ABSTRACT

Stories of human trafficking typically focus on the victim as the central character. The depiction of familiar characters helps to make a story ‘ring true’ to the audience, and it is through the story of the victim that audiences are likely to care about the problem and act to combat human trafficking. In this chapter, I examine stories of three types of adult victims trafficked in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The ‘sex slave’ is the most familiar and dominant character in the trafficking narrative. However, the narrative has evolved to recognise other victims including brides, nannies and maids enslaved in the domestic sphere, as well as migrant men exploited for their labour. Despite this evolution, and counter-narratives posing some challenge to the dominant construction, the depiction of victims relies on traits central to the more familiar sex slave character, positioning physical and sexual violence as an intrinsic part of victims’ experiences. Characters failing to meet those expectations are at risk of being cast as another familiar character in the migration story – the ‘illegal immigrant’.