Report on ‘Modern Slavery’: Some Issues

The Walk Free Foundation (WFF) in Australia has recently released a report on the Global Slavery Index (GSI), which has studied people living in ‘modern slavery’ around the world. The report states that more people are living in modern slavery due to inaction of the governments to protect the civil liberties and human rights of the people, and that the global products bought by people contribute towards enabling modern slavery.

This report by the WFF has attempted to provide a definition of ‘modern slavery’ which is not so clear till date, and tries to connect various aspects that has enabled such form of slavery across the world. WFF has stated that the study was conducted for over a decade across 160 countries and sought to answer how many people lived in modern slavery, what makes people vulnerable to it, and what governments are doing to address it, based on data provided by the Global Estimates of Modern Slavery and interviews with survivors conducted by Walk Free.

Defining Modern Slavery

According to the report, ‘modern slavery’ has been defined as “the systematic removal of a person’s freedom – their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when and whom to marry – in order to exploit them for personal or commercial gain.” Thus, the report attempts to bring together all kinds of people who are “tricked, coerced, or forced into exploitative situation” and includes “forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children”. But, the report has failed to factor in practices of caste prejudices and domination in India or cruel racism elsewhere in the west and others.

With this definition as the base, the report states that there are over 50 million people, perhaps an underestimation, who are living in modern slavery conditions across the world, with 28 million in forced labour, of which 12 million are children. The most vulnerable of them being women, children, and migrants. It goes on to say that the countries estimated to have the highest prevalence of modern slavery tend to be conflict-affected, have state-imposed forced labour, and have weak governance.

There Exists No Definition of ‘Modern Slavery’

As per the GSI, the definition of ‘modern slavery’ clubs forced labour, forced marriages and human trafficking, into one while many other forms of slavery are ignored or overlooked. The nature of the forms of oppression and exploitation faced by individuals in each of these three forms of “slavery” is distinct. Hence, bringing them all under one definition is extrapolation of what might constitute “slavery”, let alone it being a “modern” form. Bandana Pattanaik, International Coordinator of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) in Thailand[1], has critiqued the definition provided by the GSI report, and said that a universal, reliable calculation of modern slavery isn’t possible because modern slavery has no internationally agreed definition (unlike trafficking in persons which does). But, absence of a recognized, agreed legal definition of ‘Modern slavery’ need not prevent anyone from attempting to do so.

The report also ranks countries based on the prevalence of ‘modern slavery’, thus making it the ‘Global Slavery Index’. Notably, the report states that the largest estimated numbers of people in modern slavery are found in India, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Türkiye, Bangladesh, and the United States. Please note that most of these countries, barring a few, are already rattled by poverty and conflicts.

According to the report, an estimated 1,10,50,000 persons are found to be living in ‘modern slavery’ in India, i.e., with a prevalence rate of 8 persons for every 1,000. The report states that the government response to ‘modern slavery’ stood at 46.20%, whereas the average for the Asia & the Pacific region was 40.40%. This means that India did better at responding to incidents of ‘forced labour’ or ‘forced marriages’, than many other Asian or Pacific countries which perhaps is misconceived and factually wrong. Indian researchers are not in agreement with this view. In fact, Indian authorities, including the judiciary, are increasingly adopting a reactionary and conservative approach with the BJP and Modi in power.

Even if one were to look at the Indian context, both in terms of the prevalence of ‘modern slavery’ and the response of the Indian Government to combat such forms of slavery, the everyday lived realities of a majority of people, which includes women, children, Dalit community and the working-class trumps the statistics provided in the report.

In India, Article 23 of the Indian Constitution prohibits human trafficking and all forms of forced labour. Accordingly, the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976 was promulgated which put a ban on any and all forms of forced labour in India. However, the practice of bonded labour, including child labour, is prevalent across many sectors like plantations, brick kilns, domestic work, etc. The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 places a ban on employment of children below the age of 14 and 15 years of age. But, even that is being undone by the Modi government by legalizing family labour which is an euphemism for child labour. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 has put in place a system which would prevent and prohibit child marriages, and provide support to those who were forced into child marriages. Child marriages and child labour continue unabated despite the legislation, and has done very little to offer protection to girl children. The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1986, an act that was implemented to prevent human trafficking and provide protection to those persons who were trafficked, is often used to harass sex workers in India. There is no law in place to check the abuse and exploitation faced by in-house domestic workers in India, marital rape is not recognized as a crime, and nothing to protect the bodily safety and labour rights of sex workers. Even despite the legal protections to certain sections of vulnerable people, to combat and put an end to “slavery”, the deeply entrenched caste-based and patriarchal practices in the country enables the perpetration of oppression on a daily basis.

India continues to have the caste-based practice of manual scavenging with several thousand people from the Dalit community dying in our sewers. The patriarchal and caste-oppression of women’s right to choice and autonomy, in the form of ‘dis-honour’ killings, “love jihad”, etc., continues, especially with the current regime preferring the rule of barbaric Manusmriti over the comparatively modern democratic Constitution. Thousands of migrant workers faced the wrath of the State during the covid-19 pandemic-induced lockdown, and was one of the largest exodus recorded after partition, and what was witnessed at the time was not just the apathy of the State, but the systematic oppression of the working people. These lived experiences of the people who face everyday oppression, seems to be deliberately forgotten, ignored and sanitized in this report.  

The report on ‘modern slavery’, thus, not only overlooks how institutionalized oppression pushes people into various forms of slavery, but also contrives the everyday class, caste and patriarchal oppression faced by women, children and the working class, into the ‘Global Slavery Index’ ranking, leading to more questions than providing answers. We expect that the WFF will address these inconsistencies and flaws to make it improved.