Building Slavery-free Communities: A Resilience Framework

Abstract

There is growing interest in the use of community-based approaches to address the causes of modern slavery and the related goal of building antislavery 'resilience.' However, the concept of resilience is often poorly understood and applied without attention to the specific challenges of anti-slavery policy and practice. This paper provides a conceptual framework for understanding the process and outcomes of building resilience against contemporary forms of slavery within place-based communities. Inspired by established ecological models of resilience, we propose an adaptive 'resilience cycle' that activists and policymakers can draw upon to inform the process of designing and delivering policy interventions. This process is combined with a review of evidence about the multi-level social determinants of modern slavery to suggest a framework of topic areas for local review and measurement, as a means to assess existing gaps and assets, enable comparative learning, and measure progress toward goals. We also outline a future research agenda exploring locally grounded perspectives on modern slavery risk and resilience, to improve understanding of the factors underpinning resilience across different social and economic contexts.This article will assist policy-makers by clarifying the concept of antislavery resilience, which can in turn inform policy design and implementation, and help to make connections between disparate initiatives from multiple actors. By combining a process for building resilience with an overview of social determinants underpinning a slavery-free community, we offer a basis for gap-analysis and ongoing measurement. The research agenda that we outline to better understand factors underpinning resilience would make a valuable contribution to improving anti-slavery governance and assist in developing a better understanding of the linkages between achieving Sustainable Development Goal target 8.7 1 and wider sustainable development goals.

Modern slavery and labor exploitation during the COVID-19 pandemic: a conceptual model

“…Asset-based approaches should be considered [ 19 , 99 , 100 ] to improve livelihood options for those living in poverty. External funds must be used judiciously to invest in individuals, families, and communities and to bolster community-identified deficits as resources are further constrained due to COVID-19.…”

“…Given how context dependent exploitation is within communities [ 99 ], applying a positive deviant approach [ 110 ] to discover viable protective factors, mechanisms vulnerable families are using to thrive, and learning from individuals who have migrated safely, even with more risk factors, could prove invaluable [ 111 ]. Maternal education may protect against exploitation [ 17 ], but this relationship needs to be examined further and whether protective in SSA.…”

Galvanizing Local Anti-Trafficking Partnership Work Using Intelligence: Profiling the Problem and Building Resilience

“…Social, community and professional networks may also be part of the solution due to their implication in the occurrence of human trafficking. For this reason, some studies have called for more attention to community-based initiatives and the process of building "resilience" against human trafficking [6][7][8].…”

“…The first, an empirical study by Rinaldi-Semione [14], focuses on establishing conceptions of freedom and resilience from across the anti-trafficking field and provides insights into the structure and functioning of anti-trafficking partnerships in the US and UK. The second, containing conceptual research by Gardner et al [8], is used to define the idea of 'antislavery resilience' and provides a framework for its use within anti-trafficking partnership settings. Finally, we draw new insights and reflect on Brewster et al's work to operationalize aspects of the Gardner et al resilience cycle within one such anti-trafficking partnership setting [15].…”

Identifying vulnerability to human trafficking in Bangladesh: An ecosystem approach using weak‐signal analysis

“…Ecosystem approaches have been proposed previously for addressing the sex trafficking of children (Finigan-Carr et al, 2019) and for building resilience to trafficking within communities (Gardner et al, 2020). 2 The ecosystem approach is grounded in the criminology theory of situational crime prevention (SCP) and is focused towards 'Prevention' part of the '3P' paradigm (Protection, Prevention, Prosecution) that is often used for addressing human trafficking (Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, 2000).…”