Christiana Gregoriou

Representations of Transnational Human Trafficking: A Critical Review

The collection introduction defines human trafficking and proceeds to offer an in-depth literature review that assesses the significance of attention to the collection topic, suggests new directions for research, and provides a synopsis and integrative analysis of the collective contributions of manuscripts within the collection. It starts by detailing the story of human trafficking (the types, causes, and frames of trafficking), then discusses the effects of misrepresentation on the directly affected (draws on victim hierarchy, criminalisation and secondary victimisation), and then deals with the socio-political causes and effects of misrepresentation (gender and wealth inequality, global and local politics, and secondary exploitation). It ends by providing a rationale as to the nature of the case studies the book and its contributors consider.

Crime Writing: Language and Stylistics

Gregoriou proposes a stylistic approach to the teaching of crime fiction. She starts with an exploration of the plot and discourse distinction through which students could begin to explore crime fictional story structure, before then delving into Emmott’s frame theory which can shed light on the ways in which crime texts (mis)direct readers. She then turns to consider the importance of narrative style and viewpoint choice in relation to characterisation and reader sympathy. Ryan’s possible world theory is subsequently introduced, the ways in which it can also shed light on crime narrative structure discussed. In doing so, she discusses the typical crime fiction effect of suspense, before lastly focusing on linguistic tools with which such suspense can also be generated.

‘Call for Purge on the People Traffickers’: An Investigation into British Newspapers’ Representation of Transnational Human Trafficking, 2000–2016

Gregoriou and Ras draw on corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to examine a 61.5 million-word corpus of articles published by UK newspapers between 2000 and 2016, and on qualitative critical discourse analysis of a sixty-seven-article sample corpus in depth. Both approaches analyse the naming and describing of victims and traffickers, metaphors, transitivity, and speech and writing presentation, while the in-depth qualitative approach furthermore analyses the text (images) (multi)modally. Their findings conclude that trafficking for sexual exploitation is over-reported compared to other forms of trafficking, and that victims are generally presented as young, female, and vulnerable. As a result, non-stereotypical victims, of crimes like forced begging and domestic servitude, are not readily recognised as victims, and thereby are deprived of opportunities for assistance.