ABSTRACT
This study examines the role of gender in official and mediated discourse related to the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act of 2015 to combat human trafficking. Specifically, the research focuses on UK news coverage of a 2014 amendment to criminalize sex buyers à la Swedish model. Although the amendment was not adopted, MP Fiona Mactaggart’s proposal reenergized proponents of sex workers’ rights, made allies of unlikely groups, and animated a discussion of agency and victimhood. The study interrogates the ways that media coverage of the law politicized and policed gender within the framework of trafficking. It finds that themes of violence, choice, and feminism were marshaled in very different ways to link and delink prostitution and trafficking. We argue that the issue of the criminalization of demand pitted the framing acumen of feminist abolitionists and trafficking survivors against sex workers and their allies, their differences seemingly irreconcilable, leaving lawmakers to control Women's laboring bodies and audiences to work out contradictions in coverage.
