The Effects of Media on Human Trafficking Policy and Perception

In today’s society, media has the power to reach billions of people, and to influence the way the public frames topics of interest. Whether it is popular television news channels, the internet or newspapers, media sources inform the public on a daily basis of what is happening around the world. This information, however, does not exist without discourse; the media perspective, as with any opinion, cannot help but provide a lens through which the public receives information. That lens is worded, phrased, and discussed in ways that – intentionally or not – shed light on certain areas of an issue, while leaving others in the shadows. Consequently, this reporting lens affects the way the public thinks about a certain issue, and affects the subsequent decisions they make when addressing it. Human trafficking is not a new phenomenon; in fact, it has existed for thousands of years. With the proliferation of media in modern culture, human trafficking has become a topic on the forefront of global migration issues. While distributing information in order to foster knowledge and awareness, the media nonetheless contains assumptions and biases – both intentional and unintentional – that affect the way human trafficking is viewed by both the public and the policy-makers. By using gendered lens, focusing on criminal causations, and propagating the idea that enforcement is the only solution to trafficking, the media portrays human trafficking in a very different light than true statistical evidence and academic research supports.
The goal of this paper is to reveal how Canadian media portrays human trafficking to the public, and how their assumptions affect the policies and perceptions of this issue. Methodology for this paper consisted of a collection of newspaper articles that were sourced online. I chose the top 3 English-language newspapers in Canada, in order to gather a Canadian demographic of readership: The Toronto Star (ranked number 1), the Globe and Mail

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