Ending Slavery

The rights track interview 1 audio transcript

Welcome to The Rights Track podcast, where we aim to get the hard facts about the
human rights challenges facing the world today. I'm Todd Landman, and in today's
episode we're asking how do we measure and explain the phenomenon of modern
slavery. My guest is Kevin Bales, Professor of Contemporary Slavery. He was cofounder of Free the Slaves in Washington DC and is lead author of the Global
Slavery Index. Last month he published a new book, Blood and Earth which
examines the relationship between environmental degradation and slavery.
It's a real honour to have you here today Kevin and it's nice to have someone
physically with me. Typically our podcasts are from all over the world, but you
managed to make it here today to Nottingham and we're absolutely delighted to have
you on this episode of The Rights Track. I'm going to start by asking a really
straightforward question. In what way do you measure slavery and why is this
important?
Well, it's very important to measure slavery, because without a metric it's very
difficult to understand if we're making any progress to reduce the amount of slavery.
So there's a very simple notion like that. The metric will help us to reduce the amount
of slavery. But measuring slavery has always been a real challenge. And in fact, I
would probably say that the last time we had a good measurement of slavery, a truly
representative measurement of slavery, was the 1860 census in the United States.
When slavery was legal you could have real counts of people who were in slavery.
But since slavery became illegal, in virtually every country in the world, and today in
every country in the world, it's become a hidden crime. It's become a crime that's
very difficult to measure. And we've been facing that serious challenge of knowing
there's a significant global issue with people in slavery, but not knowing precisely
how to get at the real numbers of people in slavery.
So there's been a big push in the last 10 years to understand how we are going to
get away from just secondary guesses, secondary information guesses, and get up
to some primary information to help us take real counts of people who are really in
slavery.

So that's really interesting because a lot of our listeners might think that slavery was
something from history, that you know, slavery was abolished in the United States
the 1850s. The trade itself was abolished, and then after the Civil War the practise
as it were was abolished. The last country to abolish slavery was Brazil in the 1880s.
And yet you're saying that there are instances, and there's a prevalence and
variation in slavery today in the modern world.
Can you say a little bit about the prevalence of slavery? So what is a modern form of
slavery and how prevalent is it in the world?
I could give you probably 50 examples of modern forms of slavery. But in the same
way that if we looked across history, you'd also discover that there are many, many
types of forms of slavery. And I think in some ways, it's the core definition that we
understand about what slavery is that helps us to understand it more than to talk
about the different forms. So, I think what's crucial is to remember that slavery today
is what it's always been.
So a complete control of one person by another person. Violence being used to
maintain that control. And then that control and violence being used to exploit the
person in some way, economically, possibly sexually, possibly both, and so forth. So
this complete control. Treating a person as if they are an item of property. Not legal
obviously, because that legal slavery is gone. But as if they were an item of property,
you could use them in the same way that you would use something that you owned a
property.
These people are not paid right? So this is coerced labour, or is there some sort of
exchange of finance?
There's certainly the question of sustenance, you normally feed your slaves, you
normally house your slaves. But beyond that, normally, there is no pay for people in
slavery. There could be tokenistic payments, which are given to people in slavery to
encourage them to work harder. But the key is not about remuneration. Slavery has
never been determined by the presence or absence of remuneration. It's always
been about the total control.
And in some ways, when I'm in the field and I'm looking at people who may or may
not be in slavery, my rule of thumb question is first, can they walk away, and can
they walk away even into a worse situation? So if they can walk away and literally
starve to death in a gutter, that's harsh, but that's not slavery. But if they are
controlled to the point that they lack free will, they lack freedom of movement, then
they are in slavery. And then you can begin to talk about the nature and the
mechanism by which they are enslaved.
And can you give me just an example? So a country, a place, a time?
Sure. In northern India for example, we have a hereditary form of slavery which the
technical name is heredity collateral debt bondage slavery. And I've met many
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families who have been in that situation, often in their third, fourth, even fifth
generation of enslavement to the same family. It comes about when you come to me
and you say my child is dying, they must have some medicine. Can you loan me
some money to buy medicine? And I say to you as a landlord, I'm sorry, but I know
you. You're a landless peasant, you have nothing to give me as collateral. I'm afraid I
can't help you.
And then when you beg again, please help me save my child I say well, there is one
way we could do this and that's this. If you give me yourself, and all the work that you
do, and all the work of your family, as collateral, then I will give you the 400 rupees
you need to buy the penicillin. We make that exchange, and from that day forward, I
control you and I also have, as my property, all of your effort, all of your energy, all of
your work, as well as that of your family. Which of course makes it impossible for you
to repay the debt of the 400 rupees you need to buy the penicillin.
That's why it's called collateral hereditary debt bondage slavery.
And of course this is somewhat informally organised. There's no contract as it were.
And so people who enter into one of those arrangements may find themselves in a
duration that could be endless right?
Well, one of the parts of the legal definition as well as the sort of conceptual
definition of enslavement is that it's of an indeterminate length of time. But indeed,
there sometimes are pieces of paper written down, but this is just part of the control
mechanism that can be waved in front of an illiterate peasant that says, if you break
this then not only will I harm you but I can also get the police to come and harm you.
OK. So if we then sort of zoom out from that very specific case in northern India, you
built a global slavery index. And this is an index that's published annually, or
semiannually?
Annually for the first couple of years. We're just on the third edition now. OK A year
late as it were. But that was primarily because we were in negotiations with some
large data providers.
Right, and so how many countries do you cover in this?
168
That's amazing. And then what sorts of things does the index tell us?
Well, a number of things. The most exciting part for me as someone who's been
hoping to measure this for a long time is this notion of prevalence. So we're doing
our best to understand literally how many slaves are in the population of different
countries around the world. And when we present that information we often present it
as the proportion of the population, which is enslaved. As opposed to the raw
numbers.
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But we get both of course. Because in some ways the fact that Mauritania has
perhaps as many as 4% of its entire population in slavery, which makes it the most
slavery dense country in the world, is crucially important to my mind. Or Haiti with
2% of its population in slavery. It's very important because it helps us to understand
where those situations and conditions and practises exist which really sustain and
maintain slavery. As opposed to, a country say like India, which has a number of
those conditions as well. But is also the country that we think has the most people,
the raw number, in slavery. Something like 14 million out of their population of 1
billion.
So, in the past, the only way to get at that idea prevalence was to dig through every
possible secondary source tidbit that could be found through NGOs, government
sources, police, court records, you name it. Anything. Newspaper reports and so
forth. Sometimes capture-recapture could be used on those types of information. But
capture-recapture on journalistic reports is kind of a loosely goosey way of
approaching that problem.
So that's trying to establish the degree of overlap between different sources of
information.
That's right. But the good news with the Global Slavery Index is that after the first
edition, where we did use a fair bit of secondary source analysis, and a very small
number of representative sample surveys. Since then we've had three rounds of
survey work done by the Gallup World Poll, and we've increased the number of
countries each year. And we're now able to say we have representative sample data
for a large number of the developing world countries.
Now it's also an interesting challenge that representative samples work in uncovering
levels of enslavement in poor countries, but they won't work in rich countries. And it's
because the proportion of the population is so small that's enslaved in say a country
like Norway or even Great Britain, that you would have to have extremely large
sample sizes or a very, very fine net indeed, to actually find a single case of slavery.
So it becomes very difficult and other techniques have to be used there.
But in the developing world, for the first time, we were able to unpack some of that,
and say ah ha. When we multiply these up according to the sample we're able to say
that in this particular country, in India at the moment, 14 million people out of the
population of a billion seem to be enslaved.
The other part that's been very exciting for us is that there are those countries which
will not allow us in. Let's take Qatar, for example, where we know that there's a large
number of enslaved migrant workers working on what will be the World Cup stadium
and so forth. They've never allowed anyone to come in to determine the exact extent
of how many of the workers, the foreign workers in Qatar, might be enslaved.

But by doing those random sample surveys in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Philippines,
and asking households, not individuals but households, has anything like this
happened to anyone in your extended family or in your household, we've been able
to point to about 22,000 individuals from those three countries who seem to be
enslaved in Qatar. So we're actually getting a sort of peek around the corner mirror
image, almost like a periscope, into countries which would normally never allow us in
to look as well.
It's like a supply side analysis, because you're actually in the countries that are
supplying slaves to a third country. And then you can make the inference about that
third country without actually having to go to it. Because you're not allowed to. Or not
allowed to ask those questions in that country. So it's an interesting way of
triangulating the problem.
This episode of The Rights Track was presented by a Todd Landman and produced
by Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts. The project is funded by the Nuffield
Foundation. And you can find additional information and resources at
www.rightstrack.org.