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

We are planning to hold a Symposium to showcase the project and our findings, scheduled for September 2017. The one-day symposium held by the PACCS (Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research) ESRC-funded project on "Representation of Transnational Human Trafficking in Present-Day news media, true crime, and fiction" will take place on September the 12th 2017 .  The symposium will showcase some of our project partners’ research results (with findings split across the genres of newstexts, crime fiction, and true crime documentaries), and welcomes feedback from a group of especially invited participants.  Amongst these we are very pleased to welcome our three invited speakers: Crime fiction writer Ruth Dugdall ,  Journalist/writer/film-maker Paul Kenyon , Academic/writer/Free the Slaves co-founder Professor Kevin Bales .  We have also invited a number of practitioners, academics and policy makers who are investigating the ways in which transnat...

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...