Some of what I am about to say borders on heresy. Again, you say? 😊 But bear with me. Modern slavery is an issue that has plagued humanity for centuries, but we have never learn from history and continue to get it wrong. It is a pervasive problem that affects every country, culture, and socio-economic group, but almost nobody knows it. Despite concerted efforts to combat it, the number of people living in slavery is still alarmingly high and always rising.
Does that tell you we aren’t doing the right things? Well, it speaks volumes to me.
Heresy 1: we need to re-focus our responses to modern slavery on the demand reduction side instead of the almost total focus on supply side measures. For this view, I have been blackballed by oh so many agencies and governments. It cannot be said out loud. We have to date addressed modern slavery (although we only used the term human trafficking going back to the turn of the millennium) since the late 1990s as an almost exclusively criminal justice issue. I remember way back in 2004 gathering data from a number of western jurisdictions on the % of counter-trafficking budgets that were directed at law enforcement, as distinct from any other measure at all. More than 95% of all funding went to criminal justice and victim support. Now both need to be done, 100%. But not to the exclusion of actual solutions.
Modern slavery is not a criminal justice issue. It is in and of our society. Like drug use, it’s a social issue and, perhaps even more alarming but misunderstood, it’s a feature of our economic system. If better than 95% of global funding on modern slavery is directed at criminal justice responses, and victim numbers continue to rise, what does it tell you? It says to me we have it all arse-about.
The futility of criminal justice responses is evidenced by the fact that the number of victims of modern slavery is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions, but the clean-up rate is in the measly thousands. According to the Modern Slavery Index produced by the ILO, there are – well, let’s be kind and say they are in the ballpark, which cannot be assumed – around 40 million people in the condition of modern slavery.
Heresy 2: We need to add child labour numbers to that. Bizarrely, this number never include child labour, so I add the more than 160 million children as estimated by UNICEF. These children are exploited in various industries including agriculture, mining, domestic work, and manufacturing. It is heart-breaking to think that so many children are robbed of their childhood and forced to work in appalling conditions for little or no pay and I have seen the harm first hand, with my first child labour case being a boy shot and dumped overboard catching prawns destined for Western European supermarkets. Children deserve to be properly counted in the number, but that is a blog for another time.
So, despite this alarming mass of victims globally, the number of arrests and convictions for modern slavery is paltry. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported annually there are roughly year to year in the order of 17,000 cases recorded globally and just 10% of those resulting in a recorded convictions for trafficking in persons (a subset of the umbrella term of modern slavery) This is a clear indication that the criminal justice system alone cannot combat modern slavery, and should not even come close to taking a majority of funding and attention.
The reasons supply side responses dominate are both myriad and complex. First of all, policymakers don’t like to rest blame on their own society. Citizens and their elected officials might get upset. Secondly, consumers feel more reassured to think the problem is “over there” not “here”. Thirdly, we find it hard to internalise culpability. Nobody – read absolutely nobody – at Zara is self-flagellating for shopping there. Fourthly, it is far easier to blame origin countries and, by doing so, “offshore” the issue, precisely as we have done for many decades on illicit drug trafficking. As an ex-narc I can tell you we have been outrageously slow to learn the lessons on narcotics, and even negligent to not look at those lessons and apply them to modern slavery. By focusing solely on supply side measures such as raids, rescues, and arrests, we are only tackling the symptoms of modern slavery and not the root cause. This is why we need to shift our focus to the demand reduction side of the problem.
The demand for cheap goods and services is what fuels modern slavery. Consumers and companies want products and services that give them hockey-stick growth, maximising profits. This creates a race to the bottom, where companies cut corners to reduce costs. This leads to workers being paid below minimum wage, working in dangerous conditions, or even being forced to work against their will. We need to address the single root cause of modern slavery; reducing the demand for cheap goods and services.
To achieve this, we need a sea change in the way we think about modern slavery. It is not just a criminal justice issue, but a social issue that affects us all. We need to accept that modern slavery is a feature of our economies, and we all have a responsibility to combat it. We cannot simply blame other countries for this issue, as it is a global problem that affects us all. And our demand drives the entire thing.
We need to address the psychology of not wanting to take responsibility for the phenomenon, that it is someone else’s problem, far-removed, and the victims that people don’t easily identify with. Modern slavery is a hidden crime and, despite their number, victims are often hidden from view. This makes it easy for consumers to ignore the issue and continue buying cheap goods and services without thinking about the human cost.
If we are still ploughing 95% of our cash into criminal justice and other supply side measures in 10 years time, we will have enslaved at least a million more people, and perhaps many, many more. That is our negligence. Time for that sea change.
References:
Modern Slavery Index. (2020). Global Slavery Index. Retrieved from https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2020-findings/highlights/
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2020: https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/2020/GLOTiP_2020_15web.pdf
#modernslaveryawareness #endslavery #demandreduction #humantrafficking
