Inhuman Traffic
In a chilling example of art imitating life, Stuart Neville’s noir account of human trafficking in the north is published just as police there have uncovered shocking evidence of a sex slave ring. He discusses the marrow curdling case of serendipity and explains why his new heroine is the very opposite of the girl with the dragon tattoo.
Anne Sexton, 14 Oct 2011
You couldn’t ask for better timing. A month before Stuart Neville’s Stolen Souls arrived in the bookshops, the police in Northern Ireland rescued six victims of sex trafficking in Belfast. Human trafficking is the subject matter of Neville’s third book and the Northern Ireland author could hardly have chosen a more topical issue if he had tried.
“I think quite a few writers have taken this as a subject over the last few years so I’m certainly not alone in tackling it, but it did seem a rich field to tap into,” says Neville. “I knew it existed, I knew it was there but I hadn’t realised to what extent, and that it was so close to home.”
Incidences of sex trafficking appear to be more common than you may think. In 2010 the PSNI rescued 23 women who had been trafficked into Northern Ireland to work as sex slaves, and agencies working with prostitutes in Ireland report that the number of women trafficked into the country is on the increase.
That Ireland has become a hub for trafficker is partly due to geography, says Neville.
“What’s also true is that the Republic of Ireland has emerged as a major channel for trafficking people into the UK simply because it is so easy to cross the land border. Once someone is in Northern Ireland they can travel freely to the rest of the United Kingdom.”
Stolen Souls picks up after the end of Neville’s second novel, Collusion, and is a Detective Inspector Jack Lennon story, but this time around Lennon is sharing narrative duties with Galya, a young Ukrainian woman, who is a victim of sex traffickers and on the run from her captors.
Galya may be a victim, but Neville wanted to avoid making her a classic damsel-in-distress. Instead, Galya is the closest thing Stolen Souls has to a genuinely good and heroic character.
“I was very worried about using her as a passive victim that needed to be rescued. Violence against women is a very popular topic but they are simply relegated to being victims, to being passive, sort of vessels for male aggression or waiting around to be saved by the white knight. That was the kind of thing I wanted to avoid.”
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