Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective

Therefore, we declare on each and every one of our creeds that modern slavery, in terms of human trafficking, forced labor and prostitution, and organ trafficking, is a crime against humanity. Its victims are from all walks of life, but are most frequently among the poorest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters. On behalf of all of them, our communities of faith are called to reject, without exception, any systematic deprivation of individual freedom for the purposes of personal or commercial exploitation; in their name, we make this declaration.

—Pope Francis

IN EVERY CORNER of the world, slaves are exploited, dishonored, and degraded for profit. They are forced to endure conditions of indignity, misery, and oppression. Greed and prejudice have breathed life into the institution of slavery since the dawn of human civilization, and although it was proclaimed abolished centuries ago, it persists because of the following central thesis:

The immensity and pervasiveness of slavery in the modern era is driven by the ability of exploiters to generate substantial profits at almost no real risk through the callous exploitation of a global subclass of humanity whose degradation is tacitly accepted by every participant in the economic system that consumes their suffering.

Slavery is a relic of history that disgraces us all. As long as there is even one slave in the world, the legitimacy of contemporary civilization is threatened. I believe the moral test of our time is whether we will undertake every effort required, for as long as it takes, to rid the world of slavery permanently. Slaves permeate the global economy, and their torment touches our lives every day, from the food we eat to the clothes we wear to the technology that makes our lives possible. For our existence to be valid, we must eradicate slavery. Many brilliant activists are working at this task every day. I offer the following thoughts in the hope that they might prove useful in these efforts.

RECAPITULATION OF THE TWENTY FORCES THAT PROMOTE SLAVERY TODAY

In chapter 1, I listed twenty forces that promote slavery centered on a “Five P” framework of prevention, protection, prosecution, partnership, and progress. Those forces are:

Prevention

1. Failure to provide reasonable alternatives to the most destitute and vulnerable populations.

2. Failure to provide access to formal credit markets.

3. Failure to protect displaced people in a postcrisis context.

4. General acceptance of the subjugation of low-class/caste groups and minority communities.

5. Failure to provide connectivity and information tools to foreign migrants.

6. Imposition of up-front fees for labor migrants.

Protection

7. Penchant to see survivors as offenders.

8. Failure to provide long-term empowerment of survivors and break the cycle of slavery.

9. Failure to protect survivors of slavery, as well as their families, from former exploiters pursuant to being witnesses in a prosecution.

Prosecution

10. Failure to prioritize slavery cases, except for the easy ones.

11. Laws that do not adequately penalize the economic nature of the crime.

12. Corruption and the failure to implement or enforce laws where they exist.

13. Inadequate training of law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to recognize the offense and prosecute it effectively.

14. Failure to effectively penalize the demand side of sex trafficking.

15. Failure to introduce sufficient cost and risk to corporations to motivate cleansing of global supply chains.

Partnership

16. Lack of transnational cooperation with investigations and prosecutions.

17. Insufficient resources and coordination among antislavery NGOs and shelters.

18. Inadequate coordination between sending and destination countries of labor migrants.

Progress

19. Insufficient research and data gathering on all aspects of slavery.

20. Lack of sustained and adequate resources to promote progress in antislavery efforts.

If these twenty forces are effectively tackled by a fully resourced and sustained campaign across all levels of government, industry, civil society, and citizenry, I am confident that slavery will become an offense of the past. The remainder of this chapter focuses on the logic of the ten initiatives I believe will provide a comprehensive strategy to address the twenty forces listed here.

TEN INITIATIVES TO ERADICATE SLAVERY

The following ten initiatives must be undertaken without interruption for as long as it takes to eradicate slavery. There are no vital considerations relating to sequencing the initiatives, although legal and policy reforms would optimally take place prior to the others. Some of the efforts I describe are already being pursued in various forms, but they are typically resource constrained and not designed or executed effectively.

Elevated Scaling and Effectiveness of Global Antipoverty Programs

This is the most resource intensive and important of the prevention initiatives I am proposing. Extreme poverty, a lack of sufficient credit resources and alternative income opportunities, and the inability of the poor to educate their children (especially girls) are among the most powerful forces that render individuals vulnerable to slavery, child labor, and other forms of exploitation. A comprehensive and fully resourced set of antipoverty initiatives that target these forces will go a long way toward the long-term attenuation of some of the most fundamental vulnerabilities faced by the poor around the world. Many of these issues are already the focus of international and national initiatives, but corruption, a lack of funding, inadequate execution, mismanagement, and numerous other barriers render these efforts much less effective than they should be. Almost every slave I met lacked a stable source of income and security and a reasonable alternative to the condition of servitude. The following efforts can assist in inverting this reality.

Microcredit Expansion

The absence of reliable and sufficient credit sources pushes many poor people to take loans from unscrupulous lenders and traffickers, which often result in debt bondage. Microcredit has been a powerful tool for poverty alleviation as well as for prevention of debt bondage. The concept was born in South Asia through the genius of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus of Bangladesh. In 1976 he founded the Grameen Bank (“Village Bank”), which provides small loans to the poor (mostly women) toward small business ventures. The system includes programs on savings and self-help groups, business training, and a low cost of borrowing that have helped lift millions of people out of poverty. Since its inception, microcredit has expanded to dozens of countries; however, these institutions are limited by access to capital and the need to be self-sustaining businesses. These loans have to “perform,” which in turn requires that a high percentage of the loans must go toward income-generating activities (IGAs), so they can be repaid to the lender, who can then repay its own costs of capital and fund operations. Unfortunately, the credit needs of the poorest of the poor often do not generate income. Those needs may be for basic consumption, medicine, or life rituals. From the data I gathered in Bonded Labor, upward of 80 percent of the credit needs of the bonded laborers I documented in South Asia were unrelated to income-generating opportunities.1 Microcredit or other alternative credit sources must be designed to meet the spectrum of credit needs of the poorest of the poor, especially for non-IGAs. In addition, far more capital must be made available to microcredit lenders to expand their reach to as many of the poor as possible and to blend their lending portfolios to increase the ratio of lending that does not have to go toward IGAs. More formalized regulation and record keeping of microcredit lenders is also required to ensure that different lenders do not give loans to the same borrower, and to ensure that pressure or bullying tactics are never used to coerce repayment. Expanding and redesigning microcredit in this way will take time, but doing so would go a long way toward addressing the inadequate levels of credit available to the poor.

Global Economy Integration

In every corner of the world, the poor must be integrated more directly and equitably into the global economy. This is the optimal way to ensure that they have reasonable alternatives to the offer of servitude, and to promote the overall income reliability and human development of rural and impoverished people everywhere. Immense global economic forces and trade barriers disenfranchise the poor in developing nations and keep them from participating fully and equitably in the global economy. Initiatives based on tying the products of rural labor directly to Western consumers represent a prime opportunity to link the poor with global markets and provide them with diversified and sustained sources of income. Many NGOs and even small enterprises are focused on everything from fair trade initiatives to investing in the production and distribution of rural products straight to Western (or nearby urban) markets. These efforts must be expanded through elevated funding by governments and foundations. Governments should create and expand initiatives designed to integrate the poor into markets, without exploitative intermediaries. This means linking laborers and craftspeople directly to consumers and returning a fair level of profit participation to the workers. The world is rife with exploitative subcontractors and intermediaries who often exploit the individuals at the bottom of the supply chain. They are the recruiters/traffickers, loan providers, wage underpayers, and other exploitative actors that allow the producer to claim “It’s the subcontractor who is misbehaving, not me,” even though the producer may sanction the exploitation. The more directly workers can be linked to the point of retail sale, or to executives running the retail companies selling their products through supply chain transparency initiatives (such as the Supply Unchained project of GoodWeave), the less likely the workers are to be exploited. Unregulated and unmonitored labor intermediaries block the light of scrutiny and darken the underbelly of the global economy, which allows slavery and human trafficking to thrive. It is high time they were removed from the equation.

Achievement of Universal Primary School Education for the Poor, Especially Girls

One of the most powerful tools to prevent slavery is ensuring that children, especially girls, are educated through the age of eighteen. Attendance rates for children in school have improved across the last two decades, but completion rates for girls continue to lag boys significantly, which increases their vulnerability to various forms of exploitation.2 Many government education programs around the world aim to achieve complete primary education for boys and girls, but most fall far from the mark because they are not tied to programs that provide sufficient income or stability for the family to replace the lost (albeit meager) wages a child laborer might be paid, or to programs that help alter the perception that girls are not worthy of an education and are better suited to be homemakers and laborers. The thirty or forty cents a day secured through child labor could mean the difference between family survival and oblivion. Children often report that they would prefer to work to help their families, and that going to school cannot benefit them. Child labor is bad enough, but it is often the first step toward worse forms of exploitation. This is especially true for girls, who are much less likely than boys to receive a primary education in many parts of the world, and instead might be trafficked for forced prostitution or be forced to marry at a very young age, perpetuating the cycle of poverty. Some of the best results in demonstrating how the education of girls can create a new cultural norm of valuing females as economic contributors to their families and preventing trafficking and early marriage has been achieved in Nepal by the American Himalayan Foundation and its STOP Girl Trafficking program. Girls in villages prone to sex trafficking and early marriage are provided with full tuition to school and even scholarships to college, and their families are provided with additional support to ease the strain of “losing” a child earner. Almost all of the girls in the STOP program graduate and have helped lift their families out of poverty. It is a small example of what is possible when sufficient resources and expertise are deployed in a comprehensive strategy to support families and to ensure that children are educated. This type of program should be scaled globally because there is no greater preventative tool to slavery than education.

Rapid-Response Teams Focused on Prevention and Protection in Crisis Zones

Human traffickers are almost always the first responders to crisis zones around the world. Whether an environmental catastrophe or a military conflict or a sudden economic collapse, whenever crisis strikes, women, children, the poor, and outcastes are disproportionately affected, exploited, and recruited by traffickers. Faced with destitution, starvation, or worse, desperate people flee en masse to find security. The mass migration in 2015 and 2016 of millions of despairing families from North Africa and the Middle East into central and western Europe is a searing example of this phenomenon. The same phenomenon took place with the Rohingya of Myanmar in 2015. Almost every major crisis or catastrophe follows a similar pattern of distress migration and exploitation. To stem this pattern, rapid-response teams that immediately travel to crisis zones with a focus on alleviating economic and medical needs, child protection, and guidance on safe migration options will provide crucial relief to vulnerable people. Block chain technology that can help secure identities and document the movement of people is invaluable. The more resourced and sustained these efforts are, the more effective they will be.

Awareness and Education Campaigns

Slavery operates on the tacit or explicit acceptance by mainstream societies and their governments that the servile exploitation of certain subordinated communities and ethnic groups, as well as those of the female gender, is not only acceptable but in some cases is deemed a preferable outcome. Awareness campaigns for the public, as well as educational programs for law enforcement, judiciary, and government officials, focused on promoting the equality of minority castes and ethnicities around the world must be deployed to motivate the necessary change in social consciousness. Creative media personnel can devise the most effective ways to disseminate these messages, but some of the campaigns could include the following messages. First, the realities of the oppressive and dehumanizing nature of slavery, as well as its extent around the world, must be conveyed accurately. Second, consumers must be made aware that they purchase products produced by slaves and child laborers every day. Third, education and sensitization efforts devised for law enforcement, judiciary, and government officials must focus on disseminating accurate (not anecdotal) knowledge of how and why slavery operates, how to identify it, and that the rights and voices of the subclasses are just as valid as those of their exploiters. Fourth, the general impression among exploiters that slavery and child labor are acceptable because the alternatives for the enslaved individuals are worse must be dispelled.

To be most effective, media, entertainment, and sports celebrities can be recruited to support these campaigns. They could spearhead programs such as a “No More Slavery Day” that stresses the equality of all communities, genders, and ethnic groups. The ability of these individuals to sway public opinion will prove crucial to the overall efficacy of the messages. The film industry also can invest in a series of public relations messages or even short-form and long-form documentaries and feature films highlighting slavery and the need to eradicate it. These efforts will be particularly important in South Asia where “untouchables” are still treated as subhumans by mainstream society. On the day that a critical mass of people reject the oppression of minority castes and those of the female gender, and the exploitation of these communities as slaves, everything else that is necessary to abolish slavery will follow.

A “Technology Trust” Focused on Creating Innovative Solutions to the Current Barriers in Antislavery Efforts

Technology solutions will provide the edge in combating slavery at every step. Technology has been used with alarming success by sex and labor traffickers to recruit victims and to conduct business, but the potential to use these tools to fight back against traffickers represents the largest untapped opportunity in contemporary efforts to eradicate slavery. Many major technology companies are already investing in the development of antitrafficking applications, although they have only begun to scratch the surface. To reach their potential, I propose the creation of a Technology Trust that would be composed of leading executives, coders, and engineers from major tech companies who will work in collaboration with subject-matter experts to develop an array of mechanisms that will prove crucial in eradicating slavery. Some of the tools that have already proved useful were discussed in chapter 5, but with greater input from slavery experts and greater coordination between technology companies, the potential is limitless. Needless to say, this trust would need to bring with it a substantial commitment of resources to get the job done. I am confident that the abolition of slavery will be achieved through technology-based solutions, and a Technology Trust provides the best chance for achieving this goal.

Redesign of the Process and Governance of Labor Migration

The global economy requires labor migration to thrive. Remittances sent by migrant workers also provide a vital source of income for poor families. However, the current process and governance of labor migration feeds directly into labor trafficking and debt bondage. Numerous changes must be made to prevent these abuses among migrant worker populations. The two most important changes are (1) the elimination of up-front fees for foreign worker placement and (2) improved coordination between sending and receiving countries to protect migrant worker populations.

Up-front fees are the primary tool through which traffickers coerce migrant workers into forced labor and debt bondage. Poor migrants should not be saddled with fees that represent ten or twenty years of their per capita income to secure a work opportunity abroad. Both the worker and the employer benefit when labor migration is pursued equitably. There are certainly costs associated with basic training, medical checks, travel documents, and travel; however, in all cases these should be paid solely by the employer without any burden on the migrant for repayment. Strict laws and monitoring are required to enforce this policy change throughout all global labor migration channels.

To maximize the protection of migrant workers, sending and receiving countries must coordinate in a more transparent and honest way to prevent labor trafficking. At present, there appears to be a tacit agreement between many sending and receiving nations that the labor needs of the latter will be met with the low-wage, expendable migrants from the former, and to that end many labor laws and regulations meant to protect migrants remain largely unenforced. Indeed, laws are even passed that help facilitate the exploitation of vulnerable migrant workers. Taxes and fees on labor migrants provide a robust source of income for sending governments, and receiving governments similarly benefit from levies and bonds paid by companies for each migrant they employ. Receiving governments also benefit by keeping their industries more profitable through the exploitation of low-wage, expendable migrants. The net result of these implicit agreements is the pitiless exploitation of millions of migrant workers, which must be jettisoned in favor of fully transparent and regulated agreements between sending and receiving countries to enforce all labor laws as well as a host of protective mechanisms to ensure migrants are not exploited, and that when they are, they have full access to rights, protections, recompense, and justice, as opposed to immediate detention and deportation. Some of these cooperative ventures would include (1) enhanced predeparture training and cultural preparation for migrants relating to their destination countries, (2) arrival registration and orientation with government officials in the destination country, including a full review of rights and contacts available to them, (3) the provision of a working cell phone with a local SIM card that cannot be confiscated by the employer, (4) rigorous labor inspections and offsite interviews to ensure that all laws are being upheld and wages paid, and (5) the elimination of all “tied-visa” programs that prevent workers from switching employers in their destination countries. These and other alterations in the process and governance of labor migration, as well as the protection of labor migrants and the elimination of all up-front fees, will help eliminate slavery in the global migrant workforce.

Legal Reform

In addition to the first initiative, this initiative is perhaps the most ambitious and complex, yet it is crucial to the eradication of slavery. Numerous legal reforms are required to create a system that can optimally protect survivors and prosecute traffickers and slavers. The four most important reforms are described next.

Minimum Standards for Effective Survivor-Witness Protection

Inadequate and misconceived protection of survivor-witnesses results in retrafficking and makes it exceedingly difficult to prosecute traffickers and slavers. Trafficking survivors often are subject to prosecution, deportation, or worse. Some countries make an effort to protect and empower survivors, but the quality of these efforts varies significantly around the world. Protection and empowerment systems must be standardized to include, at a minimum, (1) ninety-day reflection periods; (2) full residency, work, legal, health, and psychological support and rights for the survivor; (3) safe, respectful, and hygienic shelters; (4) access to rights and protections divorced from cooperation with a prosecution; (5) fully funded protection for the survivor and his or her family members in the case of cooperation with a prosecution; and (6) elevated standards in all areas for minors that prioritize the best interests of the child.3 These and other measures will ensure that survivors are treated with a human rights approach first, and they will ensure that the survivor-witness is in the most secure position from which to participate in a prosecution. Without the survivor-witness, it is exceedingly challenging to bring successful prosecutions against traffickers, and without successful prosecutions, the crimes go unpunished and are free to thrive.

Sharp Increase in the Economic Penalties for Slavery Offenses

Laws that do not include severe economic penalties for the crime of slavery are laws that do not effectively punish the offense. Slavery is fundamentally an economic crime driven by the ability to generate substantial profits in a nearly risk-free system of human exploitation. Most laws against slavery stipulate prison terms, while economic penalties often are nonexistent, modest, or unstipulated. The absence of robust economic penalties means that even if an offender is prosecuted and even if he is convicted, the economic fines may be far less than the profits generated from slavery, which means slavery is still good business. The relatively low-cost and risk-free nature of slavery must be inverted to a high-cost, high-risk offense. Increases in economic penalties, along with efforts outlined in initiative ten, provide the best chance to achieve this goal. I provide a detailed exploration of this argument in my law journal article, “Designing More Effective Laws Against Human Trafficking”;⁴ the remainder of this section provides a summary of this argument.

The first step in the design of economic penalties for slavery offenses is to understand the real economic penalty currently associated with the offense. The second step is to assess the total economic profits currently associated with the offense. The third step is to determine the level at which the real economic penalty should be set to severely diminish, if not eliminate, the economic profits associated with the offense. These three steps must be executed for each kind of slavery crime because each form presents different economic profiles and one penalty cannot effectively punish them all. One could theoretically apply the most severe penalty to all slavery cases, but doing so may run afoul of the legal principle of proportionality.⁵

The following example is based on the penalties in Thailand’s Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2008, which were made more severe in a 2015 amendment to include a maximum of life in prison and a fine of 400,000 baht ($11,430) for the most severe offenses. This increase in penalties was partly in response to the downgrade of Thailand to Tier 3 in the U.S. Trafficking in Person’s Report the previous year.

STEP 1

A simple formula for calculating the real economic penalty for an offense is:

Real economic penalty = probability of being prosecuted × probability of being convicted × maximum financial penalty in the law.

Simple formulas for the probabilities of being prosecuted and convicted are:

Probability of being prosecuted = number of prosecuted criminal offenses in a year / total number of criminal offenses in a year.

Probability of being convicted = number of convictions for an offense in a year / number of prosecutions of that offense in a year.6

I calculated the average probability of being prosecuted for the offense of sex trafficking in Thailand from 2010 through 2015 as being approximately 0.2 percent, and the probability of being convicted once prosecuted as being 18.86 percent.⁷ Multiplying these numbers results in a real economic penalty of approximately $4 ($11,430 × 0.2 percent × 18.86 percent). This $4 real economic penalty is reflected in the phrase “no real risk” in the essential thesis I offered as driving slavery in the modern era. In essence, the current real economic penalty for the crime of sex trafficking in Thailand is meaningless, and thus it produces no incentive for offenders to obey the law.

STEP 2

The tables in appendix B provide a sense of the profits associated with various forms of slavery around the world. These values range from a few hundred dollars per year per agricultural bonded laborer in South Asia to $75,000 or more per year for a sex trafficking victim in the United States or western Europe. However, slaves are not exploited for just one year. Table 1.4 in chapter 1 provides the weighted average durations of enslavement by type from the cases I documented. To calculate the total economic profits associated with the crime of slavery, we can use the concept of exploitation value (EV), which I introduced in Sex Trafficking. Chapter 1 provides the summary data on exploitation value by type. The details and full explanation of the EV calculation can be found in table A.5, which shows a range from $2,545 for bonded labor to $68,117 for sex trafficking. These values are global weighted averages derived from highly conservative calculations of the total economic value of a slave to an exploiter by type of servitude across the aggregate duration of enslavement. Regional values vary significantly, with sex trafficking in the United States having an EV more than double the global weighted average, and sex trafficking in Thailand having an EV less than half the global weighted average. Individuals also may be exploited in more than one type of slavery and across several industries and regions during the course of their exploitation, so it can be argued that at a minimum a blended average of the global EV numbers derived from the cases I documented would capture the total exploitation value to the exploiter of slavery in general. I would still argue for specific sex-trafficking penalties given the immense profits generated by this crime. To decrease the exploitation value of a slave, a significant increase in the economic costs of operating the business must be created, and this can be most effectively accomplished by elevating the real economic penalty of committing the crime to a profit-compromising level. The level to which this penalty should be increased is discussed in step 3.

STEP 3

To elevate the economic costs of exploiting slaves to a profit-compromising level requires that one maximize the formula discussed in step 1: real economic penalty = probability of being prosecuted × probability of being convicted × maximum financial penalty in the law. At present, that value is around $4 in our example of Thailand, whereas the weighted average exploitation value in Thailand of sex trafficking is $29,345 and $3,460 for labor trafficking in the country’s seafood sector. The precise level of economic penalty that should be stipulated in the law is open to debate, but the concept is clear: the greater the real economic penalty of slavery, the lower the profitability, desirability, and viability of the crime.

One benchmark for more economically meaningful penalties could be drug laws. The Thailand Narcotic Act, B.E. 2522 (1979) stipulates a maximum penalty of fifteen years in prison and a fine of 1,500,000 baht ($42,850) for trafficking in a Category 5 drug such as marijuana. This financial penalty is almost four times more severe than the recently increased fine for human trafficking. In other countries, the fines for drug trafficking can be ten or twenty times those for human trafficking. Given the moral repugnance of the crime of human trafficking, as well as its substantial economic benefits, one could argue that the economic penalty for enslaving another human being should be several times greater than that of trafficking in marijuana. Having said this, simply substituting 1,500,000 baht for 400,000 baht as the penalty for human trafficking would result in a real penalty that is virtually meaningless due to the anemic levels of prosecution and conviction of the crime. Hence, in addition to elevating the economic penalty, the probabilities of prosecution and conviction must be increased.

To demonstrate the point, assume for the sake of argument that the penalty in the law for each offense of sex trafficking is 3,000,000 baht ($85,714), that the prosecution probability of the crime of human trafficking is 33 percent (one in three sex trafficking offenses is prosecuted in a given year), and that the probability of conviction is 67 percent (two in three prosecutions result in a conviction or settlement). Then the real economic penalty would be $85,714 × 33 percent × 67 percent = $18,951. This is roughly two-thirds the EV of sex trafficking and certainly a more deterrent number when sex traffickers start making calculations about the risk–reward profile of the offense. It is also a far more profit-compromising number than a real penalty of $4. Most important, a value like this would make sex trafficking a far less economically appealing crime, particularly if the offender is brought to justice and convicted well in advance of the expected average duration of exploitation. One could apply this penalty equally across the spectrum of slavery offenses, or apply slightly more proportional penalties for less profitable forms of slavery, such as in agriculture or seafood.

More broadly, consider for a moment if one were to impose penalties such as these on corporate executives relating to slavery in their supply chains. Companies would probably be deterred from allowing slavery to occur in their production bases. Add prison time to the mix, and the tacit or apathetic acceptance of slavery in global supply chains would probably come to an end. With these and other legal and regulatory reforms in place, the environment would be optimal to ensure that the system of slavery would no longer be a risk worth taking for any exploiter or commercial entity in the world.

Setting aside theoretical arguments, the point of this exercise is to demonstrate the importance of creating a judicial and law enforcement regime that elevates the deterrent and retributive value of the real economic penalty of slavery. Criminals, like all people, are rational economic agents, and when a high-profit, low-risk business opportunity presents itself, they will pursue it and fight to maintain it until that reality is forcibly and irrevocably altered. Whatever paper penalty is stipulated in the law, and whatever prosecution and conviction probabilities are ultimately achieved, the outcome must transform slavery into a highly toxic, costly, and risky business venture. Amending laws is one thing, but achieving enormously elevated prosecution and conviction levels is quite another. The tenth and final initiative discussed in this chapter is intended to help achieve these increased probabilities.

Severe Penalties for Consumers of Commercial Sex

The third legal reform I propose is the most controversial, but I believe it provides the most effective way to dismantle the business of sex trafficking in the near term. In Sex Trafficking, I presented an initial argument that male demand to purchase commercial sex is highly elastic.8 This hypothesis was corroborated by a small sample size of four male consumers in a brothel in India, whose demand curve demonstrated an elasticity of demand of 1.9 (highly elastic). I have since completed a survey of sixty male consumers of commercial sex in India, Denmark, Mexico, and the United States. Although there is variation between countries, the aggregate demand curve of all sixty male consumers is 1.82. When the retail price of a commercial sex act doubles, demand among these sixty consumers drops by 76 percent. This result reinforces the hypothesis in Sex Trafficking and affirms that demand-side interventions have the most potential to reduce sex trafficking in the near term.

The results of this research led me to think about another set of tactics to attack sex trafficking. Male demand to purchase cheap sex very well could be sensitive to deterrence-focused interventions in addition to those predicated on creating upward shocks in retail prices. Put another way, if demand fluctuates significantly based on price, it can very well fluctuate significantly based on efforts to deter the purchase more directly. Interventions focused on deterring the purchase of commercial sex can best be tested in systems in which the purchase is criminalized. One can then assess policies such as severe economic penalties, prison time, naming and shaming, or placement on a sex offender list, among others. These policies are being tested in small pockets around the world, with some of the most interesting work being done by Demand Abolition, based in Boston. I believe that consumer-deterrent laws and policies coupled with demand-side efforts to elevate cost and risk to the trafficker provide the best chance of having a major impact on the business of sex trafficking.

Laws or Strategic Litigation That Establish Strict Liability for Owners/Employers Relating to All Actions of Labor Subcontractors

A large proportion of the slavery and child labor offenses in the world take place at the hands of labor subcontractors operating in the shadows of global supply chains. Liability for these abuses rarely extends to the owners/employers/producers/corporations availing themselves of the cheap, expendable labor forces that exist primarily in unregulated and underregulated labor markets. To be fair, many of these companies have little or no visibility regarding what is occurring at the bottom of their supply chains, and they rely on assurances from local contractors that labor laws are being upheld. Because of the plausible deniability and the lack of liability at the corporate or producer levels, and because there is little benefit in trying to track down and punish a lowly labor subcontractor, the system of servile labor exploitation persists in the shadowy underbelly of the global economy. To remedy this lacuna in the principle of vicarious liability, laws should be passed that establish strict liability for owners and employers relating to all actions of their labor subcontractors, no matter how many levels of subcontracting down the chain the abuses take place. In common law jurisdictions, strategic litigation can be pursued to establish a legal precedent that extends strict liability to the corporate level. Once this liability is established, and once it is enforced with stiff penalties, there will surely be a significant shift in the amount of attention devoted by the top of the supply chain to what is taking place at the bottom.

Policy Reforms

Three immediate policy reforms should be undertaken in every country in the world to assist in the fight against slavery. The first reform is to ensure that any foreign migrant arrested or detained on suspicion of any offense should be presumed to be a potential victim of human trafficking. This possibility must be investigated first, and only if law enforcement, in conjunction with local NGOs, determines that the individual is not a victim of human trafficking should offenses against local laws be pursued. This policy reform alone will enhance protective measures for survivors of human trafficking and promote more effective prosecutions against traffickers. As matters stand, most human trafficking victims are seen as offenders first and as victims second. They are hauled up on charges, then detained and deported, and they most often return home all the more vulnerable to exploitation. The slavers and traffickers who exploited them not only go unpunished but do not even have to absorb the cost and risk associated with returning their victims to their home countries. Investigating the possibility of slavery offenses first under a presumption of exploitation is the optimal way to protect the human rights of vulnerable migrants while pursuing a more effective system for punishment of potential offenders.

A second policy reform is for countries to provide tax and tariff incentives for companies that credibly demonstrate that their supply chains are consistently untainted by slavery and child labor. These incentives need to be sufficient to motivate companies to expend the resources required to cleanse their supply chains, even though the ethical imperative for doing so should be sufficient. The most reliable way for companies to provide unassailable assurances that their supply chains are untainted is through independent, third-party certification regimes that have sufficient expertise and experience with forced labor inspections.

A third policy reform is for countries to provide most favored nations trading status to other countries that enact and enforce laws that meet the criteria of the core ILO labor conventions, including numbers 29, 87, 98, 100, 105, 111, 138, 182, and P029. OECD nations could begin the process with a commitment to achieve this goal, which would then flow through to many other countries to ensure favorable trading status, which would result in a systemic cleanup of the global economy.

A Mandatory United Nations Fund for Slavery

The United Nations already has a Voluntary Trust Fund for victims of human trafficking; however, the voluntary nature means member states can decide how much, if anything, to contribute each year to the fund. Many nations invest in antislavery efforts individually, but the fact that the UN’s trust fund has received only a few million dollars in donations from a handful of member states since its inception in 2010 is a sad testament to the global commitment to eradicating slavery.

Therefore, I propose a United Nations Fund for Slavery that would be resourced with mandatory contributions of 0.01 percent of the GDP of every member state each year. That is the equivalent of just one penny on every $100 of national income. If you could support a fund that would significantly enhance efforts to end slavery, wouldn’t you part with one penny on every $100 of your income? These donations would amount to $4 billion per year, which I believe is more than enough to get the job done. To put the amount in perspective, the United States spends this same amount on defense every four days, so the United States alone has sufficient resources to allocate $4 billion each year in the fight against slavery. The funds would be directed toward tackling each of the forces that promotes slavery today, with a particular focus on protection and empowerment initiatives (including the antipoverty initiatives previously described), capacity support for antitrafficking NGOs and survivor shelters, prosecutions of traffickers, and much-needed research and measurement of all aspects of slavery. The fund would be overseen by a core group of slavery experts with equal representation from each region of the world. In short, a lack of resources is the single greatest hurdle in efforts to eradicate slavery, and this fund could solve that problem permanently.

International Slavery Courts

A system of international slavery courts (ISCs) should be created to prosecute slavery cases around the world. Laws against slavery are jus cogens in international law, and any victim in any nation would have standing to bring a claim to one of the ISCs. The independent, objective, transnational standing of the courts would abrogate numerous issues of corruption, case prioritization, jurisdiction, definitional variations, and other hurdles that prevent cases from being effectively prosecuted.