“In the Suitcase was a Boy”: Representing Transnational Child Trafficking in Contemporary Crime Fiction

Abstract

This chapter investigates representations of transnational child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction, focusing specifically on the depiction of child trafficking and its victims. Beyer examines the role of crime fiction in raising reader awareness of human trafficking and of the child victims' predicament and plight, considering didactic dimensions of the genre and how it tends to erase victims in the aftermath of crime. Through detailed examinations of representations of child trafficking and its social and cultural contexts in selected post-2000 British and Scandinavian crime fiction texts, the chapter argues that crime fiction can be seen to engage explicitly in public and private debates around human trafficking, and, through its popular outreach, has the potential to affect popular perceptions of human trafficking and its victims.

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.…”