Representation of transnational human trafficking in present-day news media, true crime, and fiction

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...

My role in the project is to collect and analyse a corpus of British newspaper articles, published between 2000 and 2016, on the topic of human trafficking. A corpus is nothing more than a collection of texts, and corpus linguistics is the field that uses corpora (the plural of corpus) to draw conclusions about language use. Collecting corpora is not always a straightforward endeavour, in particular when the topic under investigation is sometimes misunderstood by the public, the media, and even legislators. For instance, human trafficking may also be known as ‘modern slavery’, and may encompass such crimes such as organ harvesting, forced labour, and domestic servitude. Furthermore, there is an ongoing debate about whether sex work should always be considered a form of exploitation and trafficking. Finally, it may not always be clear whether someone has been trafficked (i.e. moved using coercion or deception for the purposes of exploitation), or smuggled (i.e. voluntarily but ir...