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Dr Melissa Dearey's research

My part in this project is to conduct more intensely case-study based qualitative textual analysis of a small number of key texts in the non-fictional or ‘true crime’ genre. The main focus will be on popular documentary televisual representations of human trafficking in the UK today. The primary source I will be analysing is the narrative construction of present day human trafficking in the UK in the recent Al Jazeera produced documentary Britain’s Modern Slave Trade – Al Jazeera Investigates (2016). These narratives will be compared and contrasted to others presented in contemporary popular audio-visual representations of human trafficking in the true crime format and how these shape and influence, and are shaped and influenced by, popular epistemologies and mythologies of human trafficking. In this context, I will also be exploring the development and evolution in the ‘true crime’ genre in the context of present day representations of human trafficking.

The main themes I will focus on in this and other texts are the various ‘absences’, that is to say what usually gets ignored, taken for granted, or otherwise alluded to as if it was already fully understood because it’s ‘obvious’—what ‘everybody knows’. From a social science perspective, these sorts of common sense notions ignite what C. Wright Mills [1959] (1999) famously called ‘the sociological imagination’ and more recently what Jock Young (2011) has interpreted more provocatively as ‘the criminological imagination’. This approach takes criminological research into more interdisciplinary, critical and interpretive ‘cultural’ modes of analysis, adopting perspectives and theories that are less allied to the conventional policy orientation of positivist and empirical research, instead linking the micro-ethnographies of the private lives of individuals with the broad macro scope of history to get a more nuanced understanding of the criminogenesis of human trafficking.

Much of the narrative focus in human trafficking texts is victim-oriented, and that is largely understandable, given the scale and degree of trauma and harm caused to them. But the delineation of the roles of victim/perpetrator in human trafficking as in many other types of crime while often obvious at first sight, is at the same time extremely complex when viewed in more depth. Hence the roles of the ‘traffickers’ in the true crime genre in terms of who they are and why they commit their crimes is generally less well represented, glossed over entirely, or reified under the labels of evil or villainy. Similarly, the demand for the services of the victims of human trafficking tends not to be focused upon in popular narrative accounts, often left out altogether. But nevertheless the question remains, who fuels the trade in human beings by purchasing them or their services? What are the biographies of these actors, how are they represented in present day narratives of human trafficking, and what does this tell us about this form of crime and victimization at the micro level and also within the broader history of the modern slave trade?

References: 
Al Jazeera (2016) Britain’s Modern Slave Trade – Al Jazeera Investigates. http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/uk-slavery-sex-slave-smuggling-investigation/index.html [accessed 29/11/2016].

Boyle, Sheron (1995) Working Girls and Their Men: the sexual secrets of the women who sell their bodies and the men who pay them’. London: Smith Gryphon Limited. 
Earle, Sarah and Sharp, Keith (2007) Sex in Cyberspace: Men who pay for sex. Aldershot: Ashgate. 

Malarek, Victor (2009, 2011) The Johns: sex for sale and the men who buy it. New York: Arcade Publishing. 

Mills, C. Wright [1959] (1999) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

WISE (2015, 2016) Stolen Lives [DVD]. Wilberforce Institute: University of Hull.

Young, Jock (2011) The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity Press.


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