Unearthing melodrama: moral panic theory and the enduring characterisation of child trafficking

TL;DRAbstract

The issue of child trafficking came to prominence in the early part of the twentieth century as international migrations of children became more visible attracting the attention of Non-Governmental Organisations, politicians, and the national news media. The trafficking of children however is not a new phenomenon, indeed in the late nineteenth century campaigners were successful in lobbying for an increase in the age of consent partially as a result of the media expose of the ‘white slave trade trade’ orchestrated by the newspaper editor William Stead and the prominent social reformer Josephine Butler (Bristow 1978). The phenomenon of child trafficking has been previously characterised as a moral panic (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994: Cree, Clapton and Smith 2012). Moral panic theory goes some way towards explaining the conditions which provide fertile ground for the amplification of risk embedded in media representations, and policy discourses associated with child trafficking. This chapte

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