In the wake of allegations recently levelled against the late Mohammed al-Fayed1 for systematic abuse of women working at Harrods (among others) – and for Anti-Slavery Day (18th October) – it’s worth re-examining some key definitions relating to modern slavery and human trafficking; there are lot of them, they’re often used interchangeably and they’re easy to conflate.
Modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT) acts as an umbrella term covering a whole host of specific activities and conditions, from the movement of people across the world or a country and the related logistics, to the working and living conditions they suffer. Within this, there are number of sub-terms, designating specific activity or conditions. Although not all definitions are crisp, clear and universally agreed on (there are hundreds in operation, worldwide), the following demarcations give an indicator of the differences and the wide scope and scale of MSHT activity globally.
Anti-Slavery International2 defines modern slavery as a state wherein “an individual is exploited by others, for personal or commercial gain. Whether tricked, coerced, or forced, they lose their freedom”. In line with this, the International Labour Organisation (ILO)3 encompasses both forced labour and forced marriage under the term.
According to the ILO, there were 50 million people worldwide4 living in conditions of modern slavery, as of 2021. Unfortunately, the number of people in modern slavery has risen significantly in the last five years. In 2021, 10 million more people were in modern slavery compared to 2016 global estimates – that’s the equivalent of the combined populations of Birmingham, Bristol and Greater Manchester all entering into conditions of modern slavery every year, for five years.
The Palermo Protocol defines trafficking in persons as5 “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.”
You could think of human trafficking as being the process by which victims end up in the state, or condition, of modern slavery.
Human trafficking implies that victims are unwilling and have been threatened, coerced or forced into their transit or situation. Human smuggling6, rather, is when individuals are voluntarily transported (often into a country) illegally. Human smuggling activity does converge significantly with human trafficking, however, with the former often turning into the latter; for example, when vulnerable individuals fleeing violent conflict pay smugglers for passage to another country but are then trapped in conditions of modern slavery, sold and/or exploited against their will.
The ILO defines7 forced labour as "all work or service which is exacted from any person under the threat of a penalty and for which the person has not offered himself or herself voluntarily." The ILO estimates that around 28 million of men, women and children across the globe are trapped in forced labour, around 14% of which is accounted for by state-imposed forced labour (for example, Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims8 in detention centres in China’s province of Xinjiang or the tens of thousands of private and public sector workers forced by the Government to pick cotton in Turkmenistan9 each year). This leaves around 86% of forced labour in the private sector, across all sorts of industries, including construction10, agriculture11, fashion12 and beauty13. Not only does forced labour violate human rights, it also disrupts fair competition between businesses, skewing and driving down the price of production.
Commercial sexual exploitation14 represents circa 23% of all forced labour, with four out of five being women or girls, and one out of eight being children. It is a form of forced labour where the labour is sexual services, and it is undertaken by criminals to generate a profit.
Forced marriage occurs when one or both parties do not – or cannot (for reasons of age or mental capacity) – consent. It can affect all genders, age groups and nationalities, occurring in every region in the world and cutting across ethnic, cultural and religious lines; however, it is a heavily gendered practice, with women and girls predominantly affected, and it is closely linked to patriarchal attitudes and practices. An estimated 22 million people15 across the world are trapped in forced marriage, with the overwhelming majority (over 85%)16 driven by family pressure.
Not all work performed by children is automatically classified as child labour17 (some can provide them with skills and experience and contribute to their development and their families’ welfare). However, work is defined as child labour when it involves aspects which are hazardous to a child’s physical and mental health and development, demands too many hours, is performed by children who are too young, and/or interferes with a child’s right to education and to play. There are thought to be 160 million children in child labour across the world, according to the ILO, 79 million of whom are in hazardous work – for example, working in mines across Sub-Saharan Africa18 for conflict minerals vital to the clean energy transition; or in India, for minerals like mica19, which are used in makeup and cosmetics to give skin a ‘glow’.
Under these definitions, do the allegations levelled posthumously at al-Fayed fall under the auspices of human trafficking? Absolutely: the alleged victims describe recruitment, exploitation and being subjected to abuses of power (although, of course, further details of the case remain to be seen).
As the case demonstrates, modern slavery is not something which only happens ‘overseas’; it occurs in almost every country in the world (over half of all forced labour and a quarter of all forced marriages can be found in upper-middle income or high-income countries, for example).
Anti-Slavery Day gives us all a chance to pause and reflect on the ubiquity of slavery in our current society and the ways in which our own lives inevitably brush up against it, and what actions we might take to try to mitigate against it.
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