“Worst-offender lists biased towards rich countries won’t help us fight slavery,” 30 Jun 2016

…Enthusiasm for measuring human exploitation and ranking governments on their performance is at an all-time high…[T]he International Labour Organisation has been trying to find out the number of forced labourers in the world and where they are...Even if we were able to measure crude numbers, these provide no context. They tell us very little about the situation of the individuals enslaved... Each of these situations is the result of complex interplay between social, economic and political circumstances, which get lost when the focus is purely on the numbers.

Ranking individual countries according to the quality of their response is equally problematic. For one thing, assessment criteria used by both the US State Department Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report and the Global Slavery Index contain an in-built bias towards wealthy countries…These rankings…fail to take account of the reality that wealthy countries benefit disproportionately from the goods and services produced through cheap and exploitable labour…the anti-trafficking/anti-slavery movement has benefited enormously from forensic, sector or target-group specific analysis that seeks to unravel the…situation of exploitation…

Is there a better way to find out what we really need to know? Perhaps. Over the past few years, the anti-trafficking/anti-slavery movement has benefited enormously from forensic, sector or target-group specific analysis that seeks to unravel the threads that knit together a situation of exploitation.