Study title

United Kingdom, Serbia

Object

Text unit

Gregoriou and Ras: To address corpus compilation considerations with regard to the relevance of the included texts and the exhaustiveness of the corpus, we drew on Gabrielatos’ (2007) data collection method, which he developed as part of a research project examining UK media representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and (im)migrants. We first collected sample corpora (i.e. a selection of the intended final, full corpus) from Lexis Nexis for the periods 1/1/2000-30/9/2000, 1/1/2008-30/9/2008, and 1/1/2016-30/9/2016, to ensure that our results would not be unduly skewed toward either end, or indeed the middle, of the overall time frame. Each initial sample corpus was then uploaded to Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009) and compared to a reference corpus (a corpus that serves as the benchmark against which the primary corpus is, or our sample corpora were, compared), which in our case was the BNC Written Sampler (a corpus intended to be representative of written British English), to generate three keyword (words used significantly less or more often in the primary corpus than in the reference corpus) lists, one for each sample corpus, which were then combined. The potential usefulness of each keyword was evaluated by calculating RQTR scores (a mathematical measure indicating the potential relevant of a keyword as a search term) following Gabrielatos (2007). Further potential search terms were selected introspectively by members of the project team, based on their reading of the relevant literature. These potential search terms were also evaluated using Gabrielatos’ (2007) RTQR score technique. It was the resultant list of search terms that was used to collect articles from Lexis Nexis over the full time frame 1/1/2000-30/9/2016.Our resultant search terms were: bonded labour, child labour, debt bondage, domestic servitude, exploitation, exploitative labour, forced criminality, forced labour, forced prostitution, human trafficker, human trafficking, labour trafficking, organ harvesting, raid-and-rescue, sex slave, sex slaves, sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, sexual servitude, slave, slave trade, slaves, trafficked, trafficked victims, traffickers, trafficking (in/of) persons, trafficking (in/of) human being/s, and woman trafficking. Though the whole corpus of texts (61.5 million words) was explored quantitatively, a subcorpus (from periods in which human-trafficking related reporting was particularly high) of 67 texts was explored qualitatively. For Muzdeka’s study, the English language news media sub-corpus (consisting of 67 texts) was compared to a similarly compiled Serbian corpus. For the selection of the Serbian language texts, the most extensive Serbian news media database (EBART) was used, archiving news media output since 2003. The core search terms used are the direct translation of the search terms used for generation of the English language corpus: human trafficking, slavery, trafficking in human beings, forced labour, sexual exploitation, sex trafficking, sexual trafficking, sex slave (some of which in the Serbian language take more than one form, in which case all the existing expressions were included in the query). Beyer analysed a range of English child trafficking-related crime novels and also such novels from Scandinavia. Dearey analysed the portrayal of traffickers in the 7-part '21st century evil' documentary series (see Related Resources)