RT Article
T1 “Journey into hell […where] migrants froze to death”; a critical stylistic analysis of European newspapers’ first response to the 2019 Essex Lorry deaths
JF Trends in organized crime
VO 25
IS 3
SP 318
OP 337
A1 Gregoriou, Christiana 1978-
A2 Ras, Ilse A.
A2 Muždeka, Nina
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1813925836
AB In the early hours of October 23rd, 2019, 39 people were found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Grays, Essex, UK. This case attracted media interest across the world; in the 48-h period after the story broke, reporting on this discovery extended to newspapers not just in the UK, but also across Europe. This study uses elements of Critical Stylistics (Jeffries 2010) to analyse and compare first response articles published by European dailies in relation to the event at Grays, to address the nature of this reporting. We found that linguistic choices tend to dramatise what happened, criminalise victims, and even presume the driver’s innocence, with the international criminal network he is presupposed to be part of remaining only speculated on. Though there are attempts to distribute some accountability to governments and policies, as well as structural systemic factors such as war and poverty, responsibility for these factors tends to be diffused, and hence unallocated, this helping ultimately justify draconic law enforcement and border security policies. By highlighting linguistic trends and underlying ideologies which we in turn question, we address the need to tend to the structural causes of such transnational people movement-related crime (i.e. trafficking and smuggling) and shift accountability to governments.
K1 Migration and crimmigration
K1 Critical Discourse Analysis
K1 (Critical) stylistics
K1 International media
K1 People smuggling
K1 Human Trafficking
DO 10.1007/s12117-021-09418-x