More than 40 million people are enslaved around the world today. It’s a shocking statistic, but it’s the reason why the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham was set up as a large-scale research platform for ending slavery.
The Rights Lab is made up of a leading group of modern slavery scholars and is also one of the university’s six Beacons of Excellence – Future Food, Precision Imaging, Propulsion Futures, Green Chemicals, and Smart Products – carrying out research to collectively address all 17 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. “I am very proud of the university for choosing to put ending slavery at its core,” says Prof Zoe Trodd, director of the Rights Lab, whose own research focus is strategies for ending global slavery by 2030 – one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
“It was a really huge moment when ending slavery by 2030 became a Sustainable Development Goal in 2015 – 193 countries committed to trying to end slavery once and for all by 2030, and the same year Britain’s Modern Slavery Act came into being, making the UK a leader in this space.”
She believes the Rights Lab is an expression of the university’s social justice approach to research, and an extension of the original vision of Sir Jesse Boot, the university’s most high-profile benefactor and founder of the eponymous chemists. “We often talk about how important it is that research is of real value – not something in an ivory tower – much like Boot’s belief in a place of learning that would be of value to society,” says Trodd.
A team of approximately 100 people working on five programme areas – data and measurement; survivors and cultures; communities and society; law and policy; and business and economies – the Rights Lab is led by Trodd, executive director Prof Todd Landman, deputy director Sarah Kerr, who also leads the Lab’s Modern Slavery Evidence Unit aimed at policy engagement, and research director Prof Kevin Bales, founder of the anti-slavery non-governmental organisation (NGO) Free the Slaves.
While its mission is to deliver research, the Rights Lab is far from a traditional research centre; think one-third research centre, one-third thinktank and one-third NGO. “We’re doing exciting, discovery-based blue-sky research but always with an eye to whether it’s useful to the broader movement and to that 2030 goal,” says Trodd.
This research helps determine where people are enslaved, why slavery is happening, and what will help make communities and individuals resilient against slavery in the future. Developing community-based strategies based on deep knowledge of what makes people vulnerable is key, according to Trodd, as are strategies that seek to strengthen communities and local organisations to combat slavery at its roots. Drivers for slavery include conflict and displacement, natural disasters, discrimination and migration status, poverty and lack of economic opportunities, lack of education and lack of rule of law.
“Modern slavery affects all countries globally and is most prevalent in Africa, followed by Asia and the Pacific,” Trodd explains. “Women and girls make up more than 70% of victims, and one in four enslaved people globally are children.” Places where enslavement happens include fishing boats, construction sites, farms, factories, brick kilns, stone quarries and mines, and carpet looms. People are also enslaved as domestic workers and in forced sexual exploitation.
The most effective antislavery technique is to tackle the underlying systems that enable slavery to persist. “We’re not going to reach the 2030 goal if we don’t deliver what we call in the Rights Lab a ‘freedom blueprint’; a plan for what everyone needs to do, because ending slavery will need individuals, communities, businesses, governments and inter-governmental organisations to all play a role,” Trodd says. “But there’s a huge evidence gap. There are still debates about numbers and causes and what the best methods are for ending slavery.”
Research by the Rights Lab is yielding groundbreaking data that can help, and there is new knowledge about the number of countries that don’t have legislation in place to prosecute slavery, the importance of survivor perspectives, and work to map slavery from space for the first time. “This is a really exciting academic field, but it’s also a really important one, because it’s about stopping a global situation where people are being used as if they are property,” says Trodd.
The ultimate aim of the Rights Lab is to help with research to secure, for the first time in 4,000 years of human history, a slavery-free world. “We are tackling the great lie of history that some people are subhuman, that they can be enslaved, and saying once and for all that labour cannot be forced and people are not for sale,” says Trodd.
