Lots has happened since my last update in July. Thanks for your ongoing encouragement, financial support and advice.
Bella in Perth
In September, we both flew to Perth to attend the symposium "Perspectives on Modern Slavery" at the University of WA. There we heard a large variety of perspectives and had some fascinating conversations. The talks reinforced for me that through a lot of anti-slavery work there is a weird, unstated assumption about the intractability of perpetrators. What I mean is that people talk as though slave owners and human traffickers are cocooned in a black box that we can never engage with. We do not know what goes on inside that box, and our current anti-slavery interventions are limited to imposing various pressures to constrain the box from the outside, because we assume it is impossible to change what happens inside that box.
Questioning that assumption has become one of the core challenges of The Freedom Keys Research Project. We keep asking the people who are already working against modern slavery what they are doing to change the mindset of the people who perpetrate slavery-like abuse. They all say "We aren't doing anything about that, but it's a valuable idea – good luck!"
Nelson Mandela spreading his love over Pretoria
I asked the same type of question in South Africa in October, when I met with people from Hope Risen, Love Justice, and Small Voice Human Trafficking. Those three organisations all do great work. You might like to look at the Small Voice website in particular because they provide an excellent service tracking news about slavery and case studies.
In Perth, we met some of the people involved in producing the Global Slavery Index – which provides the world's best estimate of modern slavery. A couple of weeks later I also had a lengthy Skype conversation with Dr Davina Durgana, who is the principal statistician for the Global Slavery Index.
“Addressing Modern Slavery” book cover
One of the speakers at Perth, Justine Nolan, recently published the book Addressing Modern Slavery. Having read that book I was again struck by the limited vision of what strategies could be used to stop modern slavery. The book's focus is on the importance of auditing global supply chains. That reflects the dominant thinking in anti-slavery work at the moment but it is a strategy that has yet to prove itself. Once again, it completely avoids any consideration of the perpetrator side of the problem. I wrote an extensive review of that book, and the review will be published in the Journal of Human Trafficking next year. (Let me know if you’d like to read a pre-print of that review.)
During this period we also applied for a significant chunk of funding from a source that I was quite hopeful about. Unfortunately that wasn't successful. We are receiving enough from our small support community to cover the expenses of our current networking phase, though at the moment I am essentially working for free. As we move into the next phase we will certainly need to find more money ... so please let us know if you know of any philanthropically-minded people, socially-conscious businesses, or grants that we could apply for.
—Matt & Bella.