ABSTRACT

Stories of trafficking reported in news media, printed in government reports or featured in awareness campaigns achieve a showcase status that is only enjoyed by a select few. These stories share a set of commonalities that establish an ‘ideal victim’. This chapter analyses stories of trafficking in the public domain in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, questioning what is made visible and invisible in the narrative. Informed by Nils Christie’s (1986) anatomy of the ‘ideal victim’, I argue that trafficking stories embed a hierarchy of victims within the narrative code, linking victimhood to weakness and blamelessness. In the trafficking narrative, weakness is signified through gender, age and ethnicity, while blamelessness is denoted through respectability and, in the case of sex trafficking, resistance to sex work. The narrative focus on ideal victims fuels the problematic assumption that damsels must be in distress, that victims must be passive and that agency undermines victimhood.