Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking: A Critical Review

Abstract

The collection introduction defines human trafficking and proceeds 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 discusses 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 (gender and wealth inequality, global and local politics, and secondary exploitation). It ends by providing a rationale as to the nature of the case studies the book and its contributors consider.

The year’s work in stylistics 2018

“…Representations of human trafficking are analysed in literary and non-literary contexts over five chapters. British newspapers (Gregoriou and Ras, 2018) and Serbian news media (Muždeka, 2018) are examined, using methods from corpus linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and narratology, alongside the construction of human trafficking in crime fiction (Beyer, 2018) and in television documentary (Dearey, 2018). A second edition of the textbook Language and Power (Simpson et al, 2018) also contributes to work from stylisticians and discourse analysts preoccupied with the inequalities of the real world.…”

Free Mo Robinson: citizen engagement in response to a crime event on social media

“…It is noteworthy that C61 refers to the victims as "poor girls". Gregoriou and Ras (2018) and Ras (2020) demonstrate that media representations of human trafficking legitimise certain types of victims. Children and women, rather than adults and men, are identifiable as victims in large corpora of British national newspapers.…”

“…Thus far we have seen that trafficking narratives and the characters within them are often imbued with racialised and gendered assumptions, which hamper effective assistance to exploited workers and the development of policies to prevent trafficking (Balgamwalla, 2016). Despite the dominating view of victims correlating with the findings of Gregoriou and Ras (2018) through a particular absence of sympathy or close scrutiny of the root causes of human trafficking on this Facebook page, there are some commentators who recognise the highly problematic nature of some of the sentiments expressed. Negative judgements of social sanction are also the mainstay of stance in these five comments.…”

“…Media representations of human trafficking are problematic owing to the complexity of the phenomenon. Although men, women and children are trafficked, it is "sex trafficking" that has dominated political and media discourses, as well as popular representations in film and documentaries (Gregoriou and Ras 2018). Gregoriou and Ras (2018, 17) note that usually only those who are young and female and who are exploited in the sex trade and moved without their consent are given the label of being "trafficked".…”

Empirical Study on the Perception of Organized Crime in Romania

“…The methodology for assessing organized crime began to take shape in 2004, when it was decided at European level that a New European Common Approach (NECA) was needed [5], with the focus shifting from criminal groups and their activities to the current operational procedures and methods of gathering information.…”