In the early hours of October 23^rd, 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.

凌晨10月23日的^三届2019 年，在英国埃塞克斯郡格雷斯的一辆冷藏卡车中发现 39 人死亡。此案引起了全球媒体的关注；在故事爆发后的 48 小时内，对这一发现的报道不仅扩展到英国的报纸，而且扩展到整个欧洲。本研究使用批判性文体（Jeffries 2010）的元素来分析和比较欧洲日报发表的与格雷斯事件相关的第一反应文章，以解决本报告的性质。我们发现语言选择倾向于将发生的事情戏剧化，将受害者定为犯罪，甚至假定司机是无辜的，而国际犯罪网络假定他只是猜测的一部分。尽管有人试图将一些责任分配给政府和政策，以及诸如战争和贫困等结构性系统性因素，这些因素的责任往往是分散的，因此是未分配的，这有助于最终证明严厉的执法和边境安全政策是合理的。通过强调我们反过来质疑的语言趋势和潜在意识形态，我们解决了关注此类跨国人口流动相关犯罪（即贩运和走私）的结构性原因的需要，并将责任转移给政府。