Editorial: Trafficking (in) Representations: Understanding the recurring appeal of victimhood and slavery in neoliberal times

[...]collective identities are consolidated through rituals, liturgies and symbols that are constantly reproduced through their repetition.13 The mythological function of the trafficking narrative and the victim figure are most visible in the fact that the trafficking plot never varies: it starts with deception, which is followed by coercion into prostitution, moves on to the tragedy of (sexual) slavery and finally finds resolution through the rescue of the victim by the police or an NGO.14 Representations that depict women as kidnapped from their homes, coerced into migration and then imprisoned in brothels create a false dichotomy between 'ideal' and real victims,15 exclude those women who do not fit the narrow definition of the ideal victim16 and mark the boundary between citizens and non-citizens.17 Studies of media coverage, for example in Norway, have pointed to the objectification and sexualisation of Nigerian women working in the sex sector18 and those of the stripping industry in the USA have exposed the hypersexualisation of the Black and Latina women and the racialised dimension of the discursive construction of sex work.19 Representation is therefore key to understanding the historical, cultural and political specificity of the figure of the victim.By analysing data on migrant women and sex workers' experiences of raids and offering an alternative reading of the circulated raid photographs, she argues that the rights of women targeted in raids were disregarded and the harms they experienced dismissed in order to amplify the state's anti-trafficking agenda.[...]Sine Plambech discusses the ethical and aesthetic predicaments posed to attempts to produce nonsimplistic and alternative representations of trafficking and sex work migration by the genre and production necessities of documentary filmmaking.6 N Mai, Migrant Workers in the UK Sex Industry-Final policy-relevant report, ISET (Institute for the Study of European Transformations), London Metropolitan University, 2009, retrieved 26 August 2016, http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/ grants/RES-062-23-0137/read 7 R Andrijasevic, Migration, Agency and Citizenship in Sex Trafficking, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2010; M Ribeiro and O Sacramento, 'Violence against Prostitutes: Findings of research in the Spanish-Portuguese frontier region', European Journal of Women's Studies, vol. 12, issue 1, 2005, pp. 61-81; J Salt, 'Trafficking and Human Smuggling: A European perspective', I