Here at the University of Oxford, but also the Oxford Local Group of the Royal Statistical Society.
So we are combined in welcoming our speaker, Davina Dakotah.
He's going to speak today about finding today's slaves. Lessons learnt from over a decade of measurement of modern slavery.
So do we if we if we look online. And so Google has got all sorts of awards.
She's a science ambassador to international human rights devastation.
And if you order now, you can get the both wonder women of Science, where she's one of the twelve geniuses who's rocking the world.
So we get you getting there early is what it's all about.
So, yes, the debate is going to be talking to us today about the statistical challenges of some really important problems.
So, you know, they're interesting statistically. They're interesting politically and just as human being.
So it covers all the bases. So please note that this will be recorded.
And so if you don't want to be part of the recording, please turn off your sound and your your video.
And at the end, we will be taking questions so you can type your questions in the chat.
If you want to. And I can ask them on your behalf.
So we'll hand over to you. And you can share the screen and then we will ask questions later.
Excellent. Thank you, Crystal. And thank you, everyone, for joining.
In the short time that I've been able to connect with some of the amazing groups here in Oxford.
I felt so welcomed. So a shout out to the statistics equity group.
I'm so thrilled to see some of my my fellow colleagues there and great friends like Sir Bernard Silverman and Crystal Donelli and Beverly Laine.
Thank you all for joining today. And I'm really looking forward to having this discussion.
So, as Crystal noted, I've been working on modern slavery for quite a while.
The organisation I work with, its complimentary foundation. And actually, believe it or not, this plan is a little bit outdated.
We have contributed over two billion, eight Australian dollars to many issues facing the planet right now,
including removing plastics from the world's oceans all the way to eradicating modern slavery.
So for me, it's really compelling to have this background of a foundation that is well
resourced and really has science and evidence at the core of everything we do.
In addition to the work that I'm very passionate about, our modern slavery in particular,
we have quite a bit of these initiatives focussing on a lot of things that, as you can see, are really related to risks to modern slavery.
We look at have an organisation called Generation One that looks at creating
indigenous parody and really focussing on the needs of indigenous populations.
We have three by five that looks at early childhood development and education. We have the flourishing oceans work where we restore ocean health.
And actually I'm leading a project on slavery at sea, which we'll talk a little bit more about some of the slaves that we find at sea as well.
And looking in general at broader research practises. But this is the big number.
Forty point three million people around the world were victims of modern slavery on any given day in 2016.
This might seem like just another statistic. But what it represents is a momentous occasion of partnership that had not happened previously.
This number was the number we developed with the UN's International Labour Organisation and the International Organisation for Migration.
And the first time that we were able to collaborate on such a large scale of survey research and to agree on a number,
a single number to work as to work in a field.
Previously, there were competing estimates, competing methodologies, and it was just very, very confusing from an advocacy perspective.
So this was a really big milestone in our fields and we have every intention of continuing these partnerships moving forward.
In particular,
this number is comprised of twenty four point nine million people enforce Labour and fifteen point four million people enforce marriage.
Again, this may seem like just numbers,
but what it actually represents is our conscious decision to include forced marriage in the centre of this discussion.
Previously, forced marriage had not necessarily been in the central focal discussion points of a lot
of antislavery groups that it was it was something that we consider to be a problem,
but it was very difficult to tackle in a meaningful way.
However, we made a concerted decision in our measurement and survey tools to try to estimate modern slavery in forced marriage.
And we included this in a number with this decision.
We automatically included a whole component of our victim populations that had previously been on the margins of our field.
So if ever you're wondering about the the decisions that your measurement choices,
the the the decisions are making and measurement choices and what that impact can be on the field,
rest assured, they can have a huge impact on how policy is created.
Additionally, we had some of the more conventional industries of forced labour that came out of our research.
There was domestic servitude, of course, and people were forced to provide domestic work in a home.
It's a particularly challenging type of servitude to under cover because these people are typically kept within a private sphere.
There's very little interest in the public domain, making reporting law enforcement actions and other interventions very difficult.
Of course, there is forced labour and sex. There's construction, fishing, which we'll talk a little bit more about agriculture.
And that's a really compelling one from a U.S. context as well.
And globally. And manufacturing. But what do we actually do?
Why is a statistician working on modern slavery? And how how do we even do this?
How do these two things come together? Fundamentally, I think the real challenge in our work is to find hidden populations in uncontrolled spaces.
Generally speaking, our survey research does a pretty good job of finding relatively hidden populations in relatively conventional settings.
That means that we use household surveys. We use a technique called multiple systems estimation, which is actually pioneered by our very own.
Sir Bernard Silverman is on the call today in the United Kingdom and has since been continued
and reviews that in a partnership with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Romania,
Serbia, Ireland, the Netherlands.
And it's been really compelling. So we have these research methods. And I'll tell you a little about today.
But the real challenge is that all of these things,
the way that we get better at finding conventional slaves that are that are generally hidden population is then by zeroing in on what we're missing.
So when we think about forced conscription and child combatants, these are often in places that are plagued by conflict.
Those are often not places that can safely allow field enumerators and survey enumerators to do their work.
So it becomes something that we can focus on because we recognise we recognise the issue as it exists.
And we know that we we need to try to find a way to measure that.
There's a legal logging in the Amazon that's typically Peru, Brazil,
and that's where a lot of timber is is exported to major economies all around the world.
What's really interesting about that is, of course, it's a highly mobile network.
As soon as they've depleted tree and forestry resources in a certain part of the country,
they're moving on to another location and it becomes very difficult to intervene and to protect these populations.
Additionally, they tend to be in quite isolated settings. So even intervention becomes quite dangerous.
There are also deep sea slaves. So I mentioned before that I'm working on a project on slavery at sea.
And I'm really excited about this domain in particular, walk free as a part of a broader,
decent work in fisheries expert working group work with Greenpeace over the last two years to try to really talk to another major research group.
The Department of Labours list of goods made with forced and child labour,
and to advocate for the fact that we know that distant water fishing fleets in
China and Taiwan had extraordinary levels of abuse where people are stuck on
these fishing vessels and these distant water fishing fleets and distant water
means that it's outside of the territorial domain of most of these countries.
And so often they may claim that they're not responsible for what's occurring.
What makes this really interesting is by advocating with colleagues that we've built relationships with over years,
we were able to say that actually the measurement and inclusion of these distant water fishing products on your lists
will help do more for this regulatory framework than than anything we could individually advocate for on our own.
And this year, we were so thrilled to be successful in that effort and to have both Taiwan and China
named as responsible for the fishing products from their distant water fishing fleets.
This is incredibly significant. That means that essentially overnight with the publication of this one list, that now China and Taiwan,
we're in a position of having to explain how their distant water fishing fleets were not engaging in forced labour rather than acting with impunity.
So it's a really powerful example of how our scholarship and our research, when appropriately applied,
can have an incredible and exponentially effective impact on the real world.
What's really great, too, about this example is that these are thousands of fishing fleets that were magically brought under scrutiny.
And it is it is a huge personal point of pride.
I'm really excited that policy can be acted that way, especially in the backbone of measurement.
We also talk about child soldiers a lot. And there's been scholarship in the United States that indicates that actually in most developed countries,
all forms of modern slavery exist except for child soldiers.
And it may make sense, but in the absence of ethnic or or official government conflicts, that there may not be a space or scope for child soldiers.
However, I was really interested to notice that when my sister was volunteering in the south side of Chicago,
which is an area known for rampant gang activity, that a lot of her students were affiliated with gangs,
but not because of any of the conventional reasons you might suspect they were affiliated
with gangs because law enforcement did not have positive control in their neighbourhoods.
And so it became an act of survival to either affiliate with the local group that could
then provide some form of protection or to risk not having any affiliations at all.
So when I thought about this, I've.
Looking in all developed countries in particular about how child child soldiers may be reconceive reconfigured and reconceptualized in this context,
especially since, of course, this is an issue that is not a stranger to any developed countries.
And then, of course, irregular migration and refugees. The Syrian conflict, I think, is a humongous failure as an applied statistician.
I look at that and I think about the millions of people that are missing the multilateral opportunities.
We had to intervene and to provide protection that we effectively leave.
We failed. We failed our in our knowledge of what happens when governments and in civil conflict take over.
We've really not lived up to what I feel is our burden of responsibility here.
Unfortunately, I have to say a very similar trend has uncovered has unfolded in Venezuela.
So from an academic perspective, I think we hold ourselves to really high account in terms of what we need to do to understand not just the drivers
that led to to risk to modern slavery and other forms of abuse from these these societal and governmental collapses.
But we also need to think very carefully about these routes for migration and where are these vulnerable populations are ending up.
And so we've commissioned some really interesting research on the Colombian and Venezuelan border.
And we've been looking at this will continue to be an area of focus for us.
So as statisticians, as people that are interested in having an impact on the world, this is something that I really want to impress,
is that I often find that we we have such a responsibility to the broader societal and international relations flows that we can have an impact.
It's just a matter of us being as proactive as possible and really using our policy tools when they're available.
It's also really interesting is that this is not just a tough issue emotionally or in terms of like the people it's affecting that we always keep.
Front and centre in all of our work.
It's also often done in a very challenging context, meaning that often governments will take umbrage with our findings.
And so there is quite an interesting anecdote where in 2017, just before we published the global estimates of modern slavery,
we actually I personally received an award from the Times of India,
an Indian American working on modern slavery, specifically tied to our work on the Global Slavery Index.
But in general, just on modern slavery. After our report with the ILO was published,
this Guardian article came out that alerted us that the Indian intelligence service had notified Prime Minister
Modi to look into our group because they were concerned that our research might tarnish the reputation of India.
Of course, this is really ironic because they had on one hand awarded and recognised that type of prevalence research,
knowing very well that, of course,
a country like India with a huge population and a lot of vulnerability factors will have higher rates of modern slavery,
not to mention the original survey research that we also conduct in the region.
But then that our research could so threaten a leading government that this would be a priority for them.
And so for me, it's almost another point of privilege for us as statisticians and people working in this space.
I never thought that we could have an impact like this where any government's
intelligence service would notice or or care about something we publish in a report.
And so it's just another note to say that the work we do can have such a profound impact on GUNGUN governments and policies.
And what's really great is that in order to to look into this research, to try to discredit it so that it wouldn't hurt the reputation,
it actually meant that there was there was validity and and concern about those findings in the first place.
So it was a it was a really interesting moment for me personally.
And I know for our team it's it makes me very proud all the time that we have the conviction to follow through on on these human rights issues.
Another very difficult context that we addressed pretty comprehensively in the 2018 Global Slavery Index.
I'll tell you a little bit more in a second. It was North Korea. So these this is state imposed forced labour.
It's where we have substantial,
credible reports that North Korean government officials are using labour camps to punish political dissidents and minority populations.
And so coming after a government like that and being very clear about this is our position.
And this is how we're estimating. It was also quite contentious. But it was something that was really important.
And we worked closely with a North Korean defector and survivor, young MI Park.
And she's an inspiration to all of us and really,
really has spoken candidly about how doing this research shines a light on what she's she and others have experienced.
And it's the first step to preventing it in the future. Now, to give you a little bit background on the global slavery index.
So one of the really interesting things is that we try to look at global slavery pretty comprehensively.
We have our prevalence estimations of modern slavery, country by country.
And that's informed a lot by our survey research programme. And, of course, our other quantitative assessments.
I'll tell you about that in a minute. And we have a government response database.
So the government response database is really compelling because it goes country
by country and indicator by indicator of including references to all the sources.
So if you have a question about what any given country is doing on a specific aspect of modern slavery intervention,
this is a great way to double checking to see what what the sources are for.
Are our assessments. Additionally, we also share these questionnaires with NGOs and governments.
So you'll have an opportunity to see that, for example, in the United States, if we have protections on the books for migrants,
victims of modern slavery, so foreign nationals that require immigration protection.
But we don't live up to providing that protection than actually instead of getting a point for providing the legal basis for that protection.
If it's not offered and in reality, then it is given a demerit point.
So it's an interesting way to look at this nice fact checking.
And of course, there's a vulnerability model which helps us to understand the risk profiles of each country relative
to each other so that we can make the survey research that we have extend that much further.
And today we'll talk specifically about prevalence and vulnerability. So how do we measure modern slavery in the twenty eighteen Global Slavery Index?
We effectively used 48 countries as a sample of the world. Now, as you might know, this is not a full proof exercise.
Of course, these are not a completely random sample. They are guided by where countries are.
Which countries can perform surveys? Nationally, representative household surveys.
And also, it's not easy to capture a lot of these.
The aspects of these crime, for example, for sexual exploitation is a very difficult thing to discern in Face-To-Face interviews.
Additionally, surveys are limited. We can't interview people that are currently institutionalised, that they can't be in military barracks.
We can't they can't be incarcerated. So there are populations that would be a potential interest to us that are sometimes off limits.
In our survey research, additionally, of course, children are protected.
And so it is also another population that's a bit difficult to identify.
But the great part about our survey research is that it is not just numbers.
We also have these free response, verbatim opportunities where people can share in their own words what their experiences have meant to them.
Now, this is really valuable for us also from a quantitative perspective,
because we can look at how they've described their experiences and also use that as a a fact cheque for
how our survey enumerators in the fields have described their situation as they've interpreted it.
We also just have an opportunity for people around the world who are largely unheard.
To share what their experiences have been like.
And it helps us to understand the magnitude of what we're dealing with, especially from a policy perspective.
For example, in 2018, the most common reason why people stayed in a situation of forced labour and modern slavery was because of withheld wages.
Now, that's a really interesting policy point. That's a compounding issue.
That means that when wages are withheld, you stay in that position of exploitation, hoping that you will recoup those wages at some point.
But the reality is that this only continues to push you further and further into and keep you in these situations.
So it's a really interesting way to understand how people see these situations in their own lives.
For vulnerability, we actually look at several risk factors and we use we create dimensions that reflect some of
the biggest and most significant challenges we have in the modern slavery response space.
We're looking at governance issues. That's typically the most one of the most universal issues,
that if a government is unable to provide stability and care to its citizens, but often a lot of other protections are falling short.
If there's a lack of basic needs, that is also another indicator that a population is vulnerable to modern slavery.
There's inequality. Disenfranchised groups and, of course, effects of conflict. The thing to remember is that this is a global vulnerability model.
So this isn't tailored to regions or even one given country.
And for example, so in Venezuela, of course, the governance issues are a pervasive challenge that have led to a lot of these other things.
So there's a there's a really interesting way that we think and talk about vulnerability
that that leads us to really interesting opportunities for measurement as well.
We are also looking this year at regional vulnerability models.
So creating models that are independent of the ones we use for these global estimates
and allowing for more variability and more unique data sources for each global region.
So keep an eye out for that. We're really quite excited. And then, of course, this how we estimate prevalence.
So we look at these individual and country level risk factors that we generate from the vulnerability models,
and we we build models that predict modern slavery on that basis.
Then we look at regional level estimates of modern slavery from our global estimate work, and we allocate that out by region.
And then again by country based on these risk profiles. And then I'll note again a government response.
I really encourage you to cheque that out if you have any questions about any of these milestones and how they affect modern slavery.
But this isn't enough. It is not just research. It is actually about putting research into practise.
Now, to that note, we have a really robust opportunity here to look at not just the global slavery index and our research there,
but we also work with faith communities to it through the Global Freedom Network to get them to understand how
they can play a really positive role in empowering their communities and protecting them from modern slavery.
We also have the Bali Process Government and Business Forum,
which actually works with major government and industry leaders throughout the Asia-Pacific region,
including the United States and other major governments, where we attempt to understand how to bridge this divide between business and government
to make sure that protections are in place on every stage of our supply chains.
And then we, of course, have really strong relationships to the Freedom Fund, which some of you may know is based in London.
And they do some excellent work in tritely interventions before they're brought to scale in the field.
And of course, we're looking at some of these really interesting questions.
So if any of you tune in for the International Women's Day event next week,
there will be some more discussion about the female respondents and victims that
we've identified through this research and how this plays out in practise.
And you can see that, generally speaking, this is how the distribution went for twenty eighteen.
Another note on the Bali process. Government and Business Forum is that I've been really honoured to serve as one of the founding
members and and longstanding members on a commission with the US Customs and Border Patrol.
Something that you may not know is that the U.S. government has what we called withhold release orders, withhold release orders,
allow us to on the basis of scientific evidence and sufficient due diligence on their part to confirm what our research indicates,
that they can actually prohibit the importation of goods made with forced and child labour.
On that same list I mentioned before that that identified fishing products from distant water fishing fleets in China and Taiwan.
They can actually prevent those those goods from entering the US government and allowing consumers
to unwittingly purchase them as an extension of what we do with business and government.
This is a huge opportunity.
So when we look at a lot of the goods that come from that same list that we work with that is published by the U.S. Department of Labour,
we're looking at cotton that is imported from Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and is Pakistan.
We're looking at apparel from throughout the world.
We're looking at gold from the Democratic Democratic Republic of the Congo, of course, North Korea, even Karroum.
You've got fish from a lot of world industries. You've got timber, Brazil, Peru, also North Korea and electronics, laptops, computers, mobile phones.
And what's really interesting, of course, is that we will then use this data driven process to have an immediate impact on policy.
But what's really interesting is that regardless of this amazing policy tool,
there's still so many goods that are making it into the United States is one of the G20 countries we analyse.
If you look at the 2018 Global Slavery Index, you'll find all of the G20 countries represented, including, of course, the United Kingdom.
And you'll see how much of each of these goods are imported into our countries every year,
effectively giving our our fellow citizens an opportunity to be a part of these supply chains without without realising it.
Something else I'd like to mention is our assessment of how we're doing in terms of achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals,
especially as it relates to Target eight point seven, which is modern slavery.
The sad reality is that we were not doing very well. Fundamentally, there are so many gaps in identification legislation,
support services and business engagement that we will need to recoup so much of this work in order to meet our benchmarks.
Additionally, of course, that's only been made worse with the contacts with Koban 19.
That has set us back quite significantly in terms of our research, in terms of our research efforts and abilities to to combat that crime.
And of course, that brings us to the end of this part of the presentation.
I think at this point, Crystal will be able to take questions.
Indeed, Bernard, did you want to make a point about forced marriage?
Put a line in there making this campaign how it's dealt with in the U.K.
So it's that it's interesting that it's an engine statistical question because in this country,
we don't count forced marriage as parts of modern slavery, the modern slavery.
So I should tell my camera on this route. It's the Modern Slavery Act.
It was brought to you after the forced marriage of the Modern Slavery Act has very,
very draconian potential penalties up to life imprisonment, forced marriage, not quite so far.
But we we are not coming what is right or wrong.
But we consider these as two separate things. So if you attempt to quantify the number of victims, you'd have to put look at both buckets separately.
If you were working in this country, hung up. So I would say is the definition of forced marriage.
In some countries, it's not quite the same.
It's not the same as arranged marriage. It's because of an arranged marriage where each partner is free to enter into the marriage or not.
It's not a forced march. It may not be the way. It may not be culturally.
What we do. But it's in many parts of the world. It's entirely normal and it's what goes on.
And that's just not the same. But on the other hand, of the range marriage, where one of the where the bride usually is.
It's like twelve. That would be a forced march because they can't give consent that they think they are not legally able to give consent.
So therefore, she is by definition of forced marriage.
It's a whole separate issue, but it's quite interesting statistically because it shows how definitional issues make it often very,
very difficult to make international comparisons.
I'd also say that even the phrase modern slavery into being, you know, this, but other people present marriage in the United States.
It's not really used on. The reason is because of the enormous, enormous consciousness of chattel slavery,
of the kinds of slaves supposedly abolished in the 19th century and not the Dutch, the situation where you can legally own another person.
No, modern slavery is not about legally owning other people. It's just about coercing them, keeping under control and so on.
So most slaves who were legally owned were in conditions that we would regard as those in modern slavery.
But if they are not the same thing.
But to avoid the confusion in the United States, they talk about human trafficking, which is sort of the same thing.
Not exactly. So it's another definitional issue. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Solomon. You're absolutely right. So you raised a few really great points.
I'd love to stand out. And so the first part, modern slavery is the definition. Of course, our work is global in scope.
So that does mean a lot of things about how individual countries legislate and count.
Modern slavery themselves. And also how we have to do our measurements so that it's it's comparable country to country.
So you're absolutely right.
There is a meaningful distinction and a deliberate distinction, often between forced marriage and modern slavery and legislation and other points.
And that's actually why I'm interested in from a policy point, why when we published our global estimates,
we did publish the sub estimates of the twenty four point nine forced labour number and then the fifteen point four forced marriage number.
And that was specifically for exactly as you mentioned, that to separate that out.
I will also note that, as is often the case and I know you know this.
Sarah Silverman, that the reality is we are typically undercounting a lot of our our crime.
I mean, it is incredibly the standard by which we define modern slavery.
Even forced marriage is exceedingly high. So exactly what you've described, Bernard, when you talk about child child marriage,
we are talking often about prepubescent children that are very clear violations of what a marriage arrangement should be.
Additionally, you're absolutely right. Arranged marriages are separate from forced marriage, assuming that the children.
Sorry. Assuming that both parties are adults and able to consent.
So that has been a really interesting, really interesting component of this research.
So we are also looking at commissioning some forced marriage services is specifically addressing this.
And it's been really compelling because often the countries where we want to measure this,
there is already a historical and cultural legacy of arranged marriages.
And even from my perspective as someone of Indian descent, I think this is really compelling because we start talking about bridal payments
and dowries and things that are commercial exchanges in the process of marriage.
The other thing I'd like to say on that topic is that it's I've thought about this for a very long time.
And one of the difficult things for me is that.
Understanding the level of agency that any women in these societies can yield and they may not have been able to make any educational personal
choices in their life up until that point is very difficult to to understand and especially for respondents to articulate on their own behalf.
So what will be really interesting in the future is these broader strategic interventions and goals around increasing women's equality,
women's empowerment in these spaces, and then being able to fully understand the context in which arranged versus forced marriages might be occurring.
And also a note on the historical slavery piece, because it's so interesting in the U.S. context right now.
But Bernard is absolutely right. This has been especially in the context of the Black Black Lives Matter movement.
It's been a very interesting example. It's been an interesting example of how people are addressing this issue and how they view it.
So Bernard is absolutely right. We have a historical legacy in the United States and honestly globally of legal
slavery that is the the public institution of slavery where it's permitted by law.
And, of course, that was even only just ended in Mauritania and then in the 90s.
So that was not even all that long ago in some contexts. And of course,
modern slavery research and surveys in those countries indicate higher rates of modern slavery because it does
take a long time for those social norms to catch up those to the legal the legal standards that are being set.
What's interesting about how we define modern slavery, however,
is that regardless of the national contexts, we do try to identify these common these common trends.
These force fraud, coercion. And like these these methods that are comparable, regardless of how someone is themselves, may define the situation.
And so it's often very interesting that we're not typically asking someone if they themselves are a modern slave or a victim.
We're asking them about the conditions under which they work and live. And then based on those answers, then determine a bit more about the situation.
But, yeah, thank you for that. This are very interesting points for.
Please tell me also, of course, the victims of forced marriage and the victims of forced labour.
It is entirely possible to be both. So actually, there's some overlap as well.
So what you say is absolutely true, and that's an interesting question about how broadly you should define things,
because there's of these things are a bit of a grey area.
In other words, it's just never quite clear where the line is, because in a way, none of what we do is,
you know, how much when does when does when the social pressure turned into coercion.
Right. That's exactly right. It's quite difficult to say. And it is essential to submit a global treaty.
And so should you focus on the worst the most egregious cases or should you cast in that light?
And there are actually arguments, both of those points, I would say, about a bit of good background for people who may not know.
Of course, nothing in the Modern Slavery Act was legal before the Modern Slavery Act was the first out in the world.
We were the first country, the world that did this was to bring together the various different forms of exploitation,
not being, you know, you name it and put them into a single into a single serious thing.
And it just had an amazing effect on the public consciousness.
The world, while people used to say, well, this sort of thing goes on, isn't a terrible no.
It is genuinely something right across the political divide. People actually realise it's not and we need to do something about it.
So at least we become aware and at least we have some will to do to the pandemic will not have helped the world.
I think got actually my my reason for talking on and on is to give other people a chance to form a question so I can not tell from this incident.
Thank you. OK. Yes. Great that we have accumulated some questions in the meantime.
So I will. So one of our postgrads that asked about.
Can you give us some examples of survey questions that asked are the respondents victims themselves?
And if so, how do you ascertain those populations? How do you find them to ask these questions?
Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, Brian. That's a great one.
So the kinds of questions we ask are typically around the labour situation and
actually our survey tools available on our Web site at Global Slavery Index dot org.
If anyone's interested in looking at it.
But what we do ask fundamentally is we define forced labour as situations that you cannot that you are not able to leave through whatever means.
And there are few levels of indicators that someone can say.
These are the reasons I didn't leave, that I was physically detained, that there were threats of.
Harm that I was my documents were taken away.
The various conditions that have come through.
What are most consistently cited in lots of national legislations around modern slavery are typically a lot
of the things that have informed the International Labour Organisation standards on how we constitute force,
fraud and coercion often. We will find respondents that are victims themselves.
And there are ethical review protocols that go into place, referral services that need to be made available.
But what's really interesting is sometimes people will be in a very extreme situation of labour exploitation,
but have not yet conceived of themselves as as someone who's in a situation of modern slavery.
And that's always a very difficult thing to navigate.
Which is why we often use that forced labour terminology and we use the conditions around the work to really guide the questionnaire.
It's really about what are the conditions of work? What has this happened to anyone in your close family network,
which is also how we get at self and proxy responses to help make those two thousand
samples of respondent samples and even large countries kind of stretch a bit more.
And of course, they're weighted differently, but it is still absolutely an opportunity for people that are in those situations to respond.
And and actually,
a good example would be a lot of South Asian men who have historically worked in the Gulf face very exploitative situations once they're there,
often meeting a lot of the conditions that we would need for a modern slavery.
But because it's generational harm, it's something that their parents have done,
their brothers, their uncles, everyone they know is subject to that type of labour standard.
It's often not something that they would they themselves would consider an egregious form of abuse.
So it's just a really interesting thing how these these conceptions of work standards,
labour exploitation standards, are gendered and and sometimes internalised,
especially when we're talking about survey research that is focussing on on respondents providing their own account,
which is also, I think, to Bernhard's point about the grey area and how how you make that determination.
I would say we ere on the side of the more grievous forms.
But again, based on how we describe these situations, it's up to the respondent to determine if their situation fits or does not fit.
And that's fundamentally, I think, what would be guiding a lot of the survey, research driven work.
So there is another question specifically about North Korea.
Could you talk a bit more about your research that you mentioned on North Korea and how the testimony of
someone from North Korea was used to help your analysis when presumably you don't have access to very many.
Survey respondents? Not much data. Yes. Thank you.
Kim, that's a great question.
So North Korea, as with all state imposed forced labour examples, are very difficult to get complicit or permissions to work in those contexts.
It's a lot of safety issues. And, of course, we need to substantiate all of these claims.
So there's some really innovative work being done in terms of satellite imagery and identifying where a lot of work camps may be.
There's also a lot of really valuable defector information. And if you also look at our Global Slavery Index that our Web site,
we actually have a standalone report that we undertook in partnership with Leiden University,
where there is a massive amount of North Korean defector research fundamentally sharing their perspectives.
We talked about recency and how those how that was going. And fundamentally informing a lot of that work.
I would say that we are really committed to bringing a light to a lot of those types of situations because, of course,
state imposed forced labour is a bit of a different beast than every country in the world that has some form of modern slavery.
State imposed forced labour means that the very entity that has the most potential to enact positive change,
to prevent this, to stop this crime, to intervene is actually complicit.
And so for us, that's a huge obligation to address this internationally.
Also, our partners at the International Labour Organisation and others at the U.N. have been monitoring that situation for a very long time.
And so luckily, that partnership yielded a lot of really valuable data.
And of course, that's also why we published the report from that we jointly undertook with Leiden University on the defector research,
because that really important qualitative data, it really supports a lot of this other work that we're doing.
So thank you for that. It's incredibly difficult context to operate in, but so very important to to try addressing.
So another question. Can you explain why your sample of 48 countries, which have no rich Western representation rockets,
most of EU, USA, Canada, Australia had no representation from the Middle East?
How do you know your model applies to Western countries? Yes.
Thank you, Brian. So this is actually a really great a really great question.
Survey research is best suited to developing countries.
And the reason is because in most developed countries, rule of law is generally quite a bit stronger.
And so a two thousand person survey will often not yield enough respondents or proxy reports of situations of modern slavery.
Additionally, we work with Gallup World Poll, and because of that,
they actually commission in developed countries like the Western countries you mentioned there and Australasia.
They commission all of their work on phone surveys. Much of that work and phone surveys instead of face to face surveys for us for a topic like this,
especially given the potential cognitive dissonance with what we're describing and respondents identifying this in their own situations.
We, of course, prefer face to face surveys, which is something that, of course,
we're investigating even more now in this coded environment and seeing what the differences really are there.
Now, to get around this, because we do know that this is a significant limitation of the survey research.
We have undertaken multiple systems estimation in developed countries.
So Sir Bernard Silverman led the very first application of multiple systems estimation, which is effectively capture,
recapture across three or more administrative lists of victim data where the victims themselves are identifiably unique.
And so we can understand that a victim A appears on a law enforcement list and a immigration list,
but not a social services list that perhaps we can estimate the SCC,
the universe of victims, that we're missing the missing population,
the stark figure since Bernard and our friend Kevin Bales and Alice Olivia Hesketh have done this.
We've actually been able to take the method further.
We've applied this in Ireland, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and a few other countries.
It requires quite a bit of really quite a bit of collaboration with the national government.
They have to kind of trust the method, trust us, and have enough data capacity to even collect the data in a meaningful way.
Australia has also released a multiple systems estimate, national prevalence estimate, and the United States has done this in various states.
And I'm working with federal government to see if we can do something nationally as well.
One of the interesting things about multiple systems estimation, though, is that, of course,
our reliance on government health data means that there are some significant challenges,
that there are sparsity issues that often there's not a lot of overlap between some lists.
And of course, that's a necessary component for estimation procedures. And so there's actually a special edition in crime and delinquency coming out.
This basically in the next couple of months that really highlights all of the advantages and disadvantages
that we've made to date in terms of how all the all the challenges are encountered in that method.
All those strengths and then also some of the ways that we've overcome it.
Additionally, we've also had several of the leading scientists applying multiple systems estimation in modern slavery.
Right. Even a response to a public journal reflecting on a lot of the misconceptions and even other academics
in terms of how this method has been applied and how it how it really should be applied and used.
And so it's a great lesson for all of us as statisticians and programmers out there that we can provide the packages, we can provide the publications.
But often the application requires so many unspoken assumptions and so much skill that having this open dialogue for
researchers is really important because an initial article that misunderstood the application of this work could
have been corrected if they had just reached out to the original authors rather than kind of making all these really
egregious errors and then embarrassingly having to be addressed in the public forum in which they were published.
So it's it's an interesting question.
I think as well just how we conduct ourselves as academics and how we really have collegial and collaborative responses.
Right. And so there was a question about you alluded to it briefly about the impact of covered on modern slavery.
And so can you comment on how research can address this and can actually quantify what the impacts are?
Yes. Thank you. Press on. Thank you. Jumpier. That's a really you know, it's a really pressing question that's been on all of our minds.
So Cauvin is impacted, all of us in very many ways. But in the modern slavery research field, these ways have been manifold.
So one of those is about survey and research delivery. We still have an ongoing and very robust survey research programme that will now be
delivered in some in some phases by telephone and in some phases in Face-To-Face contexts.
So what will be really interesting from a methodological perspective this year,
we'll be comparing those methods and determining how that impact has been driven by Kovin.
Additionally, we published a report called Stacked Odds this Year that looked at pervasive issues
in gender inequality and how that contributed to modern slavery risk for women.
And I'll actually be talking about that in an International Women's Day event coming up soon.
But what's really interesting is that was a tremendous experience in fielding research with frontline responders throughout the Koban epidemic.
That meant that NGOs and frontline organisations with whom we rely on to collect data and to report on
situations were already overwhelmed and facing more funding restrictions than they even normally would have.
They. We also know from some of our research on the Columbia Venezuelan border that Cauvin has meant that there is less law enforcement intervention.
There's a lot less ability for children and others to be identified.
In fact, some of our colleagues doing research in Kenya have actually found that because of covered restrictions,
commercial sexual tourism of children has now been shifted into the existing robust infrastructure that that was there for for online pornography.
And so now those children who previously could have been identified through interventions by law enforcement on the streets and identified more
clearly are much more difficult to find post coalbed because they'll be basically being harmed and and filmed and exploited in private settings.
So it's a very interesting way to see how it is impacted modern slavery in the international museum.
And also I'll be talking about a report we published during this period called Protecting People in a Pandemic.
So without covering too much the same content. One of the things that has had an impact are the levels of protection on our most vulnerable
workers globally have tremendously declined their access to health care protective equipment.
Even now, vaccines has been politicised and really limited.
And so it is going to be there's going to be a tremendous impact.
Also, a lot of the Cauvin restrictions have meant that children around the world who
are already incredibly vulnerable were not able to physically go to school.
And so now you're going to see a lot of an earlier entrance into child labour, forced marriages.
I mean, we we anticipate this having a tremendous effect. OK, thank you very much.
So I had a question which I thought it was going back a bit because, as you mentioned, of forced marriage.
Because we want to be particularly careful about not having a sort of colonial
attitude and taking what we see as our standards and putting them on someone else.
I mean, how do you decide what what is a sufficient age to consent to a marriage?
Because presumably that's different legally in in different countries.
Yes. How do you decide when someone is old enough to make that decision?
Yeah. Thanks, Christiane. This is, again, one of the richest areas for discussion in terms of how we make these types of determinations.
There's actually no age limit necessarily in terms of how this is done.
And remember, because a lot of it's by survey research. So it really comes down to the respondent themselves determining if they were or were not
in a forced marriage based on how based on the factors that might contribute to that.
Did you willingly agree to your marriage? Were you willing? Were you able to leave that marriage?
Was it was it something you chose? We wouldn't impose an age limit externally necessarily.
But I would say that given the cultural context globally,
often people who may otherwise have been considered in a forced marriage where they they did not consent, they did not want to participate.
They may still be less willing to self identify as someone who has been in that situation because it's
so culturally pervasive that there is less choice in agency in deciding those those those standards.
And I think in general,
also our survey research has a severe limit and that we are unable to interview anyone younger than 15 years of age for child protection reasons.
So typically, most of the survey respondents were speaking to our people, 15 and older,
who are responding about these experiences either in their lives or their immediate family network.
So it does come down to kind of the interpretation of the survey tool and how
whether or not someone could willingly or unwillingly enter that marriage.
But it's less about us putting those kinds of hard kind of parameters around it.
And rather that decision being being guided by the respondents themselves and their interpretation of the tool,
which, of course, our survey tools go through cognitive testing.
We do really try to make sure that the right concepts are coming across as we intend them to be and as inclusive as they can be.
The other thing about this is this is an interesting point about implicit colonialism in research in terms of human rights standards.
So how do we make sure that what we are advocating for is sensitive to cultural variation?
And this is where the challenge really becomes. As we mentioned earlier about women having agency in their lives in general.
So it becomes really difficult to assume or to understand that a respondent is free,
is truly free to make a lot of decisions when that hasn't been the legacy or the cultural experience that they may have in that country otherwise.
So I'm really excited that our research specifically on women's and equality is going to lead to interventions that are broader than modern slavery,
interventions that are meant that providing more empowerment opportunities in whatever whatever context that means,
it better educational opportunities, if that's whatever choices can, can then be made by the people themselves.
And it'll be interesting to see if any of these things have an impact on how the agency in choosing marriage partners is defined in the coming years.
My story, my truck on the front. We are one of the youngest countries in Europe.
In the UK, you can get married at 16 with parental consent on that.
It's actually not the case in most European countries and most comfortably.
And UNICEF thinks 18 should be the age of consent to marriage on their own.
Many countries with marriage age under 16 states have some states that allow for 14 with parental consent.
That's really quite unusual. And so the international United Nations standard is 18 and most countries choose 18, 16.
I'm very unusual here. I knew, you know, with parental consent.
All that means, of course, that can be whites' fools.
So I think there's a general in fact, I think it's generally accepted that the age of 16 to 18 is the youngest.
Really? I mean, they're all places which younger, but not many. So there's a general rule tools.
Of course, many marriages are not legally many in many cultures to be thrown out.
Many what we call marriage is unnecessary necessarily legally marriages.
But they are in every other respect, marriage. And actually, there are two interesting points on that.
So the first is also that I should have mentioned that if if our estimate was one of child marriage, that number would be extraordinarily long.
Like, exponentially larger. So the number that we report for.
Marriage is meant to be the most egregious form of lack of ability to choose, lack of ability to leave.
Child marriages, however, are far more frequent and are reported pretty, pretty consistently throughout, especially the Southeast Asian region.
But the other component on the issue about how how we conceptualise this in the context of our research is that there is.
There's quite a lot of interesting work in terms of like dual legal systems or what we would might call like tribal law versus like formal law.
So our colleagues at the International Association of Women Judges actually have a really
interesting example in Morocco where they were taking legal efforts to prevent child marriages.
So what would happen is they would increase the legal age of marriage.
But then these communities would have tribal marriages or religious ceremonies where older
men could marry prepubescent or younger girls like far beyond the limits of the legislation.
And then they would once the the the child or the child was pregnant,
the child would then come before a more formal court and judge and say, if you do not authorise this marriage now,
then I'm going to be forced this child is going to be forced to raise this this child without the protection of a family name,
without all of these things. So these dual legal systems have also contributed quite a lot as as Bernard mentions, like these,
these informal systems have then been really abused to the to the chagrin of these advocates trying to end this in their own countries.
It's such a fascinating component, though, because it really does suggest that it has to be a broader societal shift in every country,
that women's and women's inequality can be addressed and have such a powerful ripple on effect.
Well, we're coming to the end of our hour. It's been incredibly interesting for those in the university.
It is the event for International Women's Day.
International Women's Day is on the 8th of March. And there'll be lots of things going on all over the place.
But one of them is in our MPLX less division.
And that will be a joint event between Statistics, Computer Science and Mathematics Institute.
And Divinia will be one of the keynote speakers there. So that should be really interesting.
And it's advertised throughout the university. So you can sign up there. And so we'll see many of you then if you would like to join me.
You can turn yourself off mute. And let's give a round of applause to Davina to thank her for the talk today.
Thank you.