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Human trafficking
OpinionComment
David Dodwell
David Dodwell

Inside Out | ‘Modern slavery’ can best be prevented by focusing on economic growth and education, not lofty UN goals

  • ‘Modern slavery’ is terrible, but practices such as forced labour and forced marriage have existed for centuries and hoping to end them is misguided
  • Our best bet is to stay alert, develop practices to minimise harm and work on economic growth, good education for everyone and reducing poverty

Reading Time:4 minutes
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An activist from the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body holds a placard during a protest urging the Immigration Department to review its accommodation and visa polices for foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong in 2018. Photo: AFP
David Dodwell
One of the worst but least discussed side-effects of the Covid-19 pandemic is the global surge in forced labour and forced marriage. A new report by the UN says there were around 49.6 million people worldwide trapped in one or the other in 2021 – up by more than 9 million since its last global study in 2016 and accounting for one in every 150 people worldwide.
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The United Nations calls these the two main forms of “modern slavery”. I struggle to work out what is “modern” about them, but it is easy to understand the concern that the problems are getting worse despite decades of work to purge us of these dark, heavily criminalised corners of the world.
The past three years have provided a perfect storm for these scourges to thrive: a combination of the pandemic, armed conflict in countries across the world and poverty-induced migration arising from conflict and climate change. In many countries, civic infrastructure has collapsed, joblessness has surged, poverty and indebtedness have risen and education has been disrupted.

The World Bank says an extra 75 million to 95 million people are now living in extreme poverty, reversing three decades of progress. Since poverty is a key driver of both forced labour and forced marriage, the authors of the UN report fear that a sharp increase in “modern slavery” will be a lasting legacy of the pandemic.

Unicef and the UN Population Fund have warned that up to 13 million girls will be forced into marriage by pandemic-linked poverty. The Population Fund says that every three months of Covid-19 lockdown has triggered 15 million additional cases of gender-based violence, mostly against women. Save the Children says 452 million children lived in conflict zones in 2020, many of them orphans and severely vulnerable to exploitation.

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Covid pandemic worsens poverty in the Philippines, leaving millions more impoverished

Covid pandemic worsens poverty in the Philippines, leaving millions more impoverished
Alarming as it is to report such a jump in “modern slavery”, the UN authors fear their calculations significantly underestimate the scale of the problem. Their surveys were mostly conducted in 2020, before the worst impacts of the pandemic could be reflected and Russia’s catastrophic invasion of Ukraine.
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