ABSTRACT
Given the plethora of human rights violations associated with sex trafficking, examining sex trafficking news coverage can act as a case study for understanding human rights coverage more broadly, with the goal of learning how the quality and the quantity of coverage can be improved. Thus, it is important to understand why sex trafficking occurs and how the phenomenon operates, to then be able to understand the role of news media in perpetuating and combatting the problem and apply these learnings to broader human rights violations. There are several important conceptual areas that provide a foundation for understanding the complexities surrounding the idea of sex trafficking news coverage. This chapter briefly reviews them. It also presents the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is set in the perspective of the bulk of scholarship and activism that points to the existence of sex trafficking and the practice being a violation of numerous human rights.
