Human Trafficking is Modern Day Slavery
In today’s modern era, there are people who are being detained and transported against their will for forced labor, sex work, or child enslavement (McCoy Roth, 2004). People are unaware of how broad the issue is, due to media’s framing of human trafficking. Data used from The International Labor Organization, ILO, shows that 2.45 million people are trafficked globally and out of those only 43% are used for sex trafficking (Marchionni, 2012). That means the other 57% of trafficking brings in more profit than the forced sex work. An issue is only as relevant as the media frames it to be. Sex trafficking is portrayed as making the most profit, but in reality forced labor is the majority of human trafficking. …show more content…
The way information is framed could have major impacts on how society views an issue (Koerner, M. et al, 2010). In the early 2000’s human trafficking appeared to gain more public recognition with a 160-percentage increase of news articles. American news coverage on the issue reported heavily on forced female sex work, but did start to bring labor trafficking into the equation (Farrell Amy et al., 2009). McCoy (2004) discovered that sex trafficking took up more than half the articles relating on the topic. The stories now covered all forms of prostitution and related them back to human trafficking. Media’s agenda setting began to bring human trafficking to the forefront of the general public’s mind.
Framing of Human Trafficking
The media have persuasion over how an issue is portrayed to the general public, and when it comes to human trafficking media seems to coincide with “narratives presented by the major participants in the policy process” (Gulati Girish, p. 367) of The United States.
Turn of the century would see trafficking fall under the criminalization frame, and gain popularity among powerful stakeholders and politicians in the United States (Farrell Amy et al., …show more content…
The questions that will arise are: will articles talk about forced labor at all, will national coverage be along the same lines as local coverage or will they differ, how often are men discussed as being trafficked? My first hypothesis is that news coverage will mainly focus on trafficked women and children in the sex industry. The second hypothesis will be that women are seen as helpless victims and men are seen as forced rather than
In today’s modern era, there are people who are being detained and transported against their will for forced labor, sex work, or child enslavement (McCoy Roth, 2004). People are unaware of how broad the issue is, due to media’s framing of human trafficking. Data used from The International Labor Organization, ILO, shows that 2.45 million people are trafficked globally and out of those only 43% are used for sex trafficking (Marchionni, 2012). That means the other 57% of trafficking brings in more profit than the forced sex work. An issue is only as relevant as the media frames it to be. Sex trafficking is portrayed as making the most profit, but in reality forced labor is the majority of human trafficking. …show more content…
The way information is framed could have major impacts on how society views an issue (Koerner, M. et al, 2010). In the early 2000’s human trafficking appeared to gain more public recognition with a 160-percentage increase of news articles. American news coverage on the issue reported heavily on forced female sex work, but did start to bring labor trafficking into the equation (Farrell Amy et al., 2009). McCoy (2004) discovered that sex trafficking took up more than half the articles relating on the topic. The stories now covered all forms of prostitution and related them back to human trafficking. Media’s agenda setting began to bring human trafficking to the forefront of the general public’s mind.
Framing of Human Trafficking
The media have persuasion over how an issue is portrayed to the general public, and when it comes to human trafficking media seems to coincide with “narratives presented by the major participants in the policy process” (Gulati Girish, p. 367) of The United States.
Turn of the century would see trafficking fall under the criminalization frame, and gain popularity among powerful stakeholders and politicians in the United States (Farrell Amy et al., …show more content…
The questions that will arise are: will articles talk about forced labor at all, will national coverage be along the same lines as local coverage or will they differ, how often are men discussed as being trafficked? My first hypothesis is that news coverage will mainly focus on trafficked women and children in the sex industry. The second hypothesis will be that women are seen as helpless victims and men are seen as forced rather than