Principal Investigator Dr Christiana Gregoriou on her research

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

The literature review around human trafficking representation highlighted themes surrounding the victims and traffickers being aged and gendered, there being an overrepresentation of sex trafficking, matters of victim criminalisation and secondary victimisation, the difficulty in distinguishing trafficking from smuggling, and the importance of risk factors and vested interests, among others. In response, research questions guiding the critical discourse analysis of the sample corpus include, but are not limited to:

• Are smuggling and trafficking conflated?
• What type of exploitation is highlighted?
• How are the victims and traffickers portrayed? and
• Who has agency?

To shed light on underlying ideologies relating to agency, responsibility, and vulnerability, I am in the process of exploring these media texts’ metaphor use, the naming and describing of human trafficking, its victims and traffickers, the texts’ transitivity and modality, and these texts’ reporting of speech and thought.

In a ‘Death van man jailed’ Daily Star (April 2001) article (notice the rhyme!), for instance, suffocated human trafficking/smuggling victims are referred to by means of their large number (first numbered at ‘58’, but then interestingly rounded up to ‘60’), illegal immigrant status (these are ‘illegal’ and ‘immigrants’), as transporting goods with worth (‘human cargo’ valued at £1.2 million), and by their nationality (‘Chinese’). The writer offers no indication of whether these individuals were smuggled or trafficked, what for, what the valuing of them is based on, and who exactly was behind this million-pound operation. Instead, the carrier’s sentencing – not for trafficking/smuggling, but for his inadvertent suffocating of them to death in his van – is focused on; evaluatively, he is described as ‘evil’ for letting them die, having lunch and watching films on a long ferry-crossing rather than ensuring their health and safety. Like the victims, he is referred to by nationality (‘Dutchman’). In contrast to the victims though, he is also named and hence gendered (‘Perry Wacker’- an atypical/uncommon Dutch name in fact!), referred to by age (’33-year-old’), and described by means of the vehicle (‘van’) he used to transfer them with and his capacity in doing so (‘lorry driver’). 

It is the grouping and investigating of such linguistic mechanisms in the context in which these are used that might shed light on the ways in which trafficking is represented by the press. Stay tuned for more!