narratives as forms of representation
prioritize particular aspects of human trafficking (e.g., use of official
sources), while neglecting and/or completely excluding others (e.g., roots
of human trafficking). The chapter draws attention to the logic behind such
mechanisms that transform information into meaningful structures and
thus influence the shaping of public perception and responses to this crime.
Keywords Human trafficking • Media studies • Narrative • Narratology

• Newsworthiness • Serbian news media texts • UK news media texts
N. Muždeka (*)
University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia
e-mail: nina.muzdeka@ff.uns.ac.rs

62 N. MUŽDEKA
Introduction
Transnational human trafficking invites debate on the role of the media as
a contemporary watchdog and a forum for showcasing diverse viewpoints.
To shed light on some of the mechanisms that direct the media approach
to representation of human trafficking (henceforth HT), this chapter
investigates the representation of HT in UK and Serbian news media,
using contemporary narrative and media theories (Bal, 2009; Fulton,
2005; Jahn, 2005; Zelizer & Allan, 2010). In this approach, HT news
media texts in both languages are treated as narratives, that is, forms of
representation culturally positioned to turn information into meaningful
structures and thus to produce diverse meanings within different social
and cultural milieus, addressing and affecting target audiences in specific
ways. Narrative and media theories place emphasis on the aspects of narra-
tive structure, construction, form, patterns, medium, and the elementary
epistemology of knowing the world.
Fulton (2005) defines the relationship between text and its meaning
using broadly defined poststructuralism as a theoretical approach. The
basic, but often overlooked, tenet, is the fact that information (as a non-
narrative segment) does not equal news (as a narrative construct). A piece
of news represents a “deliberately structured story” (Fulton, 2005,
p. 219), not the fact or the truth itself (however we choose to define the
concepts of “fact” and “truth”). As a deliberately created structure, a news
story “translates” the initial information into meaning using narrative
strategies, that is, the narrative construction. The aspects of narrative con-
struction are analysed as a semiotic code in which not only news is created,
but also so is a much more encompassing and influential structure: our
whole sense of reality of the world that surrounds us, as recipients of news.
Since this semiotic code contributes to the process of creating public opin-
ion, perception, and agenda, its analysis also allows investigation into the
wider ideological implications and socio-political positioning that lies
behind the process of constructing and creating news.1
Narrative studies and media and communication studies identify simi-
lar aspects of narrative construction as crucial for understanding the pro-
cess of news creation. Media and communication studies define “narrative”
as “the organizing structure of a news story that describes in patterned
ways the unfolding of public events or issues within the parameters made
1
Bal (2009, p. 35) insists that “narratological analysis inherently serves political or ideo-
logical critique” since ideology cannot be isolated from structure.
NOT ALL HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS CREATED EQUAL: TRANSNATIONAL… 63
available by a technological medium” (Zelizer & Allan, 2010, p. 77). As

such, any news narrative “offers a fundamental epistemological way of
knowing the world, involving sequence, setting, perspective, characteriza-
tion, tone, and a relationship with the public” and is “differentiated both
by its contents—what it says, the story or plot—and its form—how it says,
the act of narration” (Zelizer & Allan, 2010, p. 77). Using different terms
but essentially the same logic, Johnson-Cartee (2005, p. 159) defines nar-
rative as a fully developed story that includes “characters, scene descrip-
tions, conflicts, actions with motives, [and] resolutions”. What provides
the structure is the narrative frame, that is, “the basic organization of the
structural components used in the story” (Johnson-Cartee, 2005, p. 159).
Referring to the narrative frame, other authors in the field used expres-
sions such as “formulaic narrative construction” (Bird & Dardenne,
1988, p. 67) and “structure of expectation” (Tannen, 1993, p. 15).
Irrespective of the exact term used, the essence remains the same—what
is noticed and identified is the basic schema or the prototype of organiza-
tion that transforms various separate structural elements into a coherent
narrative structure. Following this logic, it can be argued that what is
commonly deemed as journalistic objectivity constitutes “sameness in
news” ascribed to the application of a particular narrative frame, not mir-
roring reality (Bird & Dardenne, 1988, p. 67).
Bal (2009, p. 10) defines narrative as a “cultural phenomenon” consist-
ing of three layers: the text (synonymous with “discourse” or “surface
telling”, see Fulton, 2005, p. 37; cf. Genette, 1988), the story (synony-
mous with “plot” and “syuzhet”, see Bal, 2009), and the fabula (“a series
of logically and chronologically related events […] caused or experienced
by actors”—Bal, 2009, pp. 5–9). Within the analysis of a fabula, I examine
the elementary choice of events that make the news. The analysis of
elements of a story includes the aspects of characters (who participates?)2
and focalization (who sees the events?).3 Here I also analyse the social
2
While Bal (2009, p. 92) analyses participants in the chosen events at both the level of a
fabula (as “actors” or “actants”, i.e., “abstract units”) and the level of a story (where “actors
are ‘turned into’ characters, placed into specific spaces with mutual symbolic and circumstan-
tial relations”), I opted for the analysis of this element at the level of a story only in order to
illustrate better their role in the construction of news as stories with a particular agenda to be
promoted. Bal’s (2009, p. 129) distinction says that “an actor in a fabula is a structural posi-
tion, while a character is a complex semantic unit”.
3
Bal (2009, pp. 191–192) considers focalization to be “the most important, most pene-
trating, and most subtle means of manipulation” which should not be marginalized (in
favour of content analysis) when analysing newspaper reports for their “hidden ideology”.
64 N. MUŽDEKA
groups or individuals that are given voice in the text, by showing which of
these are marked as prominent, which are placed in the background, and
which are completely neglected/excluded. Within the analysis of text and
narration, I investigate the structure of news texts in terms of the dissemi-
nation of information, as well as levels of narration (including frame/pri-
mary and embedded texts). The aim of the analysis of these three layers of
narrative structure is to show how these narrative elements are employed
regarding their role in turning information into print media discourses
that portray transnational HT in UK and Serbian news media texts. Finally,
I interpret the ideological positioning that is created as a result of such a
narrative construction, showing how particular ideological standpoints are
promoted in the news media narratives on HT.
To maintain consistency across the project, the same English language
news media text corpus of sixty-seven texts was used for this analysis as in
this collection’s Chap. 2. For the selection of the Serbian language texts,
the most extensive Serbian news media database (EBART) was used,
archiving news media output since 2003. EBART archives both broad-
sheet and tabloid newspaper sources, of national, regional and local cover-
age, in both Cyrillic and Latin script.4 The average number of HT-related
news texts was thirty-five per month. The core search terms used were
direct translations of the search terms used for the English language cor-
pus: human trafficking (“trgovina ljudima”, “trafiking”), slavery (“rop-
stvo”), modern slavery (“savremeno ropstvo”, “moderno ropstvo”),
trafficking in human beings (“trgovina belim robljem”, “trgovina ljudskim
bićima”, “trgovina ljudima”), forced labour (“prinudni rad”, “prisilni
rad”), sexual exploitation (“seksualna eksploatacija”), sex trafficking/sex-
ual trafficking (“seks-trafiking”, “seks trafiking”), and sex slave (“seksu-
alno ropstvo”, “seksualno roblje”). Articles were manually checked to
ensure they were related to HT.5
4
The corpus included 315 newspaper articles published in 28 different print news media:
̵
Akter, Balkan, Blic, Borba, Danas, Dnevnik, Ekonomist, Ekspres, Glas javnosti, Gradanski list,
Informer, Kurir, Nacional, Narodne novine, Naše novine, Nedeljni telegraf, NIN, Novi
Magazin, Pančevac, Politika, Pravda, Pregled, Press, Srpski nacional, TV novosti, Večernje
novosti, Vranjske, and Vreme.
5
Most notably, this kind of manual checking for relevance was done because of the high
frequency of Serbian texts with the key word “trafika”, which is a false friend of English “traf-
ficking” (and denotes a newspaper booth or kiosk—a very frequent robbery target and thus
a very frequent occurrence in the news).
Fabula: What to Choose for the News?

In the interpretation of news media texts, fabula—as material which is an
essential, basic layer of any narrative—is “the answer to the classic journal-
ist’s questions” (Who? What? Where? How? When? Why?) (Conboy,
2007, p. 43). Events featured in British and Serbian news texts on HT
were categorized as in the following subsections.
Arrests and Reports on Criminal Acts

As the most prominent and numerous articles on HT in both UK and
Serbian news print media, these cover the incidents that happened most
recently. In the fabula of these texts, two events are typically featured: the
act of arrest, and the criminal act perpetrated by the arrested and/or traf-
ficked person/people. The UK press reported on a “Man seized for slav-
ery”, the discovery of illegal immigrants found in the back of a lorry, and
the arrest of a man after a 26-year old Romanian victim is found by the
police (The People, 2016; The Daily Star, 2016; The Guardian, 20156). In
Serbian media, similar events occur: the arrest of 13 people found smug-
gling illegal immigrants in Vranje in June 2015, the arrest of a theme park
owner suspected of keeping a slave for 4 years, the arrest of a group sus-
pected of forcing a 16 year old girl into prostitution, and the arrest of a
person suspected of selling a girl into forced marriage (Blic, 2013b;
Informer, 2013, 2014; Večernje novosti, 2015b).
Court Proceedings
This group includes trials and sentences for HT-related criminal acts. Articles
stemming from them also feature at least two events—those related to the
court (the trial, witness statements, sentencing), and those referring to the
actual HT-related crime (mentioning victims and/or circumstances of the
criminal act). The UK press reported on “‘Trafficked’ Briton to lodge drugs
death-sentence appeal” (Fearn, 2015), on the sentence of “14 years for
trucker who left 58 to die” (Leonard, 2001), and a sex trafficker “convicted
of rape, conspiracy to traffic and conspiracy to control prostitution” (The
Sun, 2015). Similarly, in the Serbian press, some of the numerous examples
6
Those news articles in which the author’s name was not given are referred to by virtue of
the publication.
66 N. MUŽDEKA
are: a criminal duo sentenced to 5 years in jail for trafficking a 19-year-old

girl, a Pakistani man sentenced to 3 years for HT in Serbia, a report from the
ongoing trial of a criminal group of 10 people suspected of trafficking a girl
(Danas, 2004b, 2015; Večernje novosti, 2004a) and so on.
Official Reports on HT

These articles usually summarize facts and figures related to HT for a
given period and country/region. The reports and studies are issued by
authorities and agencies either linked to the government or to NGOs. In
the UK press, articles were triggered, for example, by the publication of an
EU report on HT and a Home Office report on HT (Rankin, 2016; The
Times, 2007). The examples from the Serbian press include: a UN report
on organized crime in South-East Europe, ASTRA anti-trafficking organi-
zation’s report for 2010, and a US State Department report on HT (Blic,
2004; Pregled, 2011; Večernje novosti, 2007b).
Planned Responses to HT

These events are found in the announcements from the authorities regard-
ing their plans to respond to HT. The UK press reported, for example, on
“UK police [having been] deployed to Calais to tackle people-trafficking
gangs” (Smith, 2015), “Britain to send intelligence officers to Sicily to
‘disrupt’ human traffickers” (Watt, Travis, & Mason, 2015), and the
Home Secretary announcing “plans for a crackdown on trafficking gangs”
whilst also signing “the European Convention on Human Trafficking
which commits signatories to tackling the traffickers and helping victims”
(Harrison, 2007). Serbian media similarly published articles headlined
“Serbia to decisively fight HT” (Nedeljni telegraf, 2008) and “Battle strat-
egy to combat HT” (Politika, 2006) (in which government officials
expand on the proposed strategies), as well as the article on signing the
UN anti-trafficking protocol in 2004 (Danas, 2004a).
HT-Related Public Events

These include seminars, round tables, public lectures, film screenings, the-
atre performances, public campaigns, and similar events related to HT. In
UK newspapers, such was the article on the slavery summit held by
“Britain’s top confectionery companies” (Clark, 2001). Serbian print
media featured, for example, a conference on HT in South-East Europe, a

round table organized by an OSCE mission to Serbia, the Serbian
Department of Justice, and the Victimological Society of Serbia, an anti-
HT campaign launched by “Beosupport” (NGO), and a conference held
to publicize a Serbian film on HT (Danas, 2005; Glas javnosti, 2004a;
Politika, 2004; Pravda, 2010).
Personal Experience/Victim Targeting and Victim Profiling

The UK print media wrote as to “Five myths about child labour” (Kweifio-
Okai, 2015) to determine whether child labour occurs in rich countries,
and about “three women [having been] kept captive for 30 years” in
South London (Butler & Bowcott, 2013), revealing both the story of
victims’ discovery and their position prior to it. Serbian media feature
stories about recruiting victims (especially women and children) that both
highlight their personal experience and serve as a warning for those prone
to being trafficked.
Story: Framing and Manipulating the Fabula

As the middle of the three layers of the narrative, a story consists of mate-
rial “not different from that of either the text or the fabula”, but “looked
at from a certain, specific angle” (Bal, 2009, p. 91). To create the story,
the fabula is “treated” and manipulated through inscription of a particular
ideology (Bal, 2009, p. 92).7 In HT news texts, this “manipulation” of the
fabula most notably takes form through creation/highlighting of news
values8 and focalization. In media studies, such promoting of “issue priori-
tization” and increasing of “issue accessibility” is referred to as “agenda
setting” and “priming” (Johnson-Cartee, 2005, p. 25).9
7
Bal (2009, p. 92) treats “manipulation” and “manipulated”in their original meaning of
“handling, treatment, operation”.
8
In media studies, there is the question of the extent to which news values are intrinsic to
an event. While Galtung and Ruge (1965, p. 71) maintain that an event “either possesses
[news factors] or does not possess them”, discursive analysis focuses not on how an event is
selected as news, but how it is constructed as news (Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 43; original
emphasis).
9
Johnson-Cartee (2005, p. 17) identifies three aspects of every mass-communicated news
report’s influence: agenda setting, priming, and framing. While the first two aspects show
how news draw attention to some aspects of the story at the expense of others, framing
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Newsworthiness, or How to Make a Story Publishable

For Bal (2009, p. 91), the story is “the result of an ordering”. Similarly,
ordering or structuring is inherent in the process of creating a news story.
In structuring news, the relevant elements of the fabula are tested against
their newsworthiness—the list of criteria10 that contribute to the appeal of
the news story to general audiences and deem the news story as one worth
publishing. While it is true that various authors use different terms for
news values, and that the exact number of identified criteria varies (cf.
Brighton & Foy, 2007, pp. 7–11), common factors are: oddity, proximity,
timeliness, prominence, consonance, consequence, the number of those
affected, negativity, and human interest.
Oddity/Exceptional Quality
As a news value that determines how uncommon the event is, oddity “is
about establishing contrast with the expected” (Bednarek & Caple, 2017,
p. 66). The British news piece “Women for sale in Gatwick slave auctions”
(Taylor, 2007) emphasizes this news value in its very headline. Since this
value depends on the target audience and “their experience of the world”
(Bednarek & Caple, 2017, p. 66), an event may be construed as excep-
tional if it does not conform to stereotypes and statistical norms. This is
seen in the following Serbian news texts, which translate into: “The great-
est victims of HT are—construction workers!”, “Proletariat in greater
danger than sex workers”, “[A] victim is also of masculine gender”, “Men
increasingly becoming victims of HT”, and “Men are slaves too” (Dnevnik,
2014; Naše novine, 2014; Politika, 2009a, 2009b; Večernje novosti,
2007a). These texts indicate that the public expects typical victims of HT
to be women forced into prostitution; that men (or construction work-
ers/proletariat) are increasingly becoming victims of HT is unexpected.
An exaggerated aspect of this news value is shock value or scandal (cf.
Brighton & Foy, 2007, p. 8). This value is obvious in the UK example of
focuses on “how news content affects and influences news consumers” (Johnson-Cartee,
2005, p. 25) and are discussed under “Ideological positioning”. For a detailed overview of
agenda setting, priming and framing theories, see Johnson-Cartee (2005, pp. 17–31).
10
Bednarek and Caple (2012, p. 37), citing Bell (1991, pp. 180, 194, 320), refer to news
values as both “qualities” and “criteria”. For Bell (1991, p. 169), news values lead to “events
being framed in a particular way”. Analysing the process of creating and structuring news,
Galtung and Ruge (1981, p. 60) state that “events become news to the extent they satisfy”
the list of “conditions” known as news values.
the Gatwick slave auctions, since the text not only depicts HT as a form of
modern-day slavery, but also slavery happening out in the open, in a first-
world country. It is also blatantly emphasized in the following examples
from Serbian press: “A girl sold for a laptop and €100”, “A bride sold for
€1000”, and “A man sold his pregnant wife for €1500, then reported her
kidnapped” (Blic, 2013b; Press, 2012; Večernje novosti, 2015a). Not only
do these articles emphasize the unexpected behaviour, but also behaviour
that is generally unacceptable according to social norms. By specifying the
exact amount of money for which a human being is sold, the texts under-
line the shocking aspect of the event.
Proximity
According to Bednarek and Caple (2012, p. 42), what is newsworthy
“usually concerns the country, region or city in which the news is pub-
lished”. In addition to geographical nearness, which extends to include
neighbouring countries, proximity also refers to cultural closeness. Hence
most news stories on HT published in both UK and Serbian media refer
to events that occurred in these countries, or in countries perceived as
culturally close to these countries. The UK press, for example, featured a
story headlined “Scandal of the ‘slaves’ who pamper the nails of rich
New Yorkers” (Usborne, 2005). The fact that the same sort of situation
occurs in UK nail bars “employing” immigrant women also makes the
story relevant to a UK audience. There is also a story about a “Baby ‘sold’
for £6,500 and a BMW” (The Daily Mail, 2015), which took place in
France, a country geographically close to the UK. In Serbian media, there
has also been a marked interest in the events occurring in/linked to the
region of ex-Yugoslav countries and the Balkans (Croatia, Bosnia,
Montenegro, Kosovo), which all belong to the same HT route. However,
placing emphasis on the scandal or shock value is also enough to get a
story published even if it happened at distant locations. The UK press
featured the story of “A boy smuggled in a suitcase” (Badcock, 2015) tak-
ing place at the border between Morocco and the small Spanish territory
of Ceuta, North Africa. In Serbian media, the story headlined “Moldova,
the country of sex slavery” (Politika, 2007) claims that 10% of inhabitants
of Moldova are victims of HT, that 400,000 young Moldavian women are
victims of sex slavery, and that paedophiles from all over Europe fly in once
a week to satisfy their appetites with the government’s consent. The range
of shocking details is enough to make the story appealing to the Serbian
audience, although the factors of geographical and cultural proximity are
here missing.
70 N. MUŽDEKA
Timeliness
Similarly, events that are recent or “temporally relevant to the reader”
(Bednarek & Caple, 2012, p. 42), in line with general journalistic empha-
sis on a “24 hour news cycle”,11 have precedence. This is especially true for
what are known as hard news texts.12 Most texts published in both UK and
Serbian print media feature events that have only just happened (e.g.,
recent arrests, court hearings, and announcements).
Prominence
News stories that feature celebrities, politicians, or even particular nations
(perceived as geographically or culturally close to the relevant readership)
are considered newsworthy. This is evident in the example from the UK
press headlined “I was trafficked by Westminster abuse ring”: “Vulnerable
boys were trafficked from a children’s home before being abused by ‘very
powerful’ figures in a Westminster paedophile ring, a victim has claimed.
[…] Once in the capital, they were molested by politicians and other
Establishment figures…” (Marsden, 2015, my emphasis). In Serbian media,
a lot of public attention—not only in Serbia but in the whole ex-Yugoslav
region—went to a specific case of HT in which the Deputy Public
Prosecutor in Montenegro was arrested for trafficking women (see Danas,
2004c; Večernje novosti, 2004b).
Consonance
Consonance refers to “the extent to which aspects of a story fit in with
stereotypes” (Bednarek & Caple, 2012, p. 56) about a nation, region,
issue, person, and so on. This news value has been particularly emphasized
in Serbian media, where the majority of HT news reports up to 2005
aimed to reinforce the stereotypes of victims being sex-trafficked girls
from former Eastern bloc countries and Albanian nationals as traffickers.
In British media, texts about foreign traffickers confirm the stereotype that
HT is an imported problem caused by particular ethnic groups (e.g., traf-
fickers from Hungary in “Sex trafficker facing prison”, The Sun, 2015, or
Romanian gypsy traffickers in “Baby is ‘sold’ for £6,500 and a BMW”, The
Daily Mail, 2015).
11
Bednarek and Caple (2012, p. 20) define news cycle as “the time span between the
publication/broadcast of a newspaper or news programme and the next edition”.
12
Hard news are “news associated with importance, significance, immediacy and rele-
vance” (Zelizer & Allan, 2010, p. 53), as opposed to soft or human interest news “that are
not necessarily specific to a particular day, but provide background or a ‘human interest’
angle” (Fulton, 2005, p. 226).
Number/Consequence/Impact
Space in the news will be more readily given to those HT stories that
include/affect a considerable number of individuals, bear more conse-
quence and have greater impact than others. The UK article “348 held
over Canadian child porn” (The Daily Telegraph, 2013) tells the readers
that “More than 300 people including teachers and doctors have been
arrested worldwide on child pornography charges after a Canadian-led
investigation” (my emphasis). The newsworthiness is first created through
shock, emphasizing the contrast between the publicly perceived trustwor-
thiness of the professions of those arrested, and the criminal activity of
child pornography. The fact that the criminal activity was widespread adds
to the impact. Although in the following example voluntary migrant
movements do not constitute an act of HT per se, the sheer number of
people involved is what makes this UK story newsworthy: “Up to 700
migrants and refugees are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean
[…], making it the deadliest week this year […]” (Squires, 2016, my
emphasis). The UK article headlined “Domestic workers: 47 million peo-
ple worldwide denied basic labour rights” (Kelly & Scruton, 2015) also
emphasizes the vast number of people affected, while simultaneously
underlining the “worldwide” aspect of the case, and hence the universality
of its consequence and impact. The following examples from Serbian press
similarly emphasize the newsworthy value of “number”: “Nearly 200,000
women caught in trafficking network” and “700,000 people sold around
the world each year” (Danas, 2003; Glas javnosti, 2004b, my emphasis).
Negativity
In journalism, negativity is referred to as “the basic news value” (Bell,
1991, p. 156), since news stories “frequently concern ‘bad’ happenings”
(Bednarek & Caple, 2012, p. 57) such as conflicts, damage, or wars.
Construing the value of negativity proved to be easy in HT news stories in
both languages since most news texts on HT develop the conflict along
the line of criminals vs. the police force/judicial system. In the UK press,
such are the articles headlined “Britain to send intelligence officers to
Sicily to ‘disrupt’ human traffickers” (Watt et al. 2015), and “Reid out to
crush 21st-century slave trade” (Harrison, 2007). Also, the lead sentence
of the article on New York nail bars states that “Andrew Cuomo, the
Governor of New York, has ordered a crackdown on nail salons” (Usborne,
2005) in which “undocumented immigrant women” are treated as “slaves”
(my emphasis). The Serbian press features the following examples: “Serbia
72 N. MUŽDEKA
to decisively fight HT”, “Battle strategy to combat HT”, and “exterminate

modern slavery” (Kurir, 2012, my emphasis; Nedeljni telegraf, 2008;
Politika, 2006). The choice of the expressions used heightens the tension
created. However, the apparent conflict does not necessarily have to pro-
duce a negative effect, since the intended outcome of these actions (stop-
ping criminals/HT) is not negative.
Human Interest
Human interest or personalization is the aspect emphasized in those news
stories that “give a human face to the news” (Bednarek & Caple, 2012,
p. 44). As such, it is an aspect more common in soft news. See, for exam-
ple, a UK press article headlined “Persecution and poverty driving the
Gypsies of Romania to Britain” (Phillips, 2013). In Serbian media, such
an example comes from a text on trafficking of babies in China (Politika,
2009d)—although lacking in proximity, the Serbian media still considered
this story newsworthy because it presents a deeply touching issue with
which the audience can sympathize irrespective of the country in which
this audience lives.
Focalization, Characters and Stereotypes

As Bal (2009, p. 161) claims, whenever events are presented, they are
presented from a certain point of view, which implies the “subjective
nature of story-telling”, even in journalism. Instead of “point of view”,
Bal (2009, p. 162) uses the term “focalization”, because it allows her to
distinguish between “those who see and those who speak”.13 The analysis
of news texts on HT in both languages revealed that most news reports
were prompted by noteworthy events, such as court proceedings, arrests,
or government policy announcements. These events were commented on
by representatives of the government, police, judiciary system, and other
official establishments. Given that these commentators function as charac-
ters who see, that is, focalizers, focus is placed on the one-sided, “official”
point of view. Such focalizers in the UK texts are: “Detective Superintendent
Mark Ponting, of the Metropolitan Police”, “Commander Sue Wilkinson,
also of the Met”, “Anti-slavery Commissioner Kevin Hyland”, “Mr Justice
13
Bal (2009, p. 162) also acknowledges the following terms used in narrative theory to
denote point of view: narrative perspective, narrative situation, narrative viewpoint, and nar-
rative manner.
Alan Moses”, “prosecutor Karen Wiseman”, “Home Secretary John

Reid”, “representatives of Scotland Yard”, “officials who scanned a suit-
case at the border”, “the civil guard”, and “the Pope” (Badcock, 2015;
Leonard, 2001; Taylor, 2007; The Daily Mail, 2016; The Daily Star,
2008; The Daily Telegraph, 2015). As for the Serbian media, the focalizers
featured are: the “Minister of Economy Predrag Bubalo”, the “Minister of
the Interior Ivica Dačić”, the “national anti-trafficking coordinator”, and
the “United States Ambassador to Serbia Mary Warlick” (Dnevnik, 2009;
Kurir, 2012; Politika, 2006, 2009c). These characters need not be indi-
vidualized by their name, because it is their function that bears most rele-
vance. Although both the official perspective and the fact that the news
stories were prompted by establishment-related events might signal jour-
nalists’ intention to provide an objective framework for the interpretation
and analysis of the news stories, whether this objectivity is (or indeed, can
be)14 achieved is questionable. Favouring only one perspective signals par-
tiality and the exclusion of alternative perspectives and frameworks of
interpretation. My analysis thus contests the claim that, as “an autono-
mous sphere of social influence, which reports the facts honestly and even-
handedly to raise the consciousness of the audience and act as a force for
social good” (Stockwell, 1999), news media are placing emphasis on
objectivity.
Aside from focalizers, HT-related texts in both languages also feature
characters who do not provide perspective. In the above-mentioned UK
news texts, such characters are: “children forced into thieving”, “young-
sters who should be in school”, “trafficking gangs”, “organized criminals”,
“women being sold into prostitution”, “women openly sold outside a
café”, “28 illegals”, “evil lorry driver Perry Wacker”, “illegal Chinese immi-
grants”, “sex slave traffickers”, “an eight-year old Ivorian boy”, and “a
42-year-old man from Ivory Coast”. In Serbian texts, such characters are:
“Saša B. from Kačarevo”, “Mile M., a theme-park owner from Aleksinac”,
“a 16-year old girl”, and “B.M., a man from Novi Sad” (Informer, 2014;
Kurir, 2013; Press, 2012; Večernje novosti, 2015a). These individuals are
real people who have been turned into characters of a narrative and “attrib-
uted with social roles, personal qualities and actual utterances” (Fulton,
2005, p. 237). In the interpretation of a HT news story, they stand as rep-
resentatives of a social class, gender, or group (such as migrants, illegals,
vulnerable women, innocent children, cunning traffickers). This reading
14
For more on the impossibility of achieving objectivity, see Fulton, 2005, p. 231.
74 N. MUŽDEKA
within the suggested social, cultural, or political context produces stereo-

typical perception of participants in the HT process.15
Stereotyping of characters is especially prominent in those Serbian news
texts that focus on ethnification of victims and traffickers. Prior to 2005,
the ethnicity of HT victims and perpetrators identified in Serbian HT
news was predominantly foreign. The majority of identified HT victims
were women from Moldova, Bulgaria, Russia, and Ukraine, whereas the
traffickers were especially prominently identified if Albanians (see also
Dekić, 2003). This focus on the victims’ ethnic origin contributes to exist-
ing prejudices, such as the one that trafficked women are naive foreigners
from specific countries, and hence responsible for what befell them. This
kind of portrayal also promotes victim blaming. As a result, victims of HT
are stigmatized, marginalized, denied help and protection, and ultimately
deprived of basic human rights.
In this same period (prior to 2005), trafficking as a phenomenon was
rarely openly mentioned, obscuring the fact that HT occurs in Serbia and
indicating the lack of interest to provide a deep analysis of the issue. Writing
about her research into the Serbian news articles (printed from 1998 to
2001) related to women trafficking, Dekić (2003, p. 193) concludes that “an
attitude was therefore created in the public mind that trafficking in women
happens ‘somewhere else’”. The same conclusion applies to the impression
the media created in the period up to the year 2005. The year 2005 marks a
watershed in media representation of HT in Serbia, after which point the
majority of identified HT victims were Serbian nationals (in 2006–2007,
73.9% Serbian victims; in 2010, 95% Serbian victims—ASTRA, 2011).
Archetypes and Angles
In structuring a story—news stories included—event participants are con-
strued as characters in such a way that both the roles they are given to play
and the events themselves “fit in with archetypes of stories” (Bednarek &
Caple, 2012, p. 51). In this respect, in HT-related news stories in both
languages it is possible to identify the archetypes of heroes, villains, plight,
pursuit, rescue, crime, and punishment. Similarly, in media theory, Fulton
(2005, pp. 233–234) writes about “‘angles’ that determine the narrative
template” and “seem to be generic, almost universal, ways of ordering our
world”. In HT news stories in both languages, I identified the following
archetypes or angles of representing HT.
15
For more on characters as stereotypes in news narratives, see Fulton, 2005, p. 238.
Criminal Act/Act of Organized Crime Story

A
As the most frequent representation of HT in UK and Serbian print media,
this angle treats HT as just another criminal chronicle entry which is inter-
esting while it is current (i.e., “hot”) news. News texts in both languages
mostly focus on the issues of crime and punishment, presenting very lim-
ited information and lacking background information about, for example,
details of the illegal operation being run. In the UK press, such examples
include articles on a “Sex trafficker facing prison” (The Sun, 2015) in
which the readers are told only that the trafficker and his gang face jail “for
trafficking nearly 100 women to the UK to work in brothels” and the
article “Man seized for ‘slavery’”, stating that “Le, of Deptford, South
London, was arrested in Birmingham this week after an inquiry into
alleged cannabis production” (The People, 2016). It is also added that “Le
is also charged with arranging or facilitating the travel of another with a
view to exploitation”. However, no other information regarding the actual
crime of HT is provided. In the Serbian press, criminal acts are reported
by representatives of the police force, alleged perpetrators are identified by
their first name and first letter of the surname (or initials only), while the
victims are unnamed and identified by their age (Informer, 2014; Kurir,
2013; Press, 2012; Večernje novosti, 2015a).
In HT news in both languages there is no investigative approach to the
issue, nor an analysis of causes, consequences, or the full scale of the prob-
lem. It is reasonable to conclude that in some of the texts at least (e.g., in
the UK text on illegal immigrants on cannabis farms in the UK), a shift of
focus might change public perception, perhaps through including the per-
spective of HT as a crime against human rights. In Serbian media, some of
the questions that should have been more prominently analysed are, for
example, the adequacy of punishment for the perpetrators and the suit-
ability of laws under which they are prosecuted. The introduction of anti-
HT laws in Serbia, as a non-EU country, has been slow and, as a result,
anti-HT efforts are still marred by a very slow or inadequate implementa-
tion of the laws in the field.16 Texts that draw attention to the inadequacy
16
According to the Human Trafficking Manual for Journalists (issued by ASTRA—a
Serbian non-profit anti-HT organization, and OSCE Mission to Serbia), “the state authori-
ties of Serbia and Montenegro placed the problem of HT on the political agenda after the
change of political climate in 2000. The US State Department, in its 2001 Trafficking in
Persons Report, classified the Republic of Serbia into Tier 3, assessing that it did not fulfil
minimum standards in combating HT. One year later, Serbia passed into Tier 2. […] HT was
introduced as a criminal offence into the Criminal Law of Serbia—Article 111b—in April
76 N. MUŽDEKA
of laws and, subsequently, punishment, are rare and do not offer any
incentive for action, nor do they envisage any solution to the problem. If
provided, the answers to these questions might further illustrate the effi-
cacy of the anti-trafficking efforts, pinpoint the weak spots of the legisla-
tive foundation, and ultimately lead to its improvement.
Lucrative Business
A
Since the explicit mentioning of money is bound to raise interest and pro-
vide both shock value and impact value, this is an angle readily taken when
representing HT in the British and Serbian press. UK print news state that
“[p]eople are making a lot of money. In sexual exploitation, someone can
make 1 million pounds a year out of 10 women”, or that “One woman
could fetch between 6,000 and 8,000 pounds. She could then earn her
buyer 800 pounds a day” (Taylor, 2007; The Daily Telegraph, 2015). In
Serbian media, such information is placed in the headlines: “People traf-
fickers in Serbia earning millions of euros from prostitution”, “People
traffickers earn slightly less than drug lords”, “Jočić: HT fetches as much
as 13 billion dollars a year”, “60 billion euro per year in HT” (Blic, 2011;
Dnevnik, 2007; Glas javnosti, 2007; Press, 2009). Again, what is evident is
the problem of perspective—the focus is not on the victims, but on the
business aspect of the crime. Additionally, in Serbian media, HT is pre-
sented as a lucrative business with minimal risks due to the abovemen-
tioned gaps in the legal system.
Sensational News
The third angle taken with HT representation is that of the sensationalist
coverage of the issue. This is especially evident in Serbian media, in which
all the gory and scandalous details of women trafficking are emphasized,
as in the aforementioned cases of underage victims, victims trafficked by
the members of their family, or victims sold into prostitution for ridiculous
amounts of money and/or other material possessions. These articles also
focus on methods of coercion, underlining the brutality of these crimes
but also convincing the public that the women in question are indeed
2003. […] On 1 January 2006, the new Criminal Code of Serbia came into force. In Article
388, it introduced some novelties into the definition of human trafficking and new penal
provisions for this offence, distinguishing it clearly from people smuggling”. For more on the
legislative and institutional framework for tackling HT in Serbia in, see the Human
Trafficking Manual for Journalists (2008).
victims, as if otherwise they would not be believed, for various cultural

reasons. This is indicative of victims’ perceived position, credibility, and
ultimately their basic human rights. Similarly, the UK press featured an
article on a human traffickers’ camp (“the makeshift jail, made of bamboo
and barbed wire” “that may have held up to 300 people”) discovered in
the Malaysian jungle (Freeman, 2015). The camp was equipped with
cages that held prisoners, and the camping ground was scattered with
human remains, “including a jaw bone”. Although the torturing methods
of these human traffickers are repulsive and certainly draw attention to the
mechanisms used by the trafficking syndicates to force their victims into
submission, there is also no doubt that the newspaper article focuses on
the sensationalist approach in its choice of perspective and journalistic
angle. Foregrounding shocking aspects is a simplistic approach that pushes
the real causes of HT to the background.
Text and Narration
Text Structure
As Bednarek and Caple (2012, p. 96) posit, a typical news text consists of
three parts: headline, intro/lead, and body/lead development. The head-
line and intro/lead serve to “frame the event, summarize the story and
attract readers”, also construing newsworthiness (Bednarek & Caple,
2012, pp. 96–97).17 A good example of how the choice of headlines draws
attention to particular aspects of the event and implies ideological posi-
tioning is found in the Serbian corpus. On 26 March 2013, three newspa-
pers published stories regarding the same event, a 16-year-old girl being
forced into prostitution by the gang of four for one month (Blic, 2013a;
Informer, 2013; Kurir, 2013). All three headlines emphasize the force
used against the victim. Other than that, the journalists chose to empha-
size different aspects of this crime. In the articles headlined “They forced
a little girl into prostitution!” and “A child forced into prostitution!”,
both the act of forced prostitution and the age of the victim are high-
lighted, emphasising the story’s shock value. The sensationalist aspect in
both articles is further enhanced by the exclamation mark. One headline,
however, opts for disclosing the sex of the victim (“little girl”), while the
17
Bednarek and Caple (2012, p. 97) here also acknowledge the fact that the headline and
intro/lead are frequently seen as “one unit” called “abstract” or “nucleus”.
78 N. MUŽDEKA
other focuses on the fact that the victim was a child, not stating the sex,
thus removing any association with sexual activities (as completely incon-
ceivable for children in general) and implying the damage done to the
childhood innocence. The headline “A teenager force-solicited for a
month” presents the victim as significantly older (“a teenager”) and thus
the possibility of sexual activities is not automatically excluded for the vic-
tim, which might make the criminal act slightly less grave (or at least
slightly less shocking) in the eyes of the readership. The focus is, however,
placed on the length of the molestation period (“a month”). While the
previous two headlines are given in the passive voice, placing focus on the
victim and not the perpetrators, in the third headline the guilt of perpetra-
tors (and not the suffering of the victim) is stressed.
In standard journalism, events are not presented chronologically.
Instead, information about these events is ordered according to its sig-
nificance, following the inverted pyramid structure (Bednarek & Caple,
2012, p. 100; Fulton, 2005, p. 228): the news lead provides a summary
of the event, followed by crucial details and quotations, whereas the
least important details are placed at the end of the text. In this respect,
Meilby (1996, p. 254) distinguishes between four main groups of infor-
mation according to their dissemination: introduction (new, important
information), background (provides perspective for the information),
documentation (usually quotes), and filling (information that could be
left out). News stories on HT in both languages generally follow this
organizing principle, with one crucial exception—contextual informa-
tion, necessary to evaluate the news, is placed at the very end of the
story. One such example is found the UK text headlined “Children
forced into Oliver Twist thieving” (The Daily Telegraph, 2015), with the
following closing remark: “The Home Office estimated in December
that there were up to 13,000 victims in the UK, and Mr Hyland said
there were 151 convictions last year”. This final sentence, instead of
containing “filler” information, provides additional context for interpre-
tation (through contrasting the number of victims to the number of
convictions), and proves necessary for the intended meaning (implicitly
showing the lack of success when responding to HT). In the Serbian
article on “Men increasingly becoming victims of HT” (Politika, 2009b),
the text presents a study done by the Victimological Society of Serbia
and provides information on the number of male victims identified in
one year (407 victims in 2003). The closing remark emphasizes the lack
of a state registry of the male trafficking cases and of a support network

for the victims, while drawing attention to the misconstrued public
image of a typical trafficking victim as being female. The closing part of
the text, thus, provides a crucial insight into the problem and encour-
ages the wider definition of both HT and its victim profile.
Levels of Narration
Both UK and Serbian articles on HT typically feature two levels of narra-
tion: the frame/primary text (commonly a testimony, commentary, or
report made by a primary source of information) and the embedded text
(featuring the act of trafficking and/or criminal acts committed by the
trafficked people).18 A UK press example headlined “Girl ‘passed round
60 men in sex ring’” (Elsk, 2015) brings the report on a court hearing of
“eleven men on trial” accused of “multiple rape of a child under 13, child
prostitution” and other offences related to the crime. While the primary
text features a statement by “Oliver Saxby, QC, for the prosecution” (as
an official source) on the trial itself, the embedded text brings details of
the crime (the abuse of the child and her friend by 60 men in sex abuse
gang, the targeting, grooming, drugging and molestation details). Such
division on the level of narration mirrors the choice of focalization on the
level of the story, since the focalizers are “placed” within the primary text,
while the characters are positioned within the embedded text. In the
Serbian article about the sex trafficking of a teenage girl (Blic, 2013a), the
frame text features the police arrest of four people suspected of this crime
and a one-month custody they received at the initial court hearing. The
embedded text brings the story of the crime—the beatings, threats and
soliciting the victim had to endure. What this suggests about the text’s
ideological viewpoint is that the focus is on the consequences of the crime
and on those who have the power to deal with those consequences (the
police force, judicial system, government institutions), not on the roots of
the crime and the analysis of those circumstances that led to victims being
vulnerable in the first place.
18
Bal (2009, p. 73) refers to the primary text as “the narrator’s text” and to the embedded
text as “the actor’s text”, stating that their hierarchical position is indicated “by the funda-
mental principle of level”.
80 N. MUŽDEKA
Genre
McNair (1998, pp. 9–10) distinguishes between five basic forms of jour-
nalistic output: news report/fact report, feature article (equivalent to the
documentary; in-depth reportage/analysis), commentary/column
(authoritative viewpoint on an issue), interview, and editorial (a newspa-
per/periodical that “speaks out” in its “public voice”). The most fre-
quent, and indeed dominant, journalistic genre in articles on HT in both
languages is that of news report, which reduces the issue of HT to several
lines of fact-oriented announcements that do not portray HT in any
depth. The least frequently seen are pieces of investigative journalism that
would investigate factors leading to and governing the process of
HT. Some of these factors might include economic, political, and social
issues, such as: loss of jobs, poverty, existential crises, lack of laws, poor
implementation of the laws, violence against women, lack of human
rights, and general criminal activities and tendencies. On the other hand,
HT might be linked to region-specific events: wars, general instability,
foreign activities and influences, and forced or voluntary migration.
Investigation into these roots, however, is missing from the texts on HT
in both languages. This conclusion is in accordance with the general ten-
dency in standard journalism, which states that economic factors and mar-
ket forces direct the present-day journalism towards pure fact reports and
away from investigative journalism as a not so cost-efficient genre (cf.
Fulton, 2005, pp. 224–225).
Ideological Positioning
As Soderlund (2002, p. 441) indicates, news reports present “a site of
cultural production that operates according to institutional and profes-
sional rules and paradigms and within dominant political ideologies”.
While the previous aspects of analysis show the workings of these rules and
paradigms of the journalistic profession when creating news texts on HT,
and thus answer the question of how the intended meaning is created and
how, subsequently, the ideological position underlying such creation is
indicated, this section shows what this ideological position is and why it is
present in the first place.
McNair (1998, p. 5) maintains that there is no such thing as creating
news without making deliberate choices when selecting and contextual-
izing facts. Hence, reality is never simply reflected in the news accounts,
nor are journalists simply independent and objective recorders of events

(Bird & Dardenne 1988, p. 66; Johnson-Cartee, 2005, p. 157). Since
placing emphasis and creating focus implies a certain standpoint, the pro-
cess of news construction necessarily creates bias and promotes an agenda.
In questioning the agenda when creating a story we, as readers, are con-
ducting what Walter Fisher (1970, p. 131) refers to as a “motive analysis”.
According to him, an author always has a reason, or reasons, for putting
a narrative before an audience. These reasons, or motives, not only deter-
mine the content of the narrative, but also the manner of its construction
and delivery. The content is never devoid of “an attitude about that con-
tent” (Fisher, 1970, p. 132). Thus, every narrative “expresses a theme or
thesis, an inference of judgment, which is to be preferred above any
other proposition or proposal that relates to its subject matter” (Fisher,
1970, p. 131). In passing this judgement, “journalism, therefore, like
any other narrative which is the work of human agency” becomes “essen-
tially ideological—a communicative vehicle for the transmission to an
audience not just of facts but of the assumptions, beliefs and values of its
maker(s), drawn from and expressive of a particular world-view” (McNair,
1998, p. 6).
In news media texts in both languages, the framing of HT—as a social,
political, and public issue—prompts a particular response both on the part
of the public and that of governmental institutions. Framing of HT as a
criminal activity draws attention away from the economic, political, and
social roots of the problem and reduces a very complex issue to a simple
one that can be tackled through the application of a range of policing and
law enforcement measures. Writing about UN anti-trafficking policy in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vandenberg (2007, p. 92) questions the effect
this type of media coverage has on HT, envisaging increased policing as
the response to the rise in media coverage of trafficking activities.
According to her, aggressive policing might produce greater negative con-
sequences for the trafficked individuals than for the traffickers.
Ethnification of characters in reports on HT in both languages creates
a misguided impression that HT is an imported problem, legitimizes calls
for strict immigration laws, and creates tension between the domestic pop-
ulation and immigrants. Media prioritization of sex trafficking and women
trafficking over other types of trafficking promotes the gender aspect of
the problem and contributes to the further victimization of women and
forced sex workers, establishing a cause and effect link between prostitu-
tion and trafficking (Chang & Kim, 2007, p. 3). Additionally, it creates
82 N. MUŽDEKA
the need for strict anti-prostitution laws, which again diverts attention
from investigation into the broader phenomenon of trafficking and iden-
tification of “factors that facilitate trafficking, such as poverty, discrimina-
tion, and civil and political unrest” (Chang & Kim, 2007, p. 3) of certain
regions. Unlike the UK, which serves as a destination country, Serbia’s
role in human trafficking is currently three-fold: it serves as a country of
origin (mostly for women trafficked into Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia,
West Europe), a destination country, and a key transit country in the
Balkans (for victims trafficked into Italy, Spain, and France via Bosnia, or
to the Near East via Kosovo and Macedonia). Although Serbian news
media emphasize the need to investigate the factors that make victims,
especially women, vulnerable to traffickers, this investigation is missing
from the news texts. The issues such as poor economic situation (in the
post-Soviet and post-Eastern bloc countries), high tolerance of violence
against women, militarization of the regions, and great social and political
disturbance of the 1990s and 2000s, appear to be problems better left
untouched.
All the measures and actions devised or called for by the framing of HT
focus on its effects, not causes. In this way, in Kempadoo’s words (2005,
p. xiv), “neoliberal economic interests of corporations, multilateral agen-
cies, policy experts and national governments” remain protected, “rather
than those of the world’s working and poor people”.
Conclusion
The treatment of narrative elements and narrative structure determines
the focus of the news media texts. Most articles on HT, in both languages,
place the primary focus on arrests, court proceedings, and government
announcements, with a secondary focus on the act of trafficking itself. The
media’s reliance on official sources leads to bureaucratization of the news
on HT and necessarily implies the ideological position taken by news
agencies. Alternative points of view, such as those belonging to the aca-
demics or activists in the field, are either completely excluded or awarded
a far less prominent position. This minimizes the role and the influence
other sectors might have in producing legislative acts and public policies
relevant for dealing with HT and steers the public towards establishment-
provided viewpoints. Additionally, the media framing of HT and insis-
tence on the few chosen paradigms seriously obstructs the public
perception of the problem and limits both the interest and the influence
that more extensive public debate might provide. The public agenda on
HT shaped in this way by the print news media, both in UK and Serbia,
suggests strong inclination towards retaining the status quo of political
power relations and economic interests.
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CHAPTER 4
“In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing

Transnational Child Trafficking
in Contemporary Crime Fiction
Charlotte Beyer
Abstract This chapter investigates representations of transnational child

trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, focusing specifically on the
depiction of child trafficking and its victims. Beyer examines the role of
crime fiction in raising reader awareness of human trafficking and of the
child victims’ predicament and plight, considering didactic dimensions of
the genre and how it tends to erase victims in the aftermath of crime.
Through detailed examinations of representations of child trafficking and
its social and cultural contexts in selected post-2000 British and
Scandinavian crime fiction texts, the chapter argues that crime fiction can
be seen to engage explicitly in public and private debates around human
trafficking, and, through its popular outreach, has the potential to affect
popular perceptions of human trafficking and its victims.
Keywords Crime fiction • Educational • Gender • Narrative • Plot •

Transnational child trafficking • Trauma • Violence
C. Beyer (*)
University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham, UK
e-mail: cbeyer@glos.ac.uk

90 C. BEYER
Introduction: Exploring Representations of Child

Trafficking
Since the agreement of the Palermo Protocol in 2000, there has been an
increased interest in the topic of transnational human trafficking, particu-
larly in in the news media, but also in documentary programmes and crime
fiction (Gregoriou & Ras, 2018; Dearey, 2018).1 This growing awareness
of human trafficking has recently resulted in academic research into its
representation. Notably, in 2016, the Anti-Trafficking Review journal
devoted a special issue to the topic of “trafficking representations”.
However, while offering a number of articles examining the subject of the
representation of human trafficking, the Anti-Trafficking Review issue
included no examinations of crime fiction, or literary fiction. Similarly,
scholarly investigations of transnational child trafficking representations
are lacking, or considered together with adult female sex trafficking
(Moore & Goldberg, 2015). The neglect by critics of representations of
child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction is puzzling because the
genre offers thought-provoking and challenging depictions of different
forms of child trafficking in a popular and generally accessible medium.
This chapter aims to redress this absence by offering a critical examina-
tion of representations of transnational child trafficking (TCT) in post-
2000 British and Scandinavian crime fiction novels. The representation of
TCT in crime fiction (and literary fiction) has rarely received any sustained
critical attention (with the notable exceptions of Moore and Goldberg
(2015) and Bickford (2010, 2012). Importantly, therefore, this chapter
offers a critical assessment of these representations and their wider cultural
significance, by examining child trafficking narratives in selected crime fic-
tion novels. Crime fiction enjoys a wide readership, and the representa-
tions generated by these books can potentially have a significant impact on
public awareness of TCT. It is, therefore, pertinent to investigate portray-
als of TCT in crime fiction, in order to analyse and understand these fic-
tional representations and their effect, and to understand the social,
cultural, and literary contexts for those representations. Through a critical
analysis of depictions of TCT in crime fiction, this chapter identifies cli-
chéd narrative patterns that frequently occur in crime fiction treating the
subject of child trafficking, as well as tracing those representations that
offer more complex and nuanced portrayals of TCT victims, their agency,
resilience, and survival.
1
The title quotation is from Kaaberbøl and Friis (2008, 2011, p. 2).
“IN THE SUITCASE WAS A BOY”: REPRESENTING TRANSNATIONAL CHILD… 91
Methodology and Context
In this chapter I investigate representations of TCT in a selection of British
and Scandinavian crime fiction novels: Marnie Riches’ The Girl who Walked
in the Shadows (2016), Ruth Dugdall’s Nowhere Girl (2015), Lene
Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’ The Boy in the Suitcase (2008, 2011), Emelie
Schepp’s (2014, 2016) novel Marked for Life, and Minette Walters’ The
Cellar (2015). Additional references are made to other selected crime nov-
els offering relevant representations of TCT, where appropriate to the dis-
cussion and to offer context. The above listed novels were selected for
analysis due to the complex and nuanced representations of TCT they
offer. TCT is a global phenomenon, and a number of novels from America
and the Global South treat this subject, as well as the Western European
texts selected for analysis here (Bickford, 2010; Moore & Goldberg, 2015).
For the purposes of this present investigation, concentrating on TCT as a
theme in European crime fiction enables us to examine the (self-perceived)
role of Europe as the destination (Jacomella, 2010, p. 4) for migrants,
refugees, and trafficking victims, typically from the Global South but also
from former Eastern Bloc countries, and to assess how literature and popu-
lar culture convey the important questions relating to human security and
rights currently posed by human trafficking (Jonsson, 2009, p. 7).
In post-2000 crime fiction, representations of transnational sex trafficking
(rather than forced labour), reflect prevailing media attitudes (Gregoriou &
Ras, 2018; Muždeka, 2018; Moore & Goldberg, 2015). These stereotypes
of sex trafficking of women can be observed in crime novels such as Stuart
Neville, Stolen Souls (2011) and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with
Fire (2006, 2009) among others, reflecting Ruivo’s assertion that, “human
trafficking continues to be largely associated with sexual exploitation” (2015,
p. 22). However, the distinction between adult sex trafficking and child sex
trafficking is at times erased, both in fiction and by critics referring to traf-
ficked “women and girls” (Moore & Goldberg, 2015). Matt Johnson’s
Deadly Game (2017) exemplifies a portrayal of female sex trafficking where
the key female victim is a TCT victim, although this is not acknowledged
in the novel. Deadly Game states on the opening page that the female vic-
tim was 17 when she was trafficked, thus underage according to the
Palermo Protocol which states 18 as the age of consent and adulthood.2
2
The Palermo Protocol defines child trafficking as the “recruitment, transportation, trans-
fer, harbouring or receipt” of a child under the age of 18 for the purpose of exploitation; see
Protocol (2000).
92 C. BEYER
This conflation of women and underage girls is problematic in considering

representations of TCT, as it erases an important boundary regarding con-
sent. The popular fixation with sex trafficking themes can also be seen in
several other post-2000 crime fictions dealing with TCT plots, such as Liz
Mistry’s Unquiet Souls (2016) and Marnie Riches’ The Girl who Walked in
the Shadows. However, as the crime novels discussed in this chapter dem-
onstrate, children are trafficked for a variety of purposes, as Fussey and
Rawlinson also note: “Children are trafficked for diverse purposes, not
only for commercial sexual exploitation, such as prostitution and pornog-
raphy, but also servitude, forced labour, criminality, peonage and illicit
military recruitment” (2017, p. 16; Bulman, 2017a). While acknowledg-
ing child sex trafficking representations, my chapter seeks to expand the
investigation of TCT motifs, to include a range of other purposes, such as
organ trafficking, child soldiering, modern slavery, and domestic slavery.
This investigation of broader TCT themes assesses the impact of crime
fiction authors depicting a range of non-sexual trafficking crimes, thus
challenging a monolithic focus on sex trafficking.
TCT, the subject of my present investigation, requires particular atten-
tion, since as Pearce, Hynes, and Bovarnick state “the trafficking of chil-
dren and young people […] constitutes one of the most serious human
rights violations of our time” (2013, p. 2). The seriousness of human traf-
ficking is underlined by Ruivo, who describes it as an opportunistic crime
exploiting the weak and powerless: “Traffickers and recruiters take advan-
tage of the social and economic fragilities of countries, seeking their vic-
tims among those with financial difficulties in countries with high rates of
unemployment and poverty, as well as lower levels of education” (2015,
pp. 21–22). Yet the individuality and humanity of victims often appear to
be erased through stereotypical representations of human trafficking
(Gregoriou & Ras, 2018). However, the importance of rendering traffick-
ing victims visible is reflected in a 2017 feature in The Guardian. Under
the title, “Traffickers take all that makes you human: faces of modern
slavery”, Kelly and Hodal’s article (2017) uses photos of victims and their
personal stories and experiences of human trafficking to make its point.
The insistence on the humanity of trafficking victims is vital because it
counters the move towards erasure and anonymisation of victims and their
dignity otherwise seen in news media reportage on the subject (Gregoriou
& Ras, 2018). This chapter extends this preoccupation with the visibility
of trafficking victims, specifically children, by using crime fiction novels to
examine the politics of their representation.
Employing a range of critical perspectives to examine themes in crime

fiction of TCT, trauma, and victimhood specifically in relation to chil-
dren, my chapter contributes to an emerging critical field.3 In investigat-
ing the selected crime novels and assessing the politics of representation,
this chapter’s methodology is focused around three areas: identification
of types of TCT; crime fiction as a site for the representation of trauma
and victimhood; and uses of crime fiction subgenres and/or narrative
patterns. The purpose of this multi-faceted approach is to heighten
understanding of the power of linguistic and fictional representation in
creating complex representations of TCT, and to examine the role and
function of crime fiction in shaping and influencing readers’ under-
standing of TCT. The chapter draws on Fussey and Rawlinson’s (2017)
discussion of narrative patterns utilised to depict victimhood and agency
in popular discourses around child trafficking. My analysis focuses spe-
cifically on thematic and discursive constructions of TCT victims, con-
sidering how conventional narrative patterns of heroism, abduction, and
rescue are reflected, reproduced, or resisted in crime fiction novels, and
to what effect. Fussey and Rawlinson refer to Propp’s analysis of pat-
terns of heroic rescue in folktales to illustrate how such motifs dominate
representations of child victims in trafficking narratives (2017, p. 55).4
The critique of stereotypical representations of trafficking victims and
perpetrators by Kinney (2014), in her discussion of popular cultural
texts and their depiction of human trafficking, has proved useful for
analysing cultural responses to trafficking crimes. Other analyses of fic-
tional portrayals of human trafficking include Moore and Goldberg
(2015) and Bickford (2012). Cree, Clapton, and Smith examine repre-
sentation of TCT and sexual exploitation in the twenty-first century,
looking at the different kinds of exploitation children are subjected to
and their countries of origin, concluding that stereotypical representa-
tions of TCT tend to depict the children as without agency (2014,
p. 431). Such narrative patterns and positions are examined in the crime
fictions analysed here, in order to assess whether portrayals of TCT offer
stereotypical or alternative narratives and positions for victims, and how
these representations may contribute to readers’ and the wider public’s
knowledge of TCT.
3
See also Bickford (2012) for an examination of the relationship between narrative and
public perception of trafficking.
4
Fussey and Rawlinson refer to Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1968) [1928].
94 C. BEYER
My narrative analysis of the selected crime novels focuses specifically on

the representation of child victims of trafficking, their experiences of
trauma, and the literary language and techniques used to portray these
experiences. This chapter draws on Bloom for an understanding of what
constitutes trauma in children and how trauma manifests itself, and on
Dodd and Vickroy for analyses of strategies used in literature to depict
trauma. My investigation extends Dodd’s argument that “[c]rime fiction
opens up a space in which to depict more authentic and safe representa-
tions of traumatic experience to a willing and receptive audience” (2015,
p. 5). The discussion of trauma and victimhood reflects Fussey and
Rawlinson’s insight that views of TCT are defined or shaped by “Western
notions of innocence, guilt, childhood, and of the status of ‘deserving’
victim” (2017, p. 16). The narrative patterns, character portrayals, and
detailed depictions of trauma in the selected novels are vital to their repre-
sentation of TCT. I argue that these portrayals are integral to the genre’s
capacity to address the complexity of TCT to different audiences and
readerships who are not necessarily knowledgeable about human traffick-
ing, and to engender a sense of reader empathy for child victims of traf-
ficking. As Bickford argues, “These novels can generate empathy and
outrage, and they provide perspectives, information and analyses that can
lead to a commitment to make change” (2012, p. 134). I argue that the
depiction of child trauma plays a central role in conveying to the reader
the suffering caused by TCT, and confronting them with the high indi-
vidual and collective cost of this crime.
I draw on crime fiction criticism to underpin my identification of sub-
genres used in the crime novels under analysis. To that end, the crime
fiction criticism by Worthington (2011) and Brunsdale (2016) provides
genre-specific critiques of narrative elements and the use of subgenres in
crime fiction. Crime fiction subgenres play an important part in drawing
the reader’s focus to a particular dimension of the novel, such as narrative
perspective, psychological aspects, or the setting, thus framing and shap-
ing TCT representations. This analysis considers the social critique articu-
lated in these crime fictions, and the impact of the representations they
offer on the reader’s and general public’s understanding of human
trafficking, its causes, and its effects on victims. Brunsdale’s (2016) exami-
nation of trafficking themes in Scandinavian crime fiction provides context
for the Nordic Noir novels examined here. Worthington’s (2011) and
Bickford’s (2010, 2012) analyses are useful in assessing the didactic
dimensions of crime fiction, and reflecting on its capacity to affect readers’
awareness of and engagement with significant public issues such as human

trafficking. Crime fiction combines a narrative centred around generating
suspense and mental problem-solving with realistic and affecting portray-
als of crime and how crime impacts the individual and society, educating
readers and the wider public about human trafficking. However, crime
fiction novels may also struggle to reconcile a suspense-driven plot focused
on entertainment with a realistic portrayal of TCT and its victims through
the depiction of their trauma, and this is a question my chapter engages
with. Through this multi-faceted critical approach blending crime fiction
criticism with sociological and cultural analyses of human trafficking and
theories about trauma and its representation, my analysis engenders a spe-
cific focus on the politics of representation and the capacity of crime fic-
tion to create greater awareness of human trafficking, particularly TCT.
Child Sex Trafficking

Riches’ The Girl who Walked in the Shadows (2016)5 primarily portrays
transnational child sex trafficking and child abduction, but also alludes to
historical child sex trafficking crimes. Set in Britain, Germany, and Holland,
Girl uses its British and European settings to represent complex contem-
porary Western European societies characterised by inequality, social ten-
sion, violence and brutality, and opportunistic crime. The novel’s black
female investigator character, Dr George McKenzie, is also an academic.6
George is a research fellow in Criminology at Cambridge University but
also carries out work for the Home Office (Riches, 2016, Part 1, Chap. 4),
and is asked to assist the Dutch police with profiling a murderer. This leads
to George’s involvement in the investigation of the disappearance of two
young children, kidnapped from their parents’ back garden. Their search
uncovers a TCT ring where which acquires young children from Roma
camps, who they then sell for sexual abuse, slave labour, and organ
trafficking (Riches, 2016, Part 3, Chap. 45). Girl’s trafficking plot is split
into two separate storylines, a duality that reflects apparent contradictions
in fictional representations of child trafficking based around perceptions of
class and ethnicity. One plotline concerns the kidnapping of children from
a socially privileged family. The other plotline concerns the organised
5
From here on referred to as Girl.
6
Riches’ use of a BAME protagonist connects with her own background which she
describes as “minority ethnic” (Diamond, 2016).
96 C. BEYER
transnational trafficking of a large number of children from Eastern

Europe, primarily for sexual exploitation. Girl also depicts historic domes-
tic child sex trafficking of children in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in
Northern England, through George’s research into the subject (Riches,
2016, Part 1, Chap. 2).7 These descriptions of historic and contemporary
child sex trafficking in Europe, both transnational and domestic, reflect
current media debates and their focus on sexual exploitation.8
The TCT plotline in Girl focuses primarily on the trafficking and
exploitation of Roma children. The novel incorporates a discussion
between George and another researcher, Sophie, about the trafficking of
Roma children, explaining that the stereotypes and media representations
surrounding the Roma, which hold them responsible for child abductions
and trafficking, are far removed from the reality, which is that Roma chil-
dren from south Eastern Europe are the most frequent victims of traffick-
ing (Riches, 2016, Part 1, Chap. 9). Sophie explains to George that:
the kids trafficked out of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania
and Slovakia, Roma kids constitute about seventy per cent. They’re dispro-
portionately poor. Maybe someone trusted in the family or village offers to
get a child work elsewhere. […] movement of children over borders into
brothels, sweatshops, begging on the streets. (Riches, 2016, Part 1, Chap. 9)
Explaining the context to Girl’s portrayal of this subject, Fussey and

Rawlinson state,
The Romani people […] face a compounded victimisation: as collective ‘col-

lateral damage’ of the economic and social insecurity that has accompanied
neoliberal policies especially as exacerbated by the global economic crisis,
and additionally as direct victims of the growing levels of poverty that have
resulted from the crisis. (2017, p. 12)
Girl’s representation of current debates around TCT, and its examina-

tion of stereotypes and misconceptions surrounding the Roma as both
victims and perpetrators of crime, particularly trafficking, form an impor-
tant part of the novel’s attempt to raise reader awareness of TCT.
7
These representations reflect media reports on domestic trafficking of vulnerable girls in
northern England; see Perraudin (2016).
8
For other portrayals of children transnationally trafficked for sexual abuse purposes, see
Craig (2012) and Mistry (2016).
Girl is mainly preoccupied with transnational child sex trafficking; how-

ever, the text gives a realistic depiction of TCT without sensationalising
the sexual aspect, in contrast to some crime novels featuring TCT plot-
lines, such as Craig’s Buckingham Palace Blues which seems to exaggerate
the crime for shock effect, by having a young abused trafficked girl ask a
police man “‘We fuck now?’” (Craig, 2012, p. 13). Girl is less sensational-
ist in its description of the traumatic effect on TCT victims of the sexual
abuse they are subjected to (Riches, 2016, Part 1, Chap. 16). Riches’
subtly harrowing portrayal of a distressed young, trafficked boy demon-
strating to police the sexual abuse he was subjected to through the use of
dolls, rather than through verbal evidence, reflects Bloom’s recognition
that “[s]ince a child’s capacity for verbalization is just developing, their
ability to put their traumatic experience into words is particularly difficult”
(1999, p. 6). Through such descriptions, Girl demonstrates that language
barriers for transnationally trafficked young children serve as an additional
obstacle to adequately addressing and treating the victim’s trauma. The
novel draws a parallel between reports of TCT in the news media, and the
reality encountered by its detective characters, describing one place where
trafficked children are held as, “the basement of a semi-derelict Berlin
townhouse where the stuff of nightmarish news reports was reality”
(Riches, 2016, Part 3, Chap. 44). Alluding to media-demonised male pae-
dophiles from Britain and Europe, Girl maintains the link established
throughout the novel between masculinity, TCT and sexual abuse:
No Joseph Fritzl or Fred West had stood guard, yet this situation had
seemed so far worse to Piet: missing children, at the mercy of not one psy-
chopath but an entire network of traffickers and abusers that saw young lives
only as commodities to be exploited and monetised. (Riches, 2016, Part 3,
Chap. 44)
Breaking down the boundary between fiction and reality in its references
to vilified and infamous real-life child abusers, Girl suggests not only that
media reports shape public perceptions of human trafficking, but, some-
what problematically, that these representations are reflective of the reality
of TCT.
Girl’s complicated TCT plot reflects the point made by Conradi that
“[t]rafficking in children is abetted by a number of political, economic
and social factors” (2013, p. 1211), outlining the complex factors that
result in parents selling their children to traffickers, and individuals
98 C. BEYER
abducting children for personal gain (2013, p. 1211). In contrast, the
novel’s other child trafficking plot, the abduction of two children from an
affluent family, draws on a less common form of child trafficking, accord-
ing to Rogers (2012). The focus in Girl on young children as victims of
child sex trafficking reflects the news media focus on youth (Gregoriou &
Ras, 2018), to some extent perpetuating established stereotypes about
TCT, and echoing the idea of ‘moral panic’ in relation to TCT discussed
by Cree et al. (2014). Through its use of British and European settings,
the novel portrays TCT as an international crime involving organisations
and gangs led by stereotypical ruthless and brutal traffickers (a feature also
commented on by Moore & Goldberg, 2015, p. 21). Girl reflects the
point made by Fussey and Rawlinson that “trafficking of children for sex-
ual exploitation is very much part of the ‘headline space’ occupied by sex
trafficking” (2017, p. 45). The novel occupies this “headline space” in its
preoccupation with sex trafficking; however, its somewhat cluttered plot-
line prevents the reader from gaining a deeper, more nuanced understand-
ing of child trafficking and the experiences of victims, or how to break the
cycle of TCT.
Harraga and Domestic Noir

Dugdall’s Nowhere Girl (2015) uses the crime fiction subgenre of domestic
noir9 to portray trafficking of girls and young females from the Global
South by means of harraga to Western European homes for purposes of
forced labour and sexual exploitation (Dunning, n.d.). Set in Luxemburg
and Algeria, the novel also depicts the disappearance in Luxemburg of Ellie,
a 16-year-old British girl, whose mother has arranged for her to be kid-
napped at a funfair to teach her a lesson (Dugdall, 2015, p. 246), and the
efforts by ex-probation officer Cate Atkins to find the girl. The novel is told
through multiple narrative perspectives, including those of the trafficked
girls. Nowhere Girl portrays the pervasiveness of child trafficking and the
invisibility of modern slavery in everyday life, using the child kidnapping
plotline alongside a depiction of TCT and modern slavery. Both plotlines
explore the role of parents and families in child trafficking (May, 2016).
9
Crouch (2013) on domestic noir: “it takes place primarily in homes and workplaces,
concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience […] and takes as its
base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes danger-
ous prospect for its inhabitants.”
Dugdall’s portrayal reflects recent attention to human trafficking in

Luxemburg. In a 2017 report, the President of the consulting commission
on human rights called for greater awareness of the prevalence of human
trafficking in the country, stating the country needs “awareness-raising
about the types of human trafficking that exist among the wider public,
hospital staff, social offices and teachers” (Bauldry, 2017).
The TCT plot in Nowhere Girl is based around the phenomenon of
harraga, a term used to describe illegal immigrants from North Africa
who have burned their personal documents in order to prevent identifica-
tion by European authorities, “literally burn[ing] down social, cultural
and familial identities” (Beneduce, 2008, p. 513; Abderrezak, 2016,
p. 68). Dugdall’s detailed depiction of the issue of harraga, and the social,
cultural, and religious factors that give rise to it, makes the representation
of human trafficking authentic and historically and culturally accurate.
Her research into harraga goes beyond a superficial or sensationalised
treatment and adds an important realistic dimension. Nowhere Girl por-
trays harraga through the depiction of the TCT of a young teenage girl,
Amina, from her home in a poor Algerian village to Luxemburg. Through
Amina’s story, the reader learns about the cultural and religious problems
that impact on families and communities in the Global South, leading to
harraga. Amina’s family is torn apart by religious conflict and patriarchal
dominance, leading to her mother sending her daughter away to
improve her life chances and to give her an education (Dugdall, 2015,
pp. 26–27).10 Amina is trafficked by a local Algerian man called “Uncle
Jak”, who lives in Europe but returns to the village twice a year with his
truck to take children away (i.e., to traffick them), under the auspices of
offering them a better life (Dugdall, 2015, pp. 28–29). The novel
describes the financial and human cost for the family of deciding to send
Amina to Europe: “The cost of harraga had been great. Omi had sold the
vineyard […] It was their only asset, sold secretly and quickly” (Dugdall,
2015, p. 79). The book also follows a 19-year-old woman called Jodie,
who has also used harraga to travel to Europe with Amina, but who ends
up being forced into prostitution. The novel’s title, “Nowhere Girl”,
alludes to the invisibility of the trafficked girls from the police and authori-
ties. Their existence without identity papers through harraga, enforced by
10
Fox (2016) discusses the impact of religious intolerance, among a number of other fac-
tors, affecting what she calls “constructions of society and education.” (pp. 57–58). See also
Manian (2010).
100 C. BEYER
trafficking, reflects a social division between those who are visible, and
those who are not, that is, those who are “nowhere”. By exploring the
TCT victim’s experience through Amina’s perspective, Nowhere Girl ren-
ders visible the emotional and physical trauma experienced by victims. The
treatment of TCT in Dugdall is well-contextualised, and the novel makes
an important contribution to knowledge for readers and researchers of
crime fiction, in its examination of harraga, and its effects and
implications.
Amina and Jodie’s trafficking narratives draw on stereotypical modes of
female exploitation, such as nail bar work and sexual abuse (Pearce et al.,
2013, p. 31).11 Although both girls live together with an Algerian family
in Luxemburg, descriptions of their living conditions clearly signal their
slave status within the family. They are forbidden to go out, their sleeping
arrangements are poor, the door to their dingy bedroom is locked from
the outside, they are both given drugs every day (Dugdall, 2015, p. 138)
and they are deprived of agency.12 Amina is made to work in a nail bar,
whereas Jodie is exploited sexually (Dugdall, 2015, p. 159). Damaged by
sexual exploitation, Jodie later breaks down and tells Amina:
They didn’t bring us here to help us better ourselves. We are here to be used
up, our beauty and our bodies […] Harraga is a factory, and we girls are
what it produces. But we are broken goods, and I am the first to break.
When I am all used up, you will be next. (Dugdall, 2015, p. 227)
This critique of harraga and the illusion that it can lead to a better life,
instead resulting in exploitation and slavery of trafficked females, is impor-
tant in the novel’s critical examination of TCT. Rather than offer freedom
and opportunity in Europe, harraga seals the females’ fate as powerless
victims, “nowhere girls”.
Nowhere Girl offers only a partial resolution of its trafficking plot.
Whereas the novel provides rescue and a closure for the kidnapped white
Western European Ellie, the two female trafficking victims from the Global
South, Jodie and Amina, are abandoned in the plot with only a perfunc-
tory rescue. The TCT victim, Amina, is left at a hospital in the care of the
family that enslaved her, and Jodie is promised “a place to stay and an
11
See also Craig (2012) and Mistry (2016) for representation of TCT for sexual exploita-
tion purposes.
12
See also Gangmasters (n.d.), “Spot the Signs”.
allowance” (Dugdall, 2015, p. 254). No further mention is made of how

the authorities might assist them in their recovery from trauma, or whether
they will be reunited with their families. Nor is there a sense of acknowl-
edgement that Amina is a child and therefore extremely vulnerable, simply
left with the family who have previously exploited her. Nowhere Girl
reflects the failure of crime fiction to portray what happens “after”—the
crime is solved and order is restored, but at the expense of the victim
whose story fades into insignificance. This silence mirrors real-life TCT
cases, as reported by Bulman who states that, in Britain, “child slavery
victims are deprived of specialised support, pushing them back into abuse”
(2017b).
Organ Trafficking
Danish authors Kaaberbøl and Friis’ The Boy in the Suitcase (2008, 2011)13
focuses on various forms of TCT, including organ harvesting, illegal adop-
tion, and sex trafficking.14 Boy depicts human trafficking as a social and
cultural problem that affects individuals and families profoundly, and pro-
motes a nuanced portrayal of TCT through a multiple character perspec-
tive.15 Set in Denmark, Lithuania, and Eastern Europe, the novel uses its
organ trafficking plot to expose the exploitation of former Eastern Bloc
countries and their resources by the West following the fall of the Berlin
Wall (Stewart, 2016; see also Meyer, 2006). Boy follows Nina, the female
investigator character and Red Cross nurse in a contemporary Danish
society marked by social division, crime, and conflict. Through its quest
motif and narrative structure, Boy creates a complex portrayal of TCT,
reflecting how “a growing number of distinguished Danish crime novels
are now exposing social issues like immigration-related tensions, drug
usage, organized crime, human trafficking, and disruptions of family life,
all symptoms of social disorder” (Brunsdale, 2016, “Denmark”). The
problems in the Danish welfare society, including human trafficking, are
explicitly referred to in the novel through Nina’s response to the apathy of
her fellow Danes: “if only she would let herself believe what no one else
13
From here on referred to as Boy.
14
See also McGilloway’s (2013) representation of child trafficking for illegal adoption
purposes.
15
In Invisible Murder (2010; 2012), Kaaberbøl and Friis treat the subject of the trafficking
of dangerous substances and Roma adults and children.
102 C. BEYER
seemed to have any trouble believing: that Denmark was a safe haven for
the broken human lives that washed up on its shores” (Kaaberbøl & Friis,
2011, p. 204). This social-realist critique engenders a compelling analysis
of TCT but falls back on narrative patterns of heroic rescue and innocent
victims which are often reproduced in TCT narratives, according to Fussey
and Rawlinson (2017, p. 52).
Boy educates readers about the anguish and human suffering caused by
TCT. This novel also features an abduction plot, alongside descriptions of
other forms of exploitation such as female sex trafficking. Boy portrays a
Lithuanian single mother Sigita, whose three-year-old son Mikas is taken
from her at a playground. She later wakes up in hospital, having been
drugged and beaten up by Mikas’ kidnappers. Sigita traces Mikas to
Denmark, by tracking down accomplices in the TCT ring, and travels
there to reclaim her son. Meanwhile, Nina is given a key by an acquain-
tance to a locker at Copenhagen train station, where she finds Mikas alive
inside a suitcase in the locker. The title of Boy alludes to the mode of trans-
portation used in the novel for TCT, anticipating a TCT case from 2015,
in which an eight-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast was trafficked to
Spain inside a suitcase (Kassam, 2015). Boy’s story follows her quest to
discover the little boy’s identity, while being hunted by Jucas, the traf-
ficker who kidnapped Mikas, as well as Sigita. Jucas’ mission is to bring the
boy he has trafficked to a wealthy Danish couple whose adopted son is
suffering from kidney failure and urgently needs a compatible transplant in
exchange for a large sum of money. Mikas is compatible, because the sick
boy is his older brother, illegally adopted at birth in Lithuania by the
Danish couple when Sigita was only fifteen. Boy’s organ trafficking plot
thus revolves around a critique of the acquisition of organs for the privi-
leged wealthy in Western Europe through criminal means such as TCT
from former Eastern Bloc countries such as Lithuania (Stewart, 2016).
Mikas’ mother Sigita is the focus in the narrative for an exploration of
maternal affect and the mother without her child (Hansen, 1997).16 The
novel’s inclusion of the portrayal of a mother whose child has been
trafficked, allows for an examination of an area of trafficking commonly
absent from debates and representations around this crime—namely
maternal experience. Boy’s representation of the mother’s abjection
16
Dugdall’s Nowhere Girl also includes maternal perspectives in its trafficking narrative, in
the form of confessional-tone letters written to Ellie, the kidnapped daughter from Bridget,
the guilt-ridden mother who arranged it.
encourages the reader to empathise with the mother and her loss and con-
front the trafficked child’s trauma.17 Including these important yet fre-
quently omitted dimensions contributes to Boy’s nuanced representation
of TCT. Boy describes Mikas’ traumatised behaviour, screaming uncon-
trollably and urinating on the floor with fear (Kaaberbøl & Friis, 2011,
pp. 225–257), reflecting what Bloom calls “engraving of trauma”: “When
we are overwhelmed with fear, we lose the capacity for speech, we lose the
capacity to put words to our experience” (1999, p. 5). This depiction and
other portrayals in the novel of Mikas give the reader an insight into the
harmful effects of trauma on trafficked children, through Boy’s realistic
portrayals of traumatised behaviours and responses.18 The significance of
this type of depiction is highlighted by Vickroy who commends, “the
capacity of trauma in literature to engage the reader’s empathy by closely
examining the personal and community contexts of trauma and its psycho-
logical ramifications” (2014, p. 148). As part of the novel’s complex rep-
resentation of TCT, the reader also learns about Jucas, the novel’s brutal
trafficker whose character reflects the stereotypically thuggish trafficking
villain described by Moore and Goldberg (2015, p. 21). Having been
sexually abused in an orphanage (Kaaberbøl & Friis, 2011, p. 265), Jucas,
in turn, brutalises others, as his reflections on torturing his victims reveal
(Kaaberbøl & Friis, 2011, p. 157). Jucas’ view of Mikas that, “the kid was
currency” (Kaaberbøl & Friis, 2011, p. 208) further demonstrates how
children are objectified and commodified through TCT trafficking.
Boy depicts how Nina is affected in her personal and professional life by
her demanding and often harrowing work with refugees and human traf-
ficking victims. Her reflections on the difficulties of her work serve the
purpose of educating the reader regarding human trafficking, as she
considers TCT, and the brutality of the people behind it, as well as the
indifference of the general population: “the real beauty of it all for the
cynical exploiters was that ordinary people didn’t care” (Kaaberbøl &
Friis, p. 213). Nina’s work gives her an awareness of the ways in which
children are exploited and abused, such as children forced by traffickers to
beg and steal, sold by parents, instructed to escape from refugee centres
and authorities (Kaaberbøl & Friis, 2011, p. 214). Like Girl and Nowhere
Girl, Boy portrays the impact of social inequality on individual victims
17
See Hansen’s (1997) examination of maternal loss of children.
18
See Rafferty (2008) on the emotional and psychological damage caused to trafficked
children.
104 C. BEYER
vulnerable to opportunistic crime, but also shows how traffickers may

themselves be impacted on by these environments and acting out of eco-
nomic necessity. Boy’s quest-driven rescue narrative resolves its TCT plot
by returning Mikas to his mother; however, both Sigita and Mikas are
dropped from the story following his return. Boy’s quest narrative is con-
structed around central questions of identity and belonging: the quest to
discover the identity of the little boy and to keep him safe from traffickers,
to reunite him with his mother and return him to where he belongs.
These are narrative resolutions with which readers can identify emotion-
ally; but although this affective dimension is important, it cannot mask
the gap in Boy’s trafficking narrative: the question of what happens to the
TCT victim and his family after the rescue and what support (if any) they
receive.
Child Soldiers and Victims

Swedish author Schepp’s (2016) novel Marked for Life19 uses crime fiction
subgenres, such as the psychological novel and the police procedural,20 to
investigate the issue of child soldiers: children who have been trafficked
transnationally and forcibly trained to fight, often being exposed to, and
suffering the effects from, extreme violence (Child Recruitment and Use,
n.d.). The theme of child soldiering is unusual in crime fiction, and
Schepp’s treatment of the theme makes her novel stand out from the other
crime texts discussed earlier, and their predominant focus on child sex traf-
ficking or individual child abductions. Commenting on child soldiering,
Tiefenbrun states that: “The use and abduction of child soldiers is an
international crime and a heinous human rights violation that is caught in
the intersection of four different but related areas of the law: children’s
rights, slavery, human trafficking, and exploitative child labor” (2007,
p. 434). Child soldiers tend to be recruited in areas of armed conflict
involving warlords, such as Africa and Asia (Mapp, 2010, p. 72); however,
Schepp’s novel transposes this particular TCT crime into a Swedish setting
19
From here on referred to as Marked.
20
The psychological crime novel focuses on inner dimensions, exploring the thoughts and
reflections of characters, including experiences of, and responses to, trauma. The police pro-
cedural depicts the workings of a police force in their crime solving efforts, focusing on
individual police characters as well as on their team work. See also Worthington (2011).
in order to examine its devastating effect on individuals, families, and

communities.
Set in Sweden, Marked opens with the murder of the head of the migra-
tion board, an event that forces together the two main threads in the nar-
rative, namely the use of child soldiers and the female protagonist, public
prosecutor Jana Berzelius. It transpires during the police investigation that
the aforementioned murder was committed by a child soldier who is later
found dead. Marked uses the interspersed harrowing flashbacks of a young
girl who is being trafficked from Chile with her parents inside a container
alongside a number of other families, having been promised a bright
future in Europe (Schepp, 2016, p. 22). However, the girl’s graphic mem-
ories of the scene reveal that all the adults in the container are killed on
arrival by the traffickers, and the children taken away, beaten, drugged,
and forcibly trained to become child soldiers. The girl is renamed Ker by
the traffickers as part of a brutal training regime which involves getting her
addicted to drugs and forcing her to fight the other children to the death.
Making child soldiers dependent on hard drugs is a strategy for control, as
Tiefenbrun points out (2007, p. 478). The trafficker, whom Ker only
knows as “the man with the scar”, carves the children’s soldier names into
their necks, to establish their new identities which he controls (Schepp,
2016, p. 89). Only later does the reader make the connection between
Jana and Ker, the girl who has been trafficked and is being exploited as a
child soldier, through the description of the characteristic scar on Jana’s
neck, a strategy which also assists the reader in understanding Jana’s
trauma. Jana’s recurring nightmares and violent responses reflect Vickroy’s
assertion that “[f]iction that depicts trauma incorporates varied responses
and survival behaviours within the characterization of survivors” (2014,
p. 130). Through the character of Jana/Ker, Marked engenders the read-
er’s engagement with the trauma suffered by trafficked child soldiers and
reconsideration of their assumptions about children and innocence (see
also Fussey & Rawlinson, 2017).
Through her realist portrayal, Schepp calls attention to the brutal strat-
egies used to transform a child into a slave and a soldier, themes which she
states are common to Nordic Noir (Zander, 2016). As in Boy, Schepp’s
focus on TCT reflects a trend in Scandinavian crime fiction to investigate
controversial topics, reflecting a critical awareness of social and cultural
failings such as “crime and terrorism; domestic violence; drug and alcohol
abuse; human trafficking; local and international gang activity” (Brunsdale,
2016, “Introduction”). Schepp has spoken in a “Shots: Crime and Thriller
106 C. BEYER
Ezine” feature about human trafficking and child soldiering, stating that
“this actually happens in Sweden today […] Adults and children disappear,
are kidnapped, are taken away and are forced into a life of prostitution or
slavery. Human traffickers profit on people in peril” (Schepp, n.d.). Child
soldiering has been associated mainly with African and Middle Eastern
countries in recent decades (Mapp, 2010, p. 69); however, Schepp’s use of
this form of human trafficking in a Swedish context raises reader awareness
and draws attention to the global impact of child soldiering.
By depicting the brutalisation of Jana/Ker during her combat training,
and the life-long damaging impact on her as an adult, Marked examines
the emotional and psychological trauma experienced by child soldiers.
These problems are also discussed by Tiefenbrun who states that child
soldiers “feel guilty because they have survived […] The children have lost
their autonomy and self-control” (2007, p. 478). As an adult, Jana remains
haunted by memories and sounds which return to torment her in her
dreams. She wants to unlock the trauma but cannot find the key:
She had experienced the same dream for as long as she could remember. It
was always the same images. It irritated her that she didn’t understand what
the dream meant. She had turned, twisted and analyzed all the symbols each
time she fell victim to it. (Schepp, 2016, p. 46)
These descriptions echo Vickroy’s explanation of the strategies used in

fiction to represent traumatised individuals: “Through familiar literary
elements trauma fiction creates constructs of that experience with proto-
typically imagined situations and symptoms, metaphoric dreams, death
imagery, and narrative styles that mimic such experience, for example,
fragmented thoughts, dissociative outlook, de-contextualized visualiza-
tion, etc.”(2014, p. 138) When Jana sees a dead boy (a child soldier) bear-
ing evidence of brutal physical abuse, with a name carved into his neck
similar to hers, her recognition of the sign and extreme reaction reflect the
severity of the trauma she has suffered, “the ground began to rock beneath
her feet. She gripped the edge of the table with both hands so as not to
fall” (Schepp, 2016, p. 135). This and other descriptions of Jana’s trauma
allow the reader to understand the affective impact of TCT and to recog-
nise it as a crime against the individual child. At the end of the novel, Jana
confronts Papa, the man with the scar who trafficked her and brutalised
her. In a bid to maintain his control over her, he tells her that she was just
an “illegal kid”, “meaningless” (Schepp, 2016, p. 359), and explains that
“In many countries there are young people who are deliberately recruited,
trained and used in armed forces. I do the same here” (Schepp, 2016,
pp. 361–362). Although the novel does not bring a resolution for Jana, it
illustrates in graphic ways the horrors of child soldiering, and the ruthless-
ness of those involved in TCT, but also the incredible resilience and cour-
age of children who have survived severe trauma.
Walters’ The Cellar (2015) specifically uses the trafficked child’s per-
spective to explore the harrowing effects of TCT, forced labour, and sex-
ual abuse, and the violent feelings and responses this abuse may generate
in the victim. In Walters’ novel, the female protagonist Muna has been
fraudulently obtained from a Nigerian orphanage at age 8 by the Songolis,
an African family who then trafficked her to Britain. Here, they keep her
as a domestic slave, locked away, subjected to physical punishment and
beatings, and sexual abuse by the father of the family. The dark cellar, in
which she is imprisoned at night, also the site of her sexual abuse, becomes
a symbolic space marking the invisibility and silence of the trafficking vic-
tim.21 The novel depicts how Muna, now aged 14, starts avenging herself
on the Songoli family, whose members disappear one by one. The Cellar
problematises the focus in the conventional trafficking narrative on rescue,
in its rejection of a happy ending and restoration of normality for the child
victim. Instead, Walters’ represents TCT as an invisible scourge that
undermines the family unit and haunts affluent Western societies. The
Cellar uses the motif of captivity as a central motif, with the cellar itself as
a symbol of that captivity and the trauma inflicted through TCT. Drawing
on the psychological thriller and domestic noir, The Cellar places the patri-
archal family at the heart of its TCT portrayal, interrogating its damaging
power dynamics and resulting taboo feelings of rage in the child victim.
This novel provides a clear example of how, as Vickroy states, “[f]iction
provides readers with a wealth of thick description of the conditions and
characteristics of traumatic experience” (2014, p. 137). Muna’s rage
transforms the cellar, from a space where she was abused, to the locus for
her deadly revenge. However, her rage is also symptomatic of a trauma-
tised child’s cry for help, echoing Caruth’s assertion regarding trauma
that: “It is this plea by an other who is asking to be seen and heard, this
call by which the other commands us to awaken” (1996, p. 9). As in
Marked, these compelling but appalling representations of trafficked girls,
This text is discussed in more detail in Gregoriou and Beyer, 2019.

21
108 C. BEYER
their rage and capacity for extreme violence illustrate with perhaps the
greatest clarity the devastation caused by trafficking. Even in crime fiction,
a genre driven by representations of violence and transgression, these
shocking portrayals make for difficult reading.
Works like those by Schepp, Walters, and Dugdall appear to be the
exception in the growing body of popular literature portraying human
trafficking, in their sustained narrative focus on the trafficked child’s expe-
rience and trauma. In crime fiction generally, victims are seldom given the
main voice and narrative perspective, and this silence or absence contrib-
utes to the stereotypical construction of victimhood as devoid of agency.
Such narrative erasure extends to representations of human trafficking and
its victims, where specifically children’s perspectives tend to be absent
from fictional depictions of this crime. However, in the novels by Schepp,
Walters, and Dugdall, it is the victims’ characters and stories that are the
most compelling and emotionally engaging aspects of the crime plot.
Their TCT narratives are not determined by ideas of innocence or rescue,
but instead by individual self-preservation and courage. By foregrounding
TCT characters within the narratives and giving these victims presence
and agency within the stories, these novels contribute to producing a
more nuanced picture of trafficking and victimhood, one which seeks to
challenge stereotypes, but also conveys the victim’s feelings of violence,
desire for revenge, and hatred.
Conclusion: The Politics of Representing TCT

in Crime Fiction
The representation in crime fiction of TCT, the child victims and their
families, has rarely received critical attention as a subject in its own right.
This oversight detracts from the way in which literature contributes to
current debates around the relationship between Western Europe, the for-
mer Eastern Bloc and the Global South, which are played out in human
trafficking narratives. However, as we have seen, crime fiction novels
feature complex storylines about TCT, some of which present child vic-
tims at the centre of the narrative. Using a range of thematic and textual
means, the texts examined in this chapter explore the cultural narratives
that dominate how readers perceive children, and the foundational texts
with their patterns of heroic rescue which tend to dominate their portrayal,
and contribute to affecting and shaping contemporary cultural, social, and
political responses to TCT (Fussey & Rawlinson, 2017, p. 55). These
crime novels here thus implicitly or explicitly engage in public and private
debates around human trafficking (Dugdall; Kaaberbøl & Friis; Schepp;
Walters), and contribute vitally to a wider understanding of academic
research into human trafficking (Riches) (see also Bickford, 2012).
Through its popular outreach, crime fiction thus has the potential to affect
popular perceptions of human trafficking.
Assessing the gender political dimensions of the TCT portrayal in the
novels examined, we have seen that certain stereotypes prevail, and that
these are particularly pronounced in the portrayal of traffickers. Human traf-
fickers tended to be male, particularly when their actions were associated
with violence and brutality, whereas females typically played an accomplice
role, but were rarely in charge of trafficking operations (Riches; Dugdall;
Kaaberbøl & Friis; Schepp). This conventional gender role distribution can
also be observed in representations of trafficking victims in popular culture
which concentrate on female sex trafficking, thereby “oversimplify[ing]
dynamics of trafficking and global migration, [and] recreat[ing] damaging
stereotypes about victims” (Kinney, 2014, p. 104). In the novels examined
here, the child victims portrayed are of both genders, suggesting that where
TCT depiction in crime fiction is concerned, gender roles are less stereotypi-
cally conceived than in media reportage, for example, which tends to focus
on adult (although young) female victims of sex trafficking (Gregoriou &
Ras, 2018). Likewise, the theme of the family features prominently in the
plot of several of these crime fictions, reflecting a preoccupation with the
theme of identity, but also drawing attention to the complex role family
plays in TCT. Cree et al. argue that, “contemporary trafficking stories high-
light the uncaring parents who sell children into servitude and the cruel
‘people traffickers’ who exploit them financially and sexually” (2014,
p. 431). The crime fictions discussed here problematise the role and agency
of parents in TCT, especially Dugdall; Kaaberbøl and Friis, raising questions
surrounding responsibility and neglect which are key to constructions of
gender and parenting (see also Moore & Goldberg, 2015, pp. 22–23).
The narrative patterns and moral themes utilised in crime fiction high-
light the already heightened and exaggerated stereotypes often at play in
cultural and media representations of human trafficking. These stereo-
types frequently form part of the TCT narrative which, according to Cree
et al., is often construed as:
a morality tale of ‘goodies’ (the innocent child victims) […], ‘baddies’ (the
cruel perpetrators, often portrayed as ‘foreigners’) and ‘saviours’ (the police
110 C. BEYER
officers, social workers, politicians, and NGO workers who bring this issue
to the public’s attention and ‘save’ children from harm. (Cree et al., 2014,
p. 429, also cited in Fussey and Rawlinson, 2017, p. 54)
According to Fussey and Rawlinson, such narratives result in TCT crimes

“occup[ying] headlines and print space” (2017, p. 54), which, however,
do not result in “prosecutions and criminal justice interventions” (2016,
p. 45). As stereotypical representations of trafficked children are perpetu-
ated through the dominant narrative of rescue which reinforce trafficking
clichés, these representations do not address the cycle of trafficking or
fundamentally change how victims are seen. Crime fiction texts rarely tell
the story of what happens to victims after the rescue. This erasure from
trafficking narratives of the aftermath of crime and the victim’s experience
extends to real life, too, as Bulman explains: “Victims of slavery and human
trafficking ‘abandoned’ as soon as they are identified. Trafficked victims
who escape sexual exploitation and domestic servitude face ‘sharp cliff
edge’ as no provisions are systematically put in place to assist their recov-
ery” (2017a; Bokhari, 2008). However, in terms of narrative function, the
crime fictions examined here attempt at least a partial restoration of order
and justice for victims, a central purpose of the genre. Along with suspense
and problem-solving, these are narrative elements that appeal to readers
and enable them to cope with the otherwise bleak representations of vio-
lence and harm in TCT.
This chapter has argued that crime fiction has the capacity to put a
human face to TCT, through nuanced portrayals created through political
use of literary language and form, thus underlining the significance of lit-
erary representation. As Nestingen states, contemporary crime fiction
presents “stories [that] use crime to engage with debates over individual-
ism, collective claims, and the status of national homogeneity, gender, and
transnational relations” (2008, p. 14). Ruivo reminds us that trafficking
victims are already marginalised or disregarded within their societies,
because of their gender, age, social status, and lack of authority (2015,
p. 22). The power and influence of representation is undeniable, as
Andrijasevic and Mai (2016) state, particularly when it comes to “under-
standing the historical, cultural and political specificity of the figure of the
[trafficking] victim”. Crime fiction authors are responding to the pressing
call for more authentic representations of TCT, a call echoed by Gregoriou
and Ras (2018) in relation to media representations of human trafficking,
and for more efforts to be made in order to support victims. Through its
compelling representations and insistence on their presence, crime fiction

plays an significant role in negating the invisibility and abandonment of
TCT victims.
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CHAPTER 5
Who are the Traffickers? A Cultural

Criminological Analysis of Traffickers
as Represented in the Al Jazeera
Documentary Series Modern Slavery:
A Twenty-first Century Evil
Melissa Dearey
Abstract The aim of this chapter is to analyse and interrogate the identi-
ties of ‘traffickers’ as represented within a series of television documenta-
ries on modern slavery. The chapter data set is a series of seven 25-minute
documentaries entitled Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil
(2011) produced by Al Jazeera. Sections on trafficker identities and the
usage of the term ‘trafficker’ within the different typologies represented in
the documentary series are shown, that is, bridal, charcoal, prison, sex,
food, child, bonded slavery/trafficking. These are represented within a
complex geocultural televisual gaze (Al Jazeera English) upon the global
north/west as ultimately the source of the slavery problem.
Keywords Cultural criminology • Documentary • Human trafficking •

Modern slavery • Popular criminology • Trafficker • True crime
M. Dearey (*)
University of Hull, Hull, UK
e-mail: m.dearey@hull.ac.uk

118 M. DEAREY
Introduction
The misery and abjection of human trafficking (henceforth HT) from the
perspective of the victims has been, and continues to be, recognised and
well documented in contemporary media representations of HT/modern
slavery. This focus upon victims in this context is entirely justified for ethi-
cal, humanitarian, historical, economic, political, cultural, and legal-
judicial reasons, and this is undisputed in this chapter. However, with a
view to a better understanding and response to the plight of victims of
HT, recently attention has begun to shift to those who traffic and/or
enslave other human beings—commonly and henceforth referred to spe-
cifically in the context of human trafficking as ‘traffickers’ or more generi-
cally as ‘perpetrators’ (e.g., Gotch, 2016; Shen, 2016). Despite the
slippages and complexities of the meanings of these two terms (also dis-
cussed in this book’s Chap. 1), HT/modern slavery as an ontological-
historical concept, global market activity, and also cultural-narrative trope
is becoming more prominent and recognisable among audiences in the
public sphere, not least as the result of the numerous fictional, factual, and
hybrid ‘factional’ (Leishman & Mason, 2004) representations of it in the
social and broadcast media and in the press.
The broader exposure of this and other forms of transnational organ-
ised crime1 in the public sphere as a form of crime on the increase has
contributed to its rise as a concern for law enforcement, politicians, and
policy makers. Hence HT has also become a concern for criminology,
whether from cultural, empirical, or policy making perspectives. As media
representations of HT develop and expand, public interest and curiosity
about it and what it is are invigorated. The market demand is for more,
newer, and more revealing presentations of these narratives for the pur-
poses of exposé or consumption, whether for information, public service,
or entertainment, or a combination of these. As the criminologist and law
professor Philip Rawlings (1998) argues, despite criminology’s dismissive
attitudes toward what he labels ‘popular criminological’ texts in the ‘true
crime’ genre, these texts do shape public awareness and comprehension of
crime and criminality, and subsequently impact governmental, legal, and
1
‘Transnational organised crime’ (or TOC) is itself a relatively new and in many ways also
problematic term that has emerged into the public and global policy-making spheres in
recent decades. With its ‘apocalyptic’ overtones in official and media discourses (Edwards &
Gill, 2003, p, 1) it requires careful examination with respect to the processes of definition
and its evolution from earlier designations of what came to be known as ‘organised crime’.
WHO ARE THE TRAFFICKERS? A CULTURAL CRIMINOLOGICAL ANALYSIS… 119
security responses. It is justified for criminologists, therefore, to take such

cultural narrative representations of crime more seriously as worthy datas-
ets for analysis, not least to enhance the less than optimal status and influ-
ence of this discipline in the political and public spheres:
Social historians have long recognised the value of popular crime literature
in their work (Linebaugh 2006; Rawlings 1998); might there be some-
thing for academic criminologists too? Most important of all, it is popular
writing about crime and criminals (fiction as well as fact) that has the
greatest impact on people’s understanding of crime and on criminal justice
policy: Home Secretaries and their Shadows have never been noted for
their interest in the views of academic criminologists (Rawlings, 1998:
online).
Increasingly, attention is turning from victim accounts of HT to the

traffickers themselves, in order to open new narrative and conceptual
spaces for understanding and storytelling, and to shed light on their
motives and the types of people they are in the representation of this type
of crime. This chapter focuses upon the representation within HT narra-
tives of trafficker identities in a particular television documentary series,
namely Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil (Al Jazeera, 2011,
hereafter referred to as S21) as an example of ‘true crime’ or ‘popular
criminology’ that portrays the identities and practices of traffickers. The
chapter begins with a consideration of the methodological issues involved
in conducting such a cultural criminological analysis of this dataset, com-
paring and relating my analysis and findings to other recent academic
research articles focusing on trafficker identities in popular cultural and/
or popular criminological media texts. I then turn my attention to the
definitions and narrative representations of traffickers in S21, analysing the
differences and similarities between the narrative representations of traf-
fickers in this documentary series that focus upon various types of HT. I
find that the definition and identification of the ‘trafficker’ and where and
how they operate in the international sphere are unclear, ambivalent, and
unstable. The deployment and determination of the role or label ‘traf-
ficker’ is significantly dependent upon the type of HT being discussed, the
(perceived generic) gender and sexualities of the main population of vic-
tims, and the ethnic, racial, class, and national characteristics of those
involved. The legal-judicial and cultural predisposition toward the indi-
vidual (as opposed to collective groups) in isolating and exposing traffickers
120 M. DEAREY
as inherently ‘evil’ also complicates and obfuscates the agencies (in both
senses of the word to designate actors and institutions) involved in the
trafficking of human beings. Programmes like S21 demonstrate how
changes to global governance and market economics that enable and exac-
erbate transnational organised crime as a distinctively modern form of evil
HT taken together with the ordinary everyday discourses of victims and
the prominence of presenter voices can affect the definition and assign-
ment of the label ‘trafficker’. While I concentrate my analysis on the seven
episodes of S21, I will briefly compare my findings to ‘trafficker’ represen-
tations in a more recent Al Jazeera documentary Britain’s Modern Slave
Trade (Al Jazeera, 2016).
Methodology
The primary dataset for this chapter is comprised of the 2011 Al Jazeera
produced documentary series S21, and secondarily the single episode doc-
umentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade (Al Jazeera, 2016). Like all texts
examined in this book, the series was produced after the ratification of the
2000 Trafficking Protocol, commonly known as the Palermo Protocol. All
book contributors recognise the salience of this statute, which provides a
historical-political focus for each of our constituent contributions to the
project and to this volume.
The broadcasting organisation Al Jazeera, also known as JSC or AJ, is a
Doha-based state-funded broadcaster owned by the Al Jazeera Media
Network. Founded in Qatar in 1996, Al Jazeera English was established in
2006. According to the report published in the widely respected journal
The Economist (2017) attributed to the unnamed ‘Cairo Correspondent’,
the emergence of Al Jazeera in the wake of the jettisoning of the ‘irritat-
ingly truthful’ BBC Arabic language service from the Saudi operated satel-
lite provided jobs for the previously BBC journalists, which the author
accounts for the steeping of Al Jazeera investigative journalism in the early
years at least in BBC culture and practice. However, with the growing
conflict and political instability in the region, The Economist journalist
indicates that this has changed, with AJ becoming more of a propaganda
tool used to criticise Saudi Arabia and its allies, including the United
Kingdom, the European Union and the United States of America. With
respect to their factual documentary programming, AJ have and continue
to operate something of an industry in the production of documentaries
on modern slavery and HT focusing on the so called ‘destination countries’
of the global west and north, and this is indeed reflected in the direction
of its criticisms toward the USA, Europe and the UK in S21.
All seven episodes of S21 are presented by the Somali born former BBC
presenter Rageh Omaar and was originally broadcast in 2011, at the height
of the so called ‘Arab Spring’. In 2016, the tenth anniversary of AJ English,
the broadcaster produced and broadcast Britain’s Modern Slave Trade
(2016) focusing on the UK as a destination country and its role in the
international sex, forced labour, and drugs trades. Reference to this other
Al Jazeera documentaries will be considered alongside those presented in
S21, but S21 will be the predominant dataset and analytic focus of this
chapter. As a dataset, this presents an interesting and previously over-
looked perspective on these televisual ‘true crime’ or popular criminology
narrative representations from the global south-east to north-west. This
adds further dimensionality to the analysis and understanding of geopoliti-
cal and cultural discourses in the contemporary political, economic, and
public and media spheres, as such geo-political semiotics become increas-
ingly fractured, indeterminate, and unstable. How narrative representa-
tions are fashioned from the complex, fast-paced, and contradictory
elements of HT in a global multi-media environment poses important
questions in the shaping of public and policy knowledge of this and other
forms of (trans)national organised crime. Who gets to say what, how, and
why, about ‘traffickers’, and how this influences the construction and
development of ‘true crime’ narratives are issues that will be addressed in
light of this analysis in this chapter.
I next turn to the ontological frameworks and concepts with respect to
narrative representations of human traffickers. As those responsible for
causing harm to others (i.e., their victims), it is overwhelmingly individuals
who are most commonly and primarily portrayed as ‘traffickers’ within con-
ventional narrative representations of HT in media, although there is also
evidence that the distinction between individuals and collective agencies
when it comes to HT is breaking down (as exemplified in the later docu-
mentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade). The focus in S21 on traffickers as
individuals is consistent with the philosophical and onto-theological ‘theo-
dicy’ type conceptualisation of narratives of evil. HT is represented in the
title of S21 as a ‘twenty-first century evil’, and this reflects a strong trend in
modern philosophy with its focus on the construction of narrative based on
the attribution of blame, guilt, and punishment to individual actors or
agents who are deemed to be responsible moral agents for the suffering
caused to victims (Dearey, 2014; Ricoeur & Pelauer, 1985). This rationalist
122 M. DEAREY
modelling of the problem of evil renders good/evil and victims/perpetrators

in a very dichotomous, oppositional, and ‘black and white’ way. This model
has provided a template for the modern Western criminal justice system in
the global north-west that endures to this day (Dearey, 2014). As is shown
in documentaries like S21, such ontologies do not fit well with the lived
realities of HT, nor do they (always) capture the evil, agency, or identities
of traffickers, the suffering of the victims, or the fuller meanings of victim’s
discursive frameworks in describing their experiences of HT.
But the failure of ‘fit’ between theory and practice is not the only fault
of traditional theodicy-type ontologies to HT. It is this almost myopic
focus upon offenders from the rational-objectivist gaze of the state as
adjudicators within the Western criminal justice system solely empowered
to deal legitimately with crime. This has historically accounted for the de
facto derogation or sideling of the victim from the judicial process, and
also the disregard for the emotional dimensions and other more local
impacts of crime. While the term ‘victim’ can be traced back to ancient
times, and while victims have been the subject of criminological study
since the 1920s and the era of the Chicago School, it was not until the
1950s that the social scientific study of victims—victimology—was for-
mally established as a subfield of criminology, and even then, not until the
1970s that the needs and concerns of victims began to be taken seriously
and to be catered for within the criminal justice system (Dussich, undated)
and their voices prioritised in international law (Engdahl, 2002). Since the
1970s, the profile of the victim has dramatically risen in prominence, from
the perspectives of popular and cultural representations of crime particu-
larly, a substantive cultural shift that has fuelled many changes to legal-
judicial discourses and practices. This swinging of the pendulum, if you
will, to the focus upon the victim could be an unintentional contributing
factor to why the identities of traffickers have been until recently some-
what less prominent in popular cultural representations of HT in true
crime/documentary formats and fiction, all of which tend to highlight
victims’ experiences and testimonies. But even so, within victim testimo-
nies such as those presented in S21, emerge potent diegetic2 narratives of
those they charge with responsibility for their victimisation—their traffick-
ers. It is primarily from these testimonies featured in S21, and also p
resenter
voiceover narratives, from which the data on traffickers are recovered.
2
Diegesis is a form of narrative whereby characters comment upon and portray the
thoughts and actions of other characters in their own stories or speech.
Previous Research
This analysis seeks to build upon a small corpus of similarly qualitative and
interpretive analytic research of narrative representations of HT in popular
cultural media. Two prominent recent examples are articles by Nicolas de
Villiers (2016) and Sine Plambech (2016). In his study, de Villiers com-
bines a feminist psychoanalytic film theory and theories of affect to decon-
struct and critique a popular television miniseries and film documentary
Human Trafficking (Lifetime Television, 2005). In his research, de Villiers
identifies what he calls the ‘hegemony of victimhood’, that is, the ubiquity
of the figure of the victim in these narratives that I alluded to in the previ-
ous section. To this he adds the significance of emotions and the body,
particularly the ‘affect of abolitionists’ (de Villiers, 2016, p. 161) with
reference to the strong emotional appeals by anti-prostitution campaign-
ers in the construction of the televisual narrative series he analyses.
According to de Villiers, these factors converge most prominently in the
narrative conflation of women with HT victims—reflective of their con-
comitant lack of agency, and reliance upon a convergence of axial tropes
relating to ‘innocence’, purity, exploitation, and the nationalist mythology
of ‘white slavery’. Though de Villiers considers HT solely within the
European context, the white slavery narrative/mythology in popular cul-
tural and media narrative representations of HT extends beyond Europe
(see Namias, 1992). In her article, Plambech (2016) notes the prevalence
of such ‘one dimensional’, distorted, and/or misleading dichotomised
tropes that are foundational to many popular HT narratives of sex traffick-
ing, exploring the reasons behind production decision-making processes
in constructing these narratives, and the possibilities for breaking out of
these reified tropes.
Building upon these analyses, in the next section, I interrogate how
trafficker identities are defined and presented in S21, and how these defini-
tions and representations differ not so much based on the identities or
characteristics of the traffickers themselves (though these display some
consistent regularities) but rather on what type of HT is being discussed
in relation to the predominant gender of the victims. These differences
within a television documentary series offer significant insights into the
underlying presumptions and prevailing attitudes influencing current
conceptualisations of HT generally, codified in the representation of traf-
fickers. While my approach is similarly and intrinsically qualitative, in pay-
ing attention to the number of times and the narrative contexts in which
124 M. DEAREY
the term ‘trafficker’ is used within and between the different episodes of
S21, this analysis should be read alongside the more quantitative content
analysis of use of terminologies in journalistic discourses about HT
included in this volume.
Stigma and Deviance in S21

The term ‘trafficker’ is of relatively recent provenance, even newer than
the also relatively current neologisms ‘human trafficking’ and ‘modern
slavery’. Though all of these phenomena are probably as old as human
society itself, these terms are increasingly represented in the public sphere,
in the media, and in academic and law enforcement arenas. But what do
these terms mean, and how are they being used? How is the usage of a
term like ‘trafficker’ within a television documentary series shaping under-
standings of this term, and wider perceptions of who human traffickers
are? Do traffickers differ in their narrative construction and characterisa-
tion relative to the type of HT being presented, and if so, how, and why?
The definition of ‘trafficker’ is far from clear, but how it is delineated
within these documentaries in terms of how it is represented and used (or
not) within HT narratives in the various episodes of S21 is the focus of this
section. As will be shown, the meanings and usages of this term are differ-
ent in the context of different types of HT and in different (inter)national
contexts. These differences appear to relate substantially to the gendering
of the victims of HT, and also to the alignment of these forms of HT to
other predominant or secondary ideological frames of HT as a form of
modern slavery, which reference to discourses such as those of ‘business’,
‘industry’, ‘natural disaster’, ‘state power’, ‘religious intolerance’, ‘love,
marriage, and family life’, and/or ‘political dissent’.
Those involved in HT are being referred to as ‘traffickers’ or more
generically as ‘perpetrators’ (e.g., Gotch, 2016; Shen, 2016). While the
word ‘perpetrator’ is being used by some academics as a synonym or alter-
native word for ‘trafficker’, it is worth noting that neither are terms that
are widely used in academic criminology, at least not in the UK.
‘Perpetrator’ is a word that is commonplace in many police procedural and
true crime narratives—and has even been shortened to ‘perp’ in slang par-
lance in many popular television series—possibly more colloquially used
by law enforcement officers and/or popular cultural representations of
police procedural programmes in the USA. However, it is not a term that
is formally or commonly used in criminology or law, which tend to use
other terms like ‘offender’, ‘suspect’ or even ‘criminal’. The use of slang
terms, ‘street’ language, criminal/drug/gang terminologies or ‘true
crime’ nomenclature in popular narrative representations of crime is sig-
nificant here, as demonstrated in the popularity of the critically acclaimed
HBO television series The Wire (2002–2008) in its representation of
another type of (trans)national organised crime: the trade in illegal drugs.
One of the most seminal and ground-breaking features of this series was
the representation of the narrative in the vernacular dialogue of its charac-
ters, with an emphasis on the argot of (mainly) young black males and
their communities and the language of ‘the street’. This in turn led to the
demand for audiences to learn and become conversant in these terms and
discourses and the subsequent provision of numerous online and media
dictionaries and glossaries to help viewers to understand what they were
saying, with the expectation that this would reveal who the characters
were, what they were doing and why, and that this provided audiences
with real insights into crime and criminality in the illegal drugs trade. The
effect was to give audiences a palpable sense that with this new language
‘skill’ that they had acquired came a new and informed knowledge and
understanding of crime and also society, because they could ‘speak’ the
lingo and understand the ‘perps’ on ‘the street’ and in the ‘hoods’. Even
if viewers had never seen or (knowingly) come into contact with an illicit
Class A drug, addict, dealer, vice cop, or been to a housing project, even
if they were not young, male, or black, they felt as if they knew the ‘score’
where any of these actors, agents, or their habitats or daily lives were con-
cerned. This has been, and continues to be, an important and potent ele-
ment of true crime and crime procedural fiction and ‘faction’ in terms of
generating what are perceived by audiences to be meaningful narrative
representations of crime. The use of language in these narratives conveys
a real and abiding sense of knowledge about crime in the sense of how it
happens, where, what the motivations are, who the criminals and victims
are, and how they should be dealt with in the criminal justice system, pri-
marily through how they talk, their vernacular functioning as a potent
simulacrum for what is ‘real’. Hence it is vital from the start to adopt a
reflexive critical awareness with respect to the usage of language, images,
sounds, and a constellation of different terminologies and tropes, and to
pay attention to how and where these are derived and deployed within
and between different expert and popular criminological epistemologies
such as a true crime or factual television documentary. It is noteworthy
here that in S21, the terms ‘perpetrator’, ‘criminal’, and ‘offender’ are not
126 M. DEAREY
tilised by the programme makers as synonyms for ‘trafficker’. Neither are

u
the older terms ‘slaveholder’ or ‘slaver’ used, which is perhaps surprising,
given the audio-visual tropes linking HT to transatlantic slavery embed-
ded in the series. ‘Trafficker’ is used, but only in certain types of HT, and
also only by certain speakers in specific contexts: most prominently, by the
series presenter in voiceovers.
However, those who traffic human beings are certainly talked about,
most authoritatively by their victims, and also by the traffickers themselves,
the presenter, lawyers, and NGO workers—even if they don’t use these
words to identify them. I turn now to the terms used by those featured in
S21 to describe those who traffic human beings, or ‘traffickers’, and anal-
yse how these narrative representations differ depending upon the types of
HT victims and the speakers.
In all but two of the episodes of S21, ‘criminals’ are never mentioned. In
the one instance that the term ‘criminal’ is mentioned, it is used to refer to
the accusations of a trafficker against his victims in the episode on bonded/
kiln slaves, in a voiceover by presenter Rageh Omaar:
Some bonded labourers have sought to gain their freedom through the
courts, only to find themselves accused by the kiln owners of criminal
offenses. Without the means to defend themselves, they are frequently
imprisoned. (‘Bonded Slaves’)
This statement underscores how powerful traffickers are in shaping and

determining who is labelled as ‘criminal’ and the assignment of criminality,
stigma, or deviance, displayed in their ability to marshal the powers of the
state and its legal apparatus (or the threat of it) to intimidate and control
their victims, and to prevent them from seeking justice or redress. In this
episode, the presenter, other advocates, and NGO contributors consis-
tently refer to those who traffic not as ‘criminals’ or indeed ‘traffickers’ but
rather as ‘owners’:
[Hina Jilani, Advocate:] When those who are repressing have ALL the access
to state institutions, they have the power to use state institutions against the
people they are oppressing. For instance, the police has [sic] always worked
for the factory owners. The police has, at the behest of the factory owners,
harassed and chased labourers when they have tried to escape. They have kept
them in custody and tortured them, at the behest of owners. So it’s not just
the owners. It’s the collusion of the state agencies that has made the power
dynamics so much tilted in their favour. (‘Bonded Slaves’ [emphasis added])
There is however one episode of S21 in which the term ‘criminal’ is

widely used, but again never with reference to traffickers. As in the
‘Bonded Slaves’ episode where the term ‘criminal’ is used once, this is also
with reference not to those who traffic, but to the victims of HT. These
are some examples of how ‘criminals’ and ‘criminalisation’ are operation-
alised in HT in the laogai prison system in China which is the subject of
‘Prison Slaves’:
For a year they tried to brainwash me, trying to force me to give up my

practice of Falun Gong. They figured me out … so they changed their strat-
egy to force me to feel like a criminal … because, according to their theory,
a prisoner should be reformed through labour … So they forced me to do
slave labour. [Charles Lee who spent three years imprisoned for religious
dissidence in the Chinese laogai]
But the role of the laogai prison system narrated in ‘Prison Slaves’ is not
merely to criminalise victims:
Chinese president say we want to see two products came from the labour
camps. The number one product is the man who has been reformed, who
is not going to fight against the Communist. Second product, the prod-
uct, made by the man. [spoken by former prisoner and political activist
Harry Wu]
In this episode, the narrative constructed is about the state using

HT/modern slavery as a tactic to control, eliminate, and prevent politi-
cal dissent and religious freedom, to enable ‘reform’ and additionally to
generate money for the state from slave labour. Punishment through
forced labour as a form of HT in this narrative has a multiple function.
The state criminalises opposition, criticism, and dissent, forcing victims
to conform to state ideology, thereby legitimising HT and absolving
anyone involved in it on behalf of the state of any deviant or criminal
label like ‘trafficker’. This narrative is literally signposted for all those
involved in the system to see. In one scene, Wu guides Rageh Omaar
through an exhibition he has curated that includes photographs of the
signs posted at the entrance to the camps photos. Entrants are presented
with a sign that says ‘Who are you? What is this place? Why are you
here?’ and another that states: ‘You are a criminal. This is the laogai. You
are here to reform through labour’:
128 M. DEAREY
[Omaar voiceover:] Abigail was sent to Shenyang women’s laogai Camp in

northeast China. It holds an average 1,000 inmates, a mixture of drug
addicts, criminals and religious dissidents. All are forced to work in its in-
house factory.
This criminalisation has the effect of neutralising (inter)national con-

cern or action to address the suffering of the victims. The narrative
represents these ‘criminals/prisoners’ as those who deserve their ‘pun-
ishment’, and thereby fail to warrant protection or judicial intervention
by this or other nation states, or the international polis. This is a state
of denial (Cohen, 2001). Denial is a key theme of trafficker narratives
across these documentaries. Where traffickers are made visible, they
tend to deny their guilt, even to the point of claiming to be the victims
themselves by default of being accused. Their implicit and sometimes
explicit power to control the use of language pertaining to who is iden-
tified as criminal or deviant, and also to deflect their own deviance or
criminality, is exposed in narratives of S21. This phenomenon is redo-
lent of criminologist Lemert’s (1967) influential thesis of primary and
secondary deviance, whereby social elites are able to use their powerful
status and capital to elide labels such as ‘criminal’ or ‘trafficker’, and to
devolve these labels onto less powerful or lower status people, including
their victims. The accusations of criminality (primary deviance) can be
denied by social elites and this will be accepted by others in society, up
to a point; it is when powerful elites exhaust their social capital in
enforcing these narratives and others in society are no longer willing to
accept their ‘story’ as valid that secondary deviance is operationalised.
Then such elites are no longer seen as legitimate and their actions and
identities are rejected and stigmatised. An integral part of this process is
the creation of deviant labels and ideologies, and the power to assign
these narratives and identities and to whom. In S21, stigmatising terms
like ‘trafficker’ or ‘criminal’ are often not used in reference to powerful
social elites involved in HT; rather, identifiers such as ‘employer’, ‘mar-
riage broker’, or ‘kiln owner’ are used to designate these actors. If the
purpose of S21 is to stigmatise, expose, or denounce traffickers, one
might expect that the usage of condemnatory terms such as ‘criminal’
or ‘trafficker’ in relation to these social elites is critical in constructing
and communicating these narratives to public audiences. However,
some actors featured in S21 are called ‘traffickers’. As will be shown in
the next section, the assignment of the ‘trafficker’ label and the devi-
ance that goes with it are largely dependent upon factors such as the
ethnicity, age, nationality, class of those involved in trafficking, and the
prevalent gender of the victims according to the type of HT
represented.
Representations of ‘Traffickers’ in S21 Narratives

of HT
The term ‘trafficker’ is used in S21, but inconsistently. In some episodes,

the use of ‘trafficker’ and their presence are predominant. This is most
evident in the episodes on the trafficking of women for sexual and/or
domestic slavery, where ‘traffickers’ are referred to frequently by the pre-
senter and programme makers, as for example in the online ‘blurb’ or text
accompanying the episode ‘Bridal Slaves’:
[online blurb:] Jamila, a former bride slave, says her traffickers kidnapped
and drugged her, before selling her to an abusive man…
Shafiq Khan, who runs a grassroots organisation dedicated to tracking
down bride traffickers and their victims, explains: ‘The girls do equal
amounts of work in two jobs. They are sex slaves, not just to one man but a
group of 10 or 12 men. Apart from that there is agriculture—working on
the farms with animals from morning until night.’
In the 25-minute ‘Bridal Slaves’ episode, the word ‘trafficker’ is used in

total eight times (including the two citations quoted above in the online
blurb). In all but one instance, the term is used by the presenter in
voiceovers and spoken in English:
[presenter voiceover] For the past 20 years, bride traffickers have preyed on
vulnerable young women from India’s vast rural hinterland, promising to
deliver them into a traditionally arranged marriage, but, in reality, selling
them over and over into a life of sexual slavery and forced labour.
And in another presenter voiceover to describe a young male who is later

identified as Shafiq Khan ‘who runs a grassroots organisation dedicated to
tracking down bride traffickers and the women who’ve fallen victim to
their trade’:
130 M. DEAREY
[presenter voiceover:] But there is a shortage of women in this region,

sometimes as few as seven women for every ten men. It creates a ready mar-
ket for bride traffickers.
Only once in ‘Bridal Slaves’ is the term used by someone else, by the afore-
mentioned Shafiq Khan, in English subtitles:
We have come to this village before and talked to these people so we were a
bit suspicious that he’s a middle man and a trafficker.
[Omaar voiceover, walking through village walkways:] But with the
men’s denial of any involvement in trafficking, Shafiq will need to continue
his search for harder evidence. He’s now on the trail of a man whose con-
tacts have identified as a marriage broker. Shafiq suspects he may be a bride
trafficker.
[Omaar voiceover over scenes of a railway station:] Marriage may seem
the best option for a woman who has been the victim of bride traffickers and
transported thousands of miles from her home. But the real solution lies in
India enforcing its own anti-slavery laws.
Traffickers are described by Omaar in another voiceover introducing a

group of women brought together to discuss their experiences of being
trafficked as
taken from their families against their will they claim by traffickers who use
a mixture of false promises and violence. They were then simply sold into
marriage, some of them many times over.
Presenter voiceover is heavily used across the episodes of S21 to create

the HT narratives. Victim testimonies also feature commonly throughout,
but their usage of the term ‘trafficker’ to describe or label those who they
identify as responsible for their trafficking is very different. It must be
noted here that many of these victims speak in their own indigenous lan-
guages, which is not English. In all episodes of S21, including ‘Bridal
Slaves’, the victims’ voices are audible and their words are presented in
translation into English in subtitles on the bottom of the screen. In these
subtitles, the word ‘trafficker’ never appears. When the ‘Bridal Slaves’
women speak (in English subtitled translation) of those who have
trafficked or abused them, they typically speak of ‘the man’ who ‘bought’,
‘sold’, ‘forced’, or ‘beat’ them. They do not use the word ‘trafficker’ to
describe those who traffic them. What is more, they tend not to directly
refer to a trafficker type agent at all, or only do so indirectly or obliquely,

as for example in these typical quotations from the women describing
their experiences:
They injected me with drugs and beat me. Then I was sold on.
I was sold to a man who had 8 girls and 4 boys. He took 6,000 Rupees
($123). After 15 days I was sold again for 10,000 Rupees ($205) to the man
I’m with now.
I would have to work all day in the heat then go home and get beaten. Is
it worth living? [‘Bridal Slaves’]
What is also notable in these representations is how traffickers are spo-

ken of in the passive or intransitive cases, as in first and second examples
above. This is consistent with that Choi-Fitzpatrick’s (2016, p. 10) previ-
ously quoted observation that in discourses of HT, traffickers lack ‘object
status’. They are portrayed above all as active agents who do as they like
with relative impunity, but are not spoken of directly. The third example
uses the intransitive case to describe what the woman does, which is to
work all day and go home to get beaten by the man who has purchased her
from the trafficker. These are examples of the diegetic narratives previ-
ously mentioned:
I was brought here by a man to stay with his sister. Before the girls are
brought here they’re told they will see Delhi. When I was brought over they
said I would be a wife.
I was driven in a truck. After that I was sold to a blind man. Then I was
sold to someone else and someone else after that. I was constantly being
given drugs I said ‘I don’t want to go any further’. He said, ‘Let’s see how
you don’t want to go’. He would put my legs over the fire. [‘Bridal Slaves’]
Following the above testimony, the documentary cuts back to a previously

featured tearful woman victim who is interviewed by Omaar, and whose
words are presented in English translation subtitles:
[unnamed woman:] I was sold for 5,000 Rupees.

[Omaar:] 5,000 Rupees, that’s about $120. So how did these men treat
you?’
[Woman:] They would hit and punch me. Day and night he would swear
and beat me. I would have to work all day in the heat. My mind would be
going round and round [makes circles in the air with her finger.] That’s no
132 M. DEAREY
life. [Crying] What’s the point? You go home and the man hits and beats
you. Is it worth living? [ ‘Bridal Slaves’].
The above segment is repeated twice in this episode. Throughout this

episode, monetary amounts mentioned are translated by the presenter
into US dollar currency, presumably so that western viewers can under-
stand the commodification of people as an essential element of HT.
To briefly summarise, while ‘trafficker’ is used quite prominently in the
episode on bridal slaves (the second most prominent usage of the seven
episodes comprising S21), it is a term used almost exclusively by the pre-
senter, and once (in subtitled translation) by a local male NGO worker.
The women themselves are never quoted using it, though again their
voices are audible and their words are presented in English translation
subtitles. Rather, as cited above, they are quoted as using more ordinary
words when referring to their traffickers as ‘men’, or alternatively concen-
trate solely on the abjection or disparity of their own condition, for exam-
ple, in terms of the violent abuse they suffer at the hands of these men, the
work they are forced to do, or the fact that they were falsely promised that
they would be a ‘wife’.
In contrast, in the episode entitled ‘Charcoal Slaves’, the term ‘traf-
ficker’ is never used. This role is heavily implied, but the word itself is
conspicuously absent. Like the women in the ‘Bridal Slaves’ episode which
is located in rural India, the men in rural Brazil enslaved to make charcoal
speak of those who traffic them in more indirect, oblique, and again pas-
sive/intransitive modes using ordinary language and focusing instead not
on those who traffic them but their own suffering and plight:
[in English subtitles, headshot of the man, interspersed with family scenes]:
We fell into it. Charcoal became really lucrative around here, you know.
Here in Jacunda, unemployment is really a problem. We have to work to
earn our day-to-day living and however little we get, it’s all welcome. More
than welcome.
The narrative focus here is on family, employment, the market for char-
coal, and the need for work. There is no mention of criminals or criminal-
ity, men or traffickers.
A man is shown shovelling charcoal from a fire, with the presenter
Omaar describing in voiceover how he was forced to breathe in the
s moke-filled air. The victim speaks and his words appear in English transla-
tion subtitles along the bottom of the screen:
We had no protective clothing, no masks, not even footwear, face guards or

helmets. The place we lived in was a wooden shack. There was no electricity
and no fridge. No oven, bathroom or even running water. It caused me lots
of health problems. [‘Charcoal Slaves’]
Again, the focus is not on ‘traffickers’ but rather upon living conditions
and the lack of proper safety equipment. There is no mention of those
who are responsible for this, or should have provided better accommoda-
tion or protection. These agents are present only by implication, not
explicitly made visible, audible, or otherwise named or known as respon-
sible and accountable individuals. This failure to identify traffickers as
criminal actors as a result of their elision of ‘direct object status’ as
described by Choi-Fitzpatrick (2016) in narratives of HT could help
explain the failures to deal with them via the legal-judicial framework with
its concentration upon individual named criminals detailed at the begin-
ning of this chapter. There are substantial divergences in terms of victim/
witness discourses and the law when it comes to identifying, discussing,
and capturing (in the semiotics of language, visual iconography, and law)
‘traffickers’.
The differences in narrative representations of traffickers even in a sin-
gle documentary series are paramount. Consider the following example of
ow another man describes his enslavement at the charcoal farm:
Charcoal farming is the worst kind of work that exists as far as I am con-
cerned. It’s the most back-breaking. As you are out there in the jungle,
right? People know what that’s like, right? In the jungle, cutting away, get-
ting scratched. I had malaria twice in a row. [‘Charcoal Slaves’]
But in response to this man, Omaar does not refer to ‘traffickers’ but
rather ‘employers’:
[Omaar]: And did the employers give you any assistance, whether it was
because of getting malaria, or food, or someone else got sick, did you have
any help from the employers in the work?’ Man shakes his head ‘No.
Nothing. Just work. [‘Charcoal Slaves’, emphasis added]
134 M. DEAREY
Similar to ‘Charcoal Slaves’, the ‘Food Chain Slaves’ episode also deals
exclusively with male victims. Two of the enslaved men interviewed speak
of their traffickers thusly:
They watch.
They tell you to eat…
They are referred to by the men as ‘security guards’. [‘Food Chain
Slaves’]
As in the ‘Charcoal Slaves’ example, those responsible for trafficking the

men in the ‘Food Chain Slaves’ are never described by their victims as ‘traf-
fickers’. The Soo brothers who are featured in this episode as traffickers who
were brought to court to face slavery charges are visually represented in
what appears to be amateur video footage walking silently from the court
building in the manner of the famous Patterson-Giblin footage of ‘Big Foot’
(see Bader, Baker, & Mencken, 2011). This is a powerful visual semiotic that
connotes a strong cultural narrative of strangeness, uniqueness, elusiveness,
and cunning invention of those who traffic other human beings, rendering
traffickers visually as mythical, alien, unknown, or even wild creatures who
may or may not live among us. As Bader et al. (2011) explain, this consti-
tutes a hyper masculine-oriented ideology of fearful yet desirable ‘otherness’
in which the uncertain and indeterminate identity of ‘trafficker’, like ‘Big
Foot’, is semiotically represented and read by many audience members.
The reasons behind this usage of language and semiotics are open to
debate, but a difference between these documentaries that immediately
springs to mind is that the ‘Bridal Slaves’ episode is devoted entirely to
female victims, whereas the ‘Charcoal Slaves’ and ‘Food Chain Slaves’
documentaries relate to victims who are all male. While the Indian
women featured in ‘Bridal Slaves’ speak of those who traffic them as
‘men’ and not ‘traffickers’, the presenter uses the term ‘trafficker’ in this
episode on this form of HT frequently. In contrast, the male victims fea-
tured in the ‘Charcoal Slaves’ (Brazil) and ‘Food Chain Slaves’ (Hawaii)
rarely speak of those who traffic them, never use the term ‘trafficker’, and
neither does the presenter. Instead, in ‘Charcoal Slaves’ and ‘Food Chain
Slaves’ terms like ‘employer’ or ‘security guards’ are used to refer to
those involved in or responsible for trafficking the men, aligning them
and their activities to broader ideological and social discourses relating
not to slavery, but to work. Narrative representations of this type of HT
with predominantly male victims is formulated as a subcategory of busi-
ness or enterprise, not HT.
Does this usage of ‘trafficker’ according to the prevailing gender of the

victims extend to other episodes of S21 and other types of HT? Let us
return to the episode ‘Sex Slaves’ which deals exclusively with the traffick-
ing of women in Europe. ‘Trafficker’ is used seven times in the episode
‘Sex Slaves’, most commonly by the presenter in voiceovers, but also by a
local male lawyer named as Ian Visdova and a female NGO worker identi-
fied as Ana Revenco, who both work with female sex trafficking victims
from Moldova:
[Visdova in translation with subtitles]: A public employee earns a salary here

of 100–150 Euros per month. That’s why everybody wants? to go abroad
and find a decent salary. Traffickers exploit the gap between life abroad and
the poverty in Moldova.
[Omaar voiceover:] The most common ploy used by Moldovan traffick-
ers is to place a bogus job advert in the local newspaper Maklak [phonetic
spelling]. La Strada’s team monitors each edition. [‘Sex Slaves’]
Ana Revenco, Moldovan female anti-trafficking worker, speaking in

English:
The traffickers actually use violence, [unclear] it’s psychology and emotions.
From the very beginning until the very end. They play with that. They use
their own fears or hopes to chain the person. [‘Sex Slaves’]
Undercover footage of traffickers is also presented in this episode.

Images of two young local men dressed casually in t shirts and jeans and a
recording of their voices translated in subtitles is featured:
So how many girls do you want to see?

[Omaar voiceover:] [The undercover reporter] was quickly introduced
to sex traffickers.
This is a revealing excerpt, because while ‘trafficker’ is used by the pre-

senter in the voiceover for this segment, in the recorded undercover video
footage presented on screen, the names of the young men are accompa-
nied by the word ‘PIMP’ in capitals across the bottom of the screen, for
example, ‘ALEX: PIMP’. The narrative representation of sex trafficking is
thus a layered discursive construction, with the ‘trafficker’ identity built
upon the foundational metanarrative of prostitution and its typical nomen-
clature. While the presenter describes these individuals as ‘traffickers’ in
136 M. DEAREY
his voiceover, the visual subtext identities them as ‘PIMPS’, not ‘crimi-
nals’, or simply ‘men’. What is more, as in this scene, these ‘pimp/traffick-
ers’ are depicted as less powerful than other more socially elite
‘businessmen/traffickers’ featured in S21. A lawyer who prosecuted
Alexandr ‘Salun’ Kovali, a ‘trafficker’ featured in ‘Sex Slaves’, explains how
those who are prosecuted are typically poor, uneducated, low-level, local
agents from an ethnic minority background:
There are a lot of men like Salun who are free and live well here. Most of the
time, only simple, low-level traffickers are convicted. [‘Sex Slaves’]
There are clearly different standards being applied to ‘traffickers’ in

popular cultural genres and in law, and this is acknowledged in S21:
[Omaar voiceover:] The fate of the two convicted sex traffickers highlights
those double standards. Alexandr Kovali will spend the next 19 years locked
in a Moldovan prison. Shaban Baran [another convicted trafficker] is back
home in Turkey. And free. The Dutch government allowed him out of jail
for one day, he absconded and never returned. Until the rich Western coun-
tries address the demand for prostitution, rather than profit from it, there
will always be men like Kovali and Baran. And there will always be sex slaves
behind these windows. [‘Sex Slaves’].
While the word ‘trafficker’ and the figures of traffickers are presented in
‘Sex Slavery’ in the above passages, the language and visual semiotics in
this episode tends to refer to these men and their activities in terms of the
language typically used to define and discuss prostitution, for example, the
sex ‘trade’, traffickers/users as ‘pimps’, ‘clients’ or ‘buyers’ of women who
then ‘sell them on’. At the same time, the language of ‘business’ is also
utilised, as those involved are referred to as ‘pimps’ and ‘traffickers’, but
also as ‘recruiters’ of women for ‘work’ in brothels or clubs.
In ‘Sex Slaves’ Omaar interviews the convicted trafficker Kovali in
prison, who recalcitrantly uses the language of business to vehemently
deny any involvement in HT. Ironically, he defends himself against charges
of trafficking or prostitution by reference to the right to privacy of the
‘girls’ and their freedom to do as they choose outside of business hours:
[Kovali:] The girls were paid as hostesses. What they did after 5am, after the
club closed, is none of my business. It’s their private life. [Kovali shrugs and
uses body language that divests and distances him from involvement in pros-
titution or trafficking.] [‘Sex Slaves’]
As in the ‘Charcoal Slaves’ episode, this type of ‘explanatory’ discourse

reflected in the various phenomenal narratives of HT constructed by and
around those accused of trafficking involves the positioning and semiotics
of traffickers as ‘businessmen’ and their alignment with ideologies of
‘entrepreneurialism’, ‘work’, ‘recruitment’, ‘employment’, ‘supply and
demand’, and participation in the legitimate global market economy. In
this respect, the framing of the problem of HT and traffickers is not strictly
speaking in terms of illegal activity or individual criminality, but rather the
opportunities offered to ‘entrepreneurs’ by the international ‘market’ in
women by recent changes to the sex trade itself, or indeed by the trade in
men in the charcoal factories for the automotive industry and its demand
for pig iron. In these instances, such changes to global market economics
and the legalisation of prostitution results in the increase in the trafficking
of women from Eastern Europe, specifically Moldova, in response to the
decriminalisation of prostitution in destination countries like Amsterdam
and the relative economic deprivation in eastern European countries.
These relate to the so called ‘push and pull’ factors cited in Chap. 1.
As Visdova explains, traffickers, poverty and economic migration go
together:
[Visdova in English translation with subtitles]: A public employee earns a

salary here of 100–150 Euros per month. That’s why everybody wants to go
abroad and find a decent salary. Traffickers exploit the gap between life
abroad and the poverty in Moldova. [‘Sex Slaves’]
This quote and its role in the narrative representation of HT in the inter-
national sex trade is significant in that it reflects and invigorates broader
public ambivalence toward perceptions and narratives of global economic
migration (see Plambech, 2016).
Coda
In the 2016 documentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade (Al Jazeera, 2016,
or BMS), the construction and usage of the term ‘trafficker’ and this iden-
tity are similar, but also different. In her testimony presented in English
translation this time in a voiceover by a female translation, a female victim
of sex trafficking refers to her traffickers as ‘they’ and ‘the guys’, similar to
the women in ‘Bridal Slaves’:
‘They brought thirty guys. Then they tied me to the bed and the guys did
their job.’ [sex trade]… [BMST]
138 M. DEAREY
Similarly, traffickers are later referred to by the presenter David Harrison

as ‘the man’ who drops off food to a cannabis farm slave, and as ‘pimps’ in
relation to sex traffickers, as in the ‘Sex Slaves’ episode of S21. The word
‘trafficker’ appears a number of times in the written text accompanying the
BMST documentary on the Al Jazeera webpage in which the video is
embedded. However, there is a distinct shift in the episode broadcast in
the use of labels to identify sex traffickers as ‘Romanian captors’, ‘an ex-
boyfriend and his brother’, and ‘slave masters’, and also to refer explicitly
to women traffickers as a ‘female ringleader’, ‘madam’, and ‘the bad lady’.
Other terms for traffickers in other types of HT relate to their activities
as ‘[people] smugglers’, ‘Vietnamese gangs’ or ‘criminal gangs’, ‘drugs
gang’, each of these in relation to HT for cannabis farming. ‘Smugglers’
are further identified, in the forced labour trade, as family members, as for
example in the example presented of a nail bar in East London, in which
the salon owner has ‘smuggled’ his sister into the UK to work illegally. In
an interview in BMS, Kevin Hyland, UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner,
refers not to legitimate or illegitimate actors or ‘traffickers’, but rather to
the disappearance of these roles in the often-unwitting blurring of ‘The
legitimate and the illegitimate economies [that have] become one in some
ways … because companies and people don’t realise … they are … using
modern day slaves in their supply chain’. In contrast, the Salvation Army
worker who is featured in BMS consistently and explicitly uses the term
‘traffickers’ to refer to those involved in HT.
Conclusion
This chapter presents a selection of representations of ‘traffickers’ as pre-
sented in the seven 25-minute long episodes of the Al Jazeera produced
documentary series Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil (2011), and the
47-minute long documentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade (2016), and
an analysis of them from a cultural criminological perspective. This analysis
reveals multiple aspects of this complex and multi-dimensional roles and
the emplotment of traffickers within popular narratives of HT/modern
slavery. In accordance with traditional theodicy conceptualisations of, in
Leibniz’s famous phrase, the ‘problem of evil’ (Dearey, 2014; Ricoeur &
Pelauer, 1985), the focus is primarily on named individuals who are pre-
sented as subject to accusation, conviction, and censure, whether in crimi-
nal court or less formal social settings. What these narrative representations
of traffickers reveal is the fragility and failure of western criminal justice
systems to (a) recognise and (b) deal effectively with traffickers, even on
the rare occasions when they do face criminal charges. S21 portrays these
traffickers within narratives of injustice, crimes are not being prevented or
dealt with effectively by state(s), and criminals are not being reformed.
Even in instances when individual traffickers are accused, convicted, and
jailed, they still consistently, and often vehemently, deny any wrongdoing.
The semiotics of their identity narratives suggest a potent mixture of mys-
tery, repulsion, fear, and desire, reminiscent of the ‘white slavery’ mythos
cited by de Villiers (2016) and Namias (1992). Victims, as featured in
these documentaries, do not identify or speak of them in ways that are
amenable with modern criminal justice systems.
In its various usages, the term ‘trafficker’ is not clearly defined nor is its
meaning or application consistent across the different episodes of S21. The
most decisive factor influencing the usage of the term ‘trafficker’ is by the
gender of victims; types of HT that involve only or primarily women and
the sex trade tend to feature the word ‘trafficker’ in the documentary nar-
ratives. Whereas forms of HT involving men as victims for non-sexual
purposes tend to eschew the label ‘trafficker’ in favour of terminology
relating to business and enterprise to refer to these actors, for example,
factory or kiln ‘owners’, ‘security guards’, ‘employers’, ‘businessmen’,
‘barons’, ‘exporters’, and the like. What is more, the lower status, local
and ethnic minority men involved in the trafficking of women for sex are
also identified as ‘pimps’ as well as ‘traffickers’, doubly stigmatising them
as the result of their intimate involvement with the women they traffic and
their own ethnicities, nationalities, relatively low socio-economic statuses,
and masculinities. However, the language of ‘business’ can also be applied
to these actors too, for example, in their role as ‘recruiters’ as well as
‘pimps’. With respect to these lower-level male traffickers, the label of
‘victim’ or the recognition that these men (and women) can sometimes be
victims too is not applied in either S21 or BMST.
The voice of who is speaking, and how, is also significant. There is a
liberal use of presenter voiceover throughout the episodes of S21, and it is
within these that the term ‘trafficker’ most often appears. When victims of
HT are interviewed in S21, their testimonies are often presented in English
translation and in subtitles. This is somewhat different in the later Al Jazeera
documentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade (2016). The women victims
featured in S21 do not use term ‘trafficker’ when discussing those who traf-
fic them, tending to focus more upon their own experiences of what they
have suffered at the hands of the ‘men’ who have abused and/or exploited
140 M. DEAREY
them, if they directly refer to these individuals at all. In contrast, the pre-
senter of BMST tends to use language relating to forms of transnational
organised crime such as ‘smuggling’ or national or ‘gang’ related criminal-
ity, or terms more reflective of the relationship between the victim and the
perpetrator. The term ‘trafficker’ is eschewed by the presenter of BMST but
is consistently and explicitly used in this documentary by a British NGO
worker from the Salvation Army who works with HT victims.
Throughout S21, even where less powerful men are involved in HT, if
their victims are male, they are still less likely to be labelled ‘traffickers’
than those involved in trafficking women for the sex trade. The presence
of males in the victim population is significant in the identification and
usage of the word ‘trafficker’. In instances where both males and females
are trafficked—for example, child slavery, prison slavery, bonded slavery—
in S21, those who traffic them are never referred to as either ‘traffickers’ or
‘criminals’ by the presenter, NGO workers, victims or the traffickers them-
selves. If it is women only who are trafficked, and if they are trafficked for
work in the sex industry, then the word ‘trafficker’ is used, but almost
always by the presenter, never by the victims themselves.
This indicates the primary significance of victims’ gender and potency
of prostitution metanarratives, and to a lesser extent the ethnicities and
social status of HT offenders in the formulation and construction of the
narratives and identities of ‘traffickers’ in popular criminology or ‘true
crime’ discourses. This presents substantial challenges to the necessity or
desirability of a special term ‘trafficker’ as cited in the Palermo Protocol to
identify and/or stigmatise these individuals. The appearance and usage of
such ‘new’ linguistic terms could have the effect of generating a sense of
‘insider’ knowledge on the part of audiences, with very little to substanti-
ate the clarity or stability of the words, or their equitable use as stigmatis-
ing labels and/or legal terms. By presenting audiences with a new word to
use to understand HT (that is, ‘trafficker’), such true crime documentary
programmes makers may be conveying a false sense of understanding and
knowledge of the realities of HT to viewers, by over-emphasising the
exceptionalism, homogeneity, power, cunning, or strangeness of those
who traffic human beings by giving them a new label of their own.
One of the most notable elements of the use of ‘trafficker’ in S21 is that
it is, with one exception, used only by the presenter, almost exclusively in
voiceover. Presenter voiceover is heavily used throughout S21 to construct
the documentary narratives of differing types of HT in S21. As a feminist
cultural criminologist, I am struck by the fact that none of the women
featured in S21 used this term to describe or identify those who trafficked
them. That they referred to ‘men’ or sometimes even ‘husbands’, or no

one in particular at all, is in many ways more revealing of the realities and
lived experiences of HT and human traffickers in their everyday lives. These
testimonies are framed by the daily experiences of women (and men)
around the world for whom the trauma of (sexual) violence and exploita-
tion is still very much the norm. It does not require a special word, or role,
raising the question of why such a term is introduced, who and in what
positions the men who use it are doing so, and why. Questions are also
raised about what such a term conveys to audiences who purport to under-
stand HT or victims or HT, to enable them to recognise or identify a ‘traf-
ficker’, as opposed to a criminal, conman, fraudster, kidnapper, or rapist; or
indeed a brother, husband, pimp, ‘bad lady’, businessman, or just a man.
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Plambech, S. (2016, September). The art of the possible: Making films on sex
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Ricoeur, P., & Pelauer, D. (1985, December). Evil: A challenge to philosophy and
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Shen, A. (2016). Female perpetrators in internal child trafficking in China: An
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The Wire. (2002–2008). Television series. HBO. Creator: David Simons.
Conclusion
In this book, we explored portrayals of transnational human trafficking

(THT) presented by various media, and investigated the relationship
between these depictions and the realities of trafficking. We linked our
findings to existing research literature as well as taking account of the
experiences of law enforcement, NGOs, and media practitioners. Our
methods were drawn from various critical fields and theoretical areas. The
strength of such a multi-methodological approach is that consistently
reoccurring representations can, with a great level of confidence, be said
to form part, if not the core, of the current master narrative of
trafficking.
Our analyses show that throughout newspaper articles, there is a pre-
occupation with female victims of sex trafficking. This pre-occupation sus-
tains a view of trafficking in which only young, female, compliant, silent,
agentless subjects of sex trafficking are actually considered victims. As a
result, only these victims are likely to receive judicial remedy and/or sub-
stantial formal post-trafficking support. Less ‘ideal’ but nonetheless real
victims, often male, are at best invisible, or are stigmatised and criminal-
ised, often held responsible for their own victimisation. These gender ste-
reotypes are perpetuated in crime fiction, which often portrays traffickers
as male and violent, whereas female accomplices play a supporting role.
However, the analysis of British and Scandinavian crime novels suggests
that fiction does allow for greater nuance, particularly in its portrayal of

Trafficking, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78214-0
144 CONCLUSION
child trafficking victims. We argue that crime fiction promotes a greater

understanding of the different forms of exploitation to which trafficked
children are subjected. These include child soldiering, domestic slavery,
and organ trafficking, as well as sexual exploitation.
In the Al Jazeera documentaries, the identity of perpetrators is linked to
the gender of their victims, in the sense that those who traffic women for
sexual purposes are identified as traffickers, whereas those who traffic men
for non-sexual exploitation are identified, predominantly, as businessmen.
This again suggests that sex-trafficked women tend to be recognised as
victims of trafficking, whereas trafficked men tend not to be. The language
and discourses of witness, testimony, and prevailing cultural paradigms of
‘normal’ daily life and family practices often raised questions about the
construction of programmer or other expert narrative explanations.
Across text types, we find a focus on official responses to trafficking,
especially heroic rescues, to the exclusion of critical and alternative options.
In British newspapers, trafficking is consistently presented as a foreign,
imported problem, which, as our literature review also indicates, allows
the British state to portray itself as heroically responding to threats to its
national security and those deemed worthy of protection. However, cer-
tain British newspapers criticise the criminal justice response to the sup-
posedly foreign threat of traffickers. The analysis of British and Scandinavian
crime fiction indicates a recurring theme of family ‘allowing’ their children
to be trafficked, suggesting also that states take on a paternalistic, almost
patronising parental role in lieu of the actual family. On the other hand,
the Al Jazeera documentaries, as well as various newspaper articles, show
that the criminal justice responses fall short. Our analysis of Serbian news-
papers also demonstrates that these stories are manipulated to fit the news
agenda. These findings indicate that the prevalent representation of traf-
ficking is, as also suggested by media practitioners attending our sympo-
sium, ‘shaped’ by the economic necessity of ‘selling’ a story to the readership.
Our literature review also demonstrates that responses to victims are
severely lacking and seem to serve more to make state actors ‘look good’
than actually help those affected by trafficking. This focus on official
responses, however, glosses over the role of Britain and other Western
states in sustaining the global inequalities that contribute to the problem.
Our analyses suggest that representations of HT are often simplistic,
focusing on heroic responses. These representations may be, as per our
Introduction, complicit in the perpetuation of global inequality. As such,
alternative perspectives must be presented and shared, and structural fac-
CONCLUSION
145
tors must be focused on (Gregoriou, 2017). These measures are crucial

for general public awareness of the complex realities of labour- and sexual
exploitation.
Reference
Gregoriou, C. (2017). PaCCS policy brief: The representation of transnational
human trafficking in present-day news media, true crime and fiction. [Online].
Leeds: PaCCS. Retrieved February 13, 2018, from http://www.paccsresearch.
org.uk/policy-briefings/transnational-human-trafficking/
Index1
A B
Abolitionism, 16 Balkans, 18, 69, 82
Activists, 82, 127 BBC, 19, 30, 120, 121
celebrity, 3 Belgium, 46
Adjectives, 34, 48, 49, 51 Benin, 16
Africa, 43, 44, 104 Blic, 64n4, 65, 66, 69, 76, 77, 79
Agency, 10, 15, 26, 35, 37, 46–49, Border control, 9, 15
52n21, 66, 81, 82, 90, 93, Bosnia, 69, 81, 82
100, 108, 109, 120–123, Boy, see Boy in the Suitcase, The
126 Boy in the Suitcase, The, 91, 101
Agentless, agentive passive, 33, 34n16, Brazil, 132, 134
48, 55, 143 Britain, 9, 30, 36, 39–41, 44, 45, 47,
Albanian, 70, 74 50, 66, 71, 95, 97, 101, 107, 144
Algeria, 98 See also United Kingdom
Al Jazeera, 19, 118–141, 144 Britain’s Modern Slave Trade, 120,
America, see United State of America 121, 137–139
Anti-Slavery International, 2, 11, British National Corpus, 32n12
12 Bulgaria, 30, 74, 96
Anti-Trafficking Review, 90
Asia, 43, 104
ASTRA, 66, 74, 75n16 C
Asylum seekers, 27, 42, 43, 53 C-collocate, 32, 32n13, 33n14,
Awareness, 15, 19, 90, 95, 96, 99, 39–42, 44, 45, 47
103, 105, 106, 118, 125, 145 Cellar, The, 91, 107
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Trafficking, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78214-0
148 INDEX
Chicago School, 122 Daily Star, The, 28, 47, 65, 73

Children, 2, 6, 7, 14, 16, 19, 27, 37, Daily Telegraph, The, 28, 71, 73, 76,
37n20, 42, 44, 46, 50, 52, 52n21, 78
54, 67, 70, 71, 73, 77–79, 92–99, Danas, 64n4, 66, 67, 70, 71
101–110, 140, 144 Deadly Game, 91
Child soldiers, 104–108 Deception, 2, 3, 15, 48
Christie, Nils, 7, 45 Dehumanisation, 11
Churnalism, 52n21 Demand, 8, 14, 17, 48, 52n21, 55,
Coercion, 2, 3, 76 118, 125, 136, 137
Collocate, 32n13, 33n14, 36, 44 Denmark, 101, 102
Concordance, 32, 32n13, 33n15, Deportation, 12, 53
37n20, 43, 45 Deviance
Conflict, 5, 8, 15, 37, 52n21, 53, 63, primary, 128
71, 72, 99, 101, 104, 120 secondary, 128
Consent, 3, 4, 10, 17, 69, 91, 92 Dichotomy, 122, 123
Corpus Disaster, 5, 53
analysis, 32 Dnevnik, 64n4, 68, 73, 76
linguistics, 18, 31, 32, 44 Documentary, v, 2, 19, 80, 90,
primary, 27n4 118–141, 144
reference, 27n4, 32n12 Drug
sample, 18, 26, 27n4, 28–32, 31n7, trafficking, 37
35–38, 40, 43, 45, 47, 50, 52, use, 101, 124
53
Crime
fiction, 2, 18, 19, 90–111, 143, E
144 EBART, 64
organised, 66, 75–76, 101, 118n1 Economist, The, 120
transnational, 4, 91, 97, 110 Elite, 128, 136
true, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124, 125, Erasure, 35, 92, 108, 110
140 Ethnification, 74, 81
Criminality, 39, 92, 118, 125, 126, Europe
128, 132, 137, 140 Eastern, 42–44, 96, 101, 137
Criminal justice system, 26, 122, 125, European Union, 30, 120
138, 139 Western, 18, 102, 108
Critical discourse analysis, 18, 26, Evil, 39, 42, 47, 73, 120–122
31–34, 55 Exploitation
Critical linguistics, 33 exploiters, 12
labour, 6, 7, 9, 14, 45
primary, 26n1
D secondary, 17, 26n1
Daily Express, The, 46 sexual, 13, 18, 27, 27n4, 43, 45,
Daily Mail, The, 28, 40–42, 45, 69, 48, 50, 51, 55, 64, 76, 100,
70, 73 145
INDEX
149
F Home office, v, 51, 52, 66, 78, 95

Fabula, 18, 63, 63n2, 65, 67 Home Secretary, 40, 52, 66, 73, 119
Feminism, 16, 98n9, 123, 140 Human rights, 8, 74, 75, 77, 80, 92,
Fiction, 2, 90, 91, 97, 106, 119, 122, 99, 104
125, 143 woman’s rights, 74, 76, 80
crime, 2, 18, 19, 90–111, 143, 144 Hungary, 70, 96
Focalisation, 63, 63n3, 67, 72–74, Hyland, Kevin, 72, 78, 138
79
Force, v, 3, 41, 48, 49, 71, 73, 75,
76n16, 77, 79, 80, 104n20, 105, I
107, 127 Identity, 99, 102, 104, 109, 134, 135,
Framing, 8–9, 15, 55, 67, 81, 82, 94, 137, 139, 144
137 Ideology, vi, 16, 18, 35, 43, 62, 62n1,
France, 69, 82 63n3, 64, 67, 68n9, 77, 79–82,
124, 127, 134
Illegal workers, 40, 48
G Immigrants, 11, 40–42, 44, 47, 50,
Gender, 13, 17, 37n20, 44, 47, 68, 55, 65, 69, 71, 73, 75, 81, 99
73, 81, 109, 110, 119, 123, 129, Immigration, 11, 12, 40, 42, 52, 55,
135, 140, 143, 144 81, 101
Genre, 19, 80, 90, 94, 108, 110, 118, illegal, 11, 40, 50, 55, 65, 73, 75,
136 99
Girl, see Nowhere Girl See also Migration
Girl Who Played with Fire, The, 91 India, 129, 130, 132
Girl Who Walked in the Shadows, The, Inequality
91, 92, 95 economic, 8, 16
Glas javnosti, 64n4, 67, 71, 76 gender, 3, 8, 13, 14, 16, 17
Global global, 3, 14–16, 52n21, 144
north, 19 social, 103
north-west, 19, 121, 122 wealth, 3, 14
south, 19, 91, 98–100, 108 Informer, 64n4, 65, 73, 75, 77
south-east, 121 Insecurity, 14, 96
Global economic crisis, 96 Investigation, 12, 26–55, 37n20, 62,
Globalisation, 8, 14 71, 80, 82, 90–92, 94, 95, 105
Government, 15, 17, 42, 46, 52, Investigative journalism, 52n21, 80,
52n21, 66, 69, 72, 79, 82, 136 120
Grammar, 18, 49 Italy, 82
H K
Harraga, 98–101 Keyword, 27n4, 41, 44, 47–49
Harrison, David, 66, 71, 138 Kosovo, 69, 82
Hero, 38, 55, 74 Kurir, 64n4, 72, 73, 75, 77
150 INDEX
L Moldova, 69, 74, 135, 137

Law enforcement, 81, 118, 124, 143 Movement, 3, 5, 10, 14, 15, 18, 32,
Legislation, 8, 29, 42 42, 43, 53, 71, 96
Legitimacy, 51 Multimodality, 29, 31n7, 34, 53–55
Lexis Nexis, 27n4 Muslim, 19
Literature, 14, 19, 27n4, 91, 94, 103,
108, 119, 143, 144
See also Fiction N
Lithuania, 101, 102 Narrative, 14
London, 38, 40, 42, 44, 67, 75, 138 narrativisation, v, 3, 4, 9, 13–16, 18,
Luxemburg, 98–100 38, 39, 53, 62–65, 67, 72n13,
73, 74, 74n15, 81, 82, 90,
93–95, 93n3, 98, 100, 102,
M 102n16, 104–110, 118, 119,
Macedonia, 82 121–140, 122n2, 143, 144
Male gaze, 13 strategies, 18, 62
Manipulation, v, 63n3, 67, 67n7 structure, 55, 62–64, 82, 101
Marked for Life, 91, 104 See also Fabula; Story
Masculinity, 37, 44, 68, 97, 139 Naše novine, 64n4, 68
Media, v, vi, 2–5, 7–9, 15, 18, 26–29, Nedeljni telegraf, 64n4, 66, 72
31, 34, 37, 38, 45, 55, 62–83, News
90–92, 96–98, 96n7, 109, newspaper, 2, 11, 26–55, 63n3, 64,
118–121, 118n1, 123–125, 143, 64n4, 64n5, 66, 70n11, 77,
144 80, 135, 143, 144
Metaphor newsworthiness, 68, 71, 77
cognitive domain, 31 texts, 18, 35, 47, 50, 64, 65, 67,
pushed domain, 35–38 68, 70–75, 80, 82
source domain, 32n11, 37 values, 52n21, 54, 67, 67n8, 68,
target domain, 32, 36 68n10
Middle East, 18 NGO, 16, 17, 66, 67, 110, 126, 132,
Migrant, vi, 2, 4, 5, 7–9, 11, 14, 29, 135, 140, 143
39–41, 44, 46, 48, 50, 51, 53, N-gram, 32
54, 71, 73, 91 Noir
workers, 8, 46, 48, 50, 51 domestic, 98–101, 98n9, 107
Migration, 13, 15, 41, 43, 46, 48, 80, nordic, 94, 105
105, 109, 137 Norm, 3, 13, 17, 44, 68, 69, 141
crisis, 2, 29, 30, 41, 51 lifecycle, 3
Mirror, The, 31n7, 45 Novel, 2, 19, 90–104, 104n20,
Modality 106–109, 143
deontic, 50 crime, 2, 19, 90–95, 101, 104n20,
epistemic, 50, 51 109, 143
perception, 51 Nowhere Girl, 98–101, 102n16, 103
INDEX
151
O soft, 13
Offender, 7, 8, 12, 30, 33, 52n21, Pravda, 64n4, 67
122, 125, 140 Pregled, 64n4, 66
Omaar, Rageh, 121, 126–128, Press, vi, 26, 27, 40, 52n21, 64n4, 65,
130–133, 135, 136 66, 69–72, 75–77, 79, 118
Other, otherness, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, See also News
14, 16–18, 29, 31, 37, 39, 40, Propp, Vladimir, 93, 93n4
44, 46, 47, 49–51, 52n21, Prosecution, 12, 14, 79, 110
53–55, 63, 67n9, 70–72, 75–82, Prostitution, 16, 27, 39, 42, 47, 48,
91–93, 95, 96n8, 98, 99n10, 65, 68, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 92,
102–107, 118, 119, 121, 122, 99, 106, 135–137, 140
122n2, 124–126, 128, 134–136, See also Sex, work
138, 144 Public, 3–5, 7, 9, 18, 19, 27, 45, 62,
63, 66–68, 70, 74–76, 79–83, 90,
93n3, 95, 97, 99, 105, 109, 110,
P 118, 118n1, 119, 121, 124, 128,
Paedophile, 46, 69, 70, 97 135, 137, 145
Palermo Protocol, 2, 4, 5, 26, 30, 90, sphere, 118, 119, 121, 124
91, 91n2, 120, 140 Punishment, 74–76, 107, 121, 127,
People, The, 65, 75 128
Perpetrator, 31, 36, 46–47, 49, 52,
53, 55, 74, 75, 78, 93, 96, 109,
118, 122, 125, 140, 144 Q
‘perp’, 124 Qatar, 120
Photographs, 11, 34, 53, 127
Photojournalism, 54
Police, v, vi, 12, 16, 37, 39, 42, 49, R
50, 52, 52n21, 65, 66, 71, 72, RACE Project, 2, 4
75, 79, 95, 97, 99, 104, 104n20, Refugee, 2, 18, 27, 30, 44, 50, 53, 54,
105, 109, 124, 126 71, 91, 103
Policy, vi, 3, 7, 9, 45, 50, 51, 72, 81, Reporting, vi, 2, 4, 8, 13, 18, 29, 31,
82, 118, 118n1, 119, 121 36, 41, 47, 51–53
makers, 3, 7, 45, 118, 118n1 See also News
Political dissent, 124, 127 Representation, v, 2–19, 26–55, 62,
Politika, 64n4, 66–69, 72, 73, 78 74–76, 90–97, 96n7, 99,
Pop culture, 3, 7, 45 100n11, 101n14, 102, 103,
Pornography, 42, 71, 92 107–111, 118–126, 129–138,
Poverty, 5, 8, 14, 15, 17, 39, 72, 80, 143, 144
82, 92, 96, 135, 137 Right-wing, 16
Power Romani/Roma, 46, 65, 70, 95, 96,
economic, 16 101n15
material, 13 RQTR, 27n4
social, 51, 128 Russia, 74
152 INDEX
S Story, 3–4, 13, 14, 16–18, 34,

S21, 119–140 52n21, 62, 63, 63n2, 67–79,
Salvation Army, 138, 140 67n9, 81, 99, 101, 102, 104,
Saudi-Arabia, 120 110, 128, 144
Scandinavian, 2, 18, 19, 90, 91, 94, Structural factors
105, 143, 144 pull, 8, 137
Schema, 63 push, 137
Search term, 27, 27n4, 64 Sun, The, 41, 65, 70, 75
Semantics Survivors, 12, 33, 35, 37, 43–45,
category, 32n11, 35 105
domain, 32n11, 35, 37, 38 Sweden, 105, 106
Semiotics, 18, 34, 62, 121, 133, 134,
136, 137, 139
Sensationalism, 43, 76–77 T
Serbia, 18, 30, 66, 67, 70, 71, 73–76, Target
75–76n16, 78, 83 lemma, 33
Sex noun, 32, 49
industry, 11, 17, 140 Television, 15, 19, 119, 123–125
slavery, 35, 38, 48, 50, 69, 129, 136 Thailand, 41
(see also Sex trafficking) Third sector, v, vi
trade, 17, 136, 137, 139, 140 Times, The, 27, 66
work, 7, 12, 16, 45, 68, 95, 100, Trafficking
140 adoption, 3, 6, 101, 101n14
worker, 12, 68, 81 anti-trafficking, v, 3, 17, 66, 81, 90,
workers’ rights organisation, vi 135
Sex trafficking, 5–7, 9, 11–14, 16, 26, bonded, 19, 126, 127, 140
27, 27n4, 79, 81, 90–92, 95–98, bridal, 19, 132
101, 102, 104, 109, 123, 135, charcoal, 19, 132, 133, 137
137, 143 child, 92
Slavery domestic servitude, 27, 110
modern, 13, 19, 30, 39, 48, 64, 72, force criminality/criminal activities,
92, 98, 118–141 2, 81
Modern Slavery Act 2015, 26 forced begging, 18
prison, 140 forced labour, 27, 27n4, 43, 64, 91,
white, 13, 123, 139 92, 98, 107, 129, 138
Somalian, 121 HT, 2–4, 6–9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19,
Spain, 82, 102 26–29, 31, 34–40, 43, 45, 50,
Stereotype, v, 7, 9, 68, 70, 72–74, 52, 55, 62, 64–83, 118–124,
74n15, 91, 96, 98, 108, 109, 126–135, 137–141, 144
143 human, v, vi, 2–19, 26–55, 62–83,
Stigmatisation, 11, 128, 139, 140 90–95, 97, 99, 101, 103–106,
Stolen Souls, 91 108–110, 118, 123, 124
INDEX
153
marriage, 6, 48, 128–130 Unquiet Souls, 92

organ harvesting, 27, 101 US Annual Trafficking in Persons
organ trade, 11 Report, 8
sexual abuse, 95, 96n8, 97, 100,
107
sexual exploitation, 6, 27, 27n4, 43, V
45, 50, 51, 64, 91–93, 96, 98, Večernje novosti, 64n4, 65, 66, 68–70,
110, 144 73, 75
sexual slavery, 129 Vernacular, 125
slave, 36, 40, 45, 51, 65, 95, 107, Victimisation
127, 129–138 primary, 26n1
slaveholder, 126 secondary, 12–13, 26n1, 37
trafficker, 2, 26, 46, 49, 66, 74, Victims
82, 105, 119, 121, 126, 129, blaming, 11, 26n1, 74
134, 135, 138, 140, 143, female, 13–14, 55, 91, 109, 134,
144 143
Trafficking and Violence Protection male, 7, 78, 134
Act (TVPA), 11, 15, 16 status, 10, 11, 48
Transitivity, 31, 33 Violence, 2, 8, 37, 39, 42, 48, 52n21,
Transnational, 2–19, 26–55, 62–83, 80, 82, 95, 104, 105, 108–110,
90–111, 118, 118n1, 120, 140 130, 135
Trauma, 12, 93–95, 97, 100, 101, sexual, 10, 48, 141
103, 104n20, 105–108, 141 Visibility, 92
Voice
active, 48
U passive, 78
UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner, 138 victims, 108, 120, 122, 130
Ukraine, 30, 74 Vulnerability, 5, 9, 12, 13, 15, 26, 39,
Undocumented, 5, 14, 45, 71 41, 45
United Kingdom (UK), 15, 18,
26–31, 36, 42–44, 47, 50, 52,
62–83, 120, 121, 124, 138 W
United State of America (USA), 8, 9, Wire, The, 125
11, 15–17, 30, 42, 66, 75n16, Wmatrix, 27n4, 32n11, 32n12,
91, 120, 121, 124, 132 35–38, 37n20

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REPRESENTATIONS

ISBN 978-3-319-78213-3 ISBN 978-3-319-78214-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945918

Cover pattern © Harvey Loake

Printed on acid-free paper

In September 2017, we convened a group of human trafficking specialist

Leeds, UK Christiana Gregoriou

1 Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking:

2 ‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’: An Investigation

3 Not All Human Trafficking is Created Equal:

4 “In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational

5 Who are the Traffickers? A Cultural Criminological

Charlotte Beyer is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University

Christiana Gregoriou is an Associate Professor in English Language at

Table 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK

Representations of Transnational Human

Abstract The collection introduction defines human trafficking and pro-

Keywords Criminalisation • Human trafficking • (Mis)representation •

C. Gregoriou (*) • I. A. Ras

© The Author(s) 2018 1

Trafficking involves bringing people away from the communities in which

This definition follows the UN (Palermo) Protocol to Prevent, Suppress

The Story and Truth(s) of Human Trafficking

Academic work on trafficking is similarly skewed toward analyses of

docile and at home. More recently, HT has been re-framed as a criminal

create a dominant narrative of victimization that helps define who is ‘genu-

In general, victims are portrayed as helpless and trapped. Meanwhile,

Effects of Misrepresentation on the Directly

The Victim Hierarchy

as the victims they are. Stigmatisation and criminalisation occur both

As the Anti-Slavery International (2014) report also suggests, misiden-

Socio-Political Causes and Effects

The modern slavery narrative is simplistic and fairy-tale-like, a narrative of

The Focus on Female Victims and Sex Trafficking

The Lack of Focus on Labour Trafficking and Domestic

workforce, which would diminish global inequality. In turn, many cur-

Global and Local Politics (as Cause and Effect)

[t]hrough constructing the victims of human trafficking as entirely passive

Rather than addressing their responsibilities in terms of re-evaluating

at a higher risk of exploitation than others (Alvarez & Alessi, 2012;

Aronowitz, A. (2009). Human trafficking, human misery: The global trade in

Duong, K. A. (2014). Human trafficking in a globalized world: Gender aspects of

‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’:

C. Gregoriou (*) • I. A. Ras

© The Author(s) 2018 25

Keywords Critical discourse analysis • Corpus linguistics • Human

part of a research project examining UK media representations of refu-

Table 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK news-

Diachronic Change and Spike Sample Corpus Construction

Fig. 2.1 Number of human trafficking-related articles published by UK newspa-

large ‘spikes’ or increases in HT reporting, which occur in the months of April

accompanying the spike sample corpus, we obtained facsimiles and online

Table 2.3 Breakdown of the composition of the ‘spike’ sample corpora

April 2001 471 5 1.06 347,078 1,337 0.39

Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis8

sample corpus to find sustained, or mega, metaphors, and explored these

[lemma = “…”] [tag = “V.*”]{0,1} [tag = “VB.*”] [word = “.*d” &

[] {0,4} [word = “by” & tag = “IN”]18

Frequencies were recorded on a year-by-year basis to facilitate future

Leeds, UK Christiana Gregoriou

1 Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking:

2 ‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’: An Investigation

3 Not All Human Trafficking is Created Equal:

4 “In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational

5 Who are the Traffickers? A Cultural Criminological

[lemma = “…”] [tag = “V.”]{0,1} [tag = “VB.”] [word = “.*d” &

c orpus, 1.23% as a pushed domain. A final metaphor, the Trafficking is

Criminal Act/Act of Organized Crime Story