by Maya Esslemont

In recent years, the concept of ‘modern slavery’ has garnered significant academic, political and media interest. However political momentum, which peaked at the advent of the Modern Slavery Act’s passage in 2015, has now waned.1 Whilst there is some public data on modern slavery referrals, decisions and the characteristics of victims, practitioners still struggle to access reliable evidence on prevention, support, or identification. Inconsistent data access makes it difficult to assess the Government’s performance in addressing the drivers of exploitation or empowering survivors to recover. The influence of ‘data gaps’ cannot be understated. In the course of this research, professionals from a wide range of sectors reported that they have had to reconfigure or completely abandon projects due to a lack of available public data. Interviewees told us that planned work exploring survivors’ access to safe housing, the criminalisation of young victims, homelessness, and survivors’ health outcomes were amongst topics shelved due to a lack of evidence. Journalists told of having to drop reports on individual survivors’ stories, or emerging concerns held by practitioners, in the absence of national statistics.

Yet, where data is published, the output was often described as inaccurate, inconsistent, lacking in detail, or undermined by the bias of data producers’ chosen framing or ‘narratives’. In the absence of modern slavery statistics which meet the needs of practitioners, participants extolled the virtues of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) or Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as forms of evidence gathering (see 3. Requesting data). However, these methods come with challenges. The diminishing quality of data responses, coupled with the dwindling capacity and confidence of practitioners, deter many from asking for evidence in the first place. Through ‘A can of worms’: Challenges and opportunities in gathering modern slavery evidence, After Exploitation evaluates the needs of a diverse range of practitioners who use modern slavery evidence as part of their day-to-day work, alongside a five-person panel of experts with lived experience (the ‘PELE’). Recommendations for improving transparency and public data were shared by practitioners and the panel, and we have grouped data recommendations into six policy areas, explored in order of recommendation frequency: Entitlements and survivor outcomes (n=41); Immigration and enforcement (n=35); Policy monitoring and transparency (n=33), NRM recording (n=32), prevention (n=28) and criminal justice (n=21).

London: After Exploitation, 2024. 82p.

By Cody Corliss

The Article examines the relationship between trafficking and enslavement in light of recent calls from activists to prosecute trafficking as an international crime. Although human trafficking has repeatedly been denounced as "modern slavery," there remains significant distinctions between the crimes of enslavement and trafficking. Enslavement is an international crime that may be prosecuted in international courts and tribunals in addition to national courts. Trafficking, on the other hand, is a transnational crime restricted to domestic courts.

Under certain circumstances, however, trafficking crimes may constitute the crime of enslavement, as the definition of enslavement in the Statute of the International Criminal Court recognizes. Given their overlap, this Article examines the relationship between trafficking and enslavement, utilizing their respective histories of prohibition and criminalization and judgments at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and European Court for Human Rights.

South Carolina Law Review, Vol. 71, No. 3, 2020, WVU College of Law Research Paper No. 2024-008.

by Stephan Conermann, Mariana Dias Paes, Roberto Hofmeister Pich and Paulo Cruz Terra

Slavery Studies are one of the most consolidated fields in Brazilian historiography with various discussions on issues like slave agency, slavery and law, slavery and capitalism, slave families, demography of slavery, transatlantic slave trade, abolition etc. Taking into consideration these new trends of Brazilian slavery studies, this volume of collected articles allows leading scholars to present their research to a broader academic community.

Berlin/Boston, DeGruyter, 2023. 347p.

By James Cockayne

40.3 million people – around 1 in every 185 people alive – experienced modern slavery or forced labour in 2016. States have committed to take immediate and effective measures to end modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking by 2030, and child labour by 2025 (Target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals). Since 2017, 92 countries, including the UK, US, China and Saudi Arabia, have committed to a Call to Action calling for ending modern slavery to be “a priority” for multilateral development action. Yet development sector voices are often notable for their absence from global antislavery discussions. This study is the result of eighteen months of work to answer a simple question: How can fighting slavery contribute to sustainable development? We used comprehensive literature reviews, quantitative analysis, surveys and mixed methods case studies to develop a thorough answer to that question. In summary, our answer is: By maximizing people’s economic agency – their ability to make choices, for themselves, about how to develop and use their own capabilities and how to use factors of production such as land, labour and capital.

New York: United Nations University, 2021. 440p.

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By The Polaris Project

From sex trafficking within escort services to labor trafficking of farmworkers, the ways humans are exploited differ greatly. Each type has unique strategies for recruiting and controlling victims and concealing the crime.

For years, we have been staring at an incomplete chess game, moving pieces without seeing hidden squares or fully understanding the power relationships between players. The Typology of Modern Slavery, our blurry understanding of the scope of the crime is now coming into sharper focus.

Polaris analyzed more than 32,000 cases of human trafficking documented between December 2007 and December 2016 through its operation of the National Human Trafficking Hotline and BeFree Textline—the largest data set on human trafficking in the United States ever compiled and publicly analyzed. Polaris’s research team analyzed the data and developed a classification system that identifies 25 types of human trafficking in the United States. Each has its own business model, trafficker profiles, recruitment strategies, victim profiles, and methods of control that facilitate human trafficking.

Washington, DC: Polaris Project, 2017. 80p.

By The International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration

Modern slavery is the very antithesis of social justice and sustainable development. The 2021 Global Estimates indicate there are 50 million people in situations of modern slavery on any given day, either forced to work against their will or in a marriage that they were forced into. This number translates to nearly one of every 150 people in the world. The estimates also indicate that situations of modern slavery are by no means transient – entrapment in forced labour can last years, while in most cases forced marriage is a life sentence. And sadly, the situation is not improving. The 2021 Global Estimates show that millions more men, women, and children have been forced to work or marry in the period since the previous estimates were released in 2017.

Geneva: International Labour Organization (ILO), Walk Free, and International Organization for Migration, 2022. 144p.

By International Labour Organization and Walk Free Foundation,

The 2017 Global Estimates of Modern Slavery focus on two main issues: forced labour and forced marriage. The estimate of forced labour comprises forced labour in the private economy, forced sexual exploitation of adults and commercial sexual exploitation of children, and state-imposed forced labour.

The estimates herein are the result of a collaborative effort between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation, in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM). They benefited from inputs provided by other UN agencies, in particular the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

In the context of this report, modern slavery covers a set of specific legal concepts including forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, other slavery and slavery like practices, and human trafficking.

Geneva: International Labour Organization and Walk Free Foundation, 2017. 68p.

By Daniel Awigra and Ariela Naomi Syifa

Seafarers working as vessel crew [known as Anak Buah Kapal (ABK, vessel crew)] are considered migrant workers, as they work overseas for economic reasons along with its entailing vulnerabilities. Human trafficking, forced labor, and other phenomena that can be categorized as contemporary forms of slavery1 are just the tip of the iceberg. A report from the Indonesian Migrant Workers Trade Union (SBMI) investigating cases between 2015- 2020, revealed how Indonesian fishers worked barely within minimum protection: worked ridiculously long hours, had their wages unpaid, and endured poor labor conditions that in some cases resulted in death.2 In “Seabound: The Journey to Modern Slavery on the High Seas” (2019), Greenpeace Southeast Asia (GPSEA) analysed the complaints from Indonesian migrant vessel crews over 13 months from 2019-2020. The report unveils the modes and types of forced labor that frequently occur onboard distant water fishing vessels, and various indicators that indicate how forced labor has been increasing. GPSEA identified several forced labor elements, including wage deduction (87%), horrible working and living conditions (82%), fraud (80%), and abuse of vulnerability (67%). The report also noted an increasing trend of reported cases: from 34 cases (eight months from December 2018 - July 2019) to 62 cases (13 months from May 2019 - June 2020).3 This indicates a lack of serious effort by the government to properly address these issues for years.

Jakarta: Greenpeace Indonesia, 2022. 48p.

By Verité

Workers are at heightened vulnerability to modern-day slavery when they have been brought to work away from their homes. This vulnerability is generated or exacerbated by the involvement of labor brokers. Labor brokers act as the middlemen, facilitating a connection between potential workers and their eventual employers. The system of labor brokerage is widespread, opaque, sometimes corrupt, and largely lacking in accountability. In some cases brokerages are substantial, well-organized companies. In others they are informal in their structure and outreach. In all cases their presence in the recruitment and hiring “supply chain” increases the vulnerability of migrant workers to various forms of forced labor once on-the-job. The debt that is often necessary for migrant workers to undertake in order to pay recruitment fees, when combined with the deception that is visited upon them by brokers about job types and salaries, can lead to a situation of debt-bondage – which, according to Anti-Slavery International, is “probably the least known form of slavery today, and yet it is the most widely used method of enslaving people.”1 When a migrant worker finds herself in a foreign country, with formidable recruitment debt and possibly even ancestral family land hanging in the balance, on a work visa that ties her to one employer and a job that doesn’t remotely resemble the salary and conditions that were promised to her by her labor broker, she has fallen into what Verité calls a HIRING TRAP. There are few global workplace problems in more urgent need of attention. This report begins by offering key findings from recent Verité research on the intersection of brokers, migrant workers and slavery. This research was performed in a variety of sectors and locales across the globe, including: the migration of adults from India to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) States of the Middle East for work in construction, infrastructure and the service sector; the migration of children and juveniles from the Indian interior to domestic apparel production hubs; the migration of adults from Guatemala, Mexico and Thailand to work in U.S. agriculture; and the migration of adults from the Philippines, Indonesia and Nepal to the Information Technology sector in Malaysia and Taiwan.

Amherst, MA: Verité, 2010. 72p.