Who are the Traffickers? A Cultural Criminological Analysis of Traffickers as Represented in the Al Jazeera Documentary Series Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to analyse and interrogate the identities of ‘traffickers’ as represented within a series of television documentaries on modern slavery. The chapter data set is a series of seven 25-minute documentaries entitled Modern Slavery: A Twenty-first Century Evil (2011) produced by Al Jazeera. Sections on trafficker identities and the usage of the term ‘trafficker’ within the different typologies represented in the documentary series are shown, that is, bridal, charcoal, prison, sex, food, child, bonded slavery/trafficking. These are represented within a complex geocultural televisual gaze (Al Jazeera English) upon the global north/west as ultimately the source of the slavery problem.

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.…”

Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking

“…Since the agreement of the Palermo Protocol in 2000, there has been an increased interest in the topic of transnational human trafficking, particularly in in the news media, but also in documentary programmes and crime fiction (Gregoriou & Ras, 2018;Dearey, 2018 . The neglect by critics of representations of child trafficking in contemporary crime fiction is puzzling because the genre offers thought-provoking and challenging depictions of different forms of child trafficking in a popular and generally accessible medium.…”

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

“…Since the agreement of the Palermo Protocol in 2000, there has been an increased interest in the topic of transnational human trafficking, particularly in in the news media, but also in documentary programmes and crime fiction (Gregoriou & Ras, 2018;Dearey, 2018). 1 This growing awareness of human trafficking has recently resulted in academic research into its representation.…”