The purpose of this article is to fix in history the moment when certain media coverage emerged which turned the spotlight on the trafficking of Brazilian women for the sex trade in Spain. The object of the investigation is media coverage which identified human trafficking as a problematic phenomenon around the turn of the twenty first century. The sources are news reports from two widely-read newspapers, Brazil's Folha de São Paulo, and Spain's El País. The time is the period between 1997 and 2007, when references to trafficking started to appear regularly in the media.
international trafficking in women; discourses; media