Preventing modern slavery: Using a socio-political lens to explore the push/pull factors for engaging in modern slavery offences and critically analyse the potential for primary prevention measures

Abstract

Despite the UK Government's commitment to respond to modern slavery, in the UK the number of identified victims/survivors of modern slavery has increased each year from 552 in 2009 to 12,727 in 2021, and prosecutions have remained comparatively low (Home Office, 2014; 2020; 2021c; 2022b; MSOIC, 2022; NCA, 2018; 2019). To prevent the harms of modern slavery, scholars have identified the push/pull factors for victimisation and sought to develop prevention measures such as awareness-raising campaigns (Home Office, 2017; IASC and University of Nottingham Rights Lab, 2017). The continued increase of identified victims/survivors of modern slavery, however, suggests these measures are not going far enough to prevent modern slavery. Although those engaging in these offences play an integral role in modern slavery, as it is they who create the victim, there are currently no specifically identified push/pull factors for engaging in modern slavery offences. Understanding what contributes to an individual engaging in modern slavery offences allows us to understand more about those engaging, which can facilitate the design and development of primary prevention measures. Such measures will prevent the harms and abuses from being caused in the first place. This interdisciplinary thesis applies the public health model of prevention by focusing on primary prevention, which prevent harm from happening in the first instance. Drawing on the 91 modern slavery cases discussed by 18 anti-slavery professionals, the thesis explores whether primary prevention measures could address the push/pull factors for engaging in modern slavery offences in England and Wales. The research found that individuals who engage in modern slavery offences represent one of three narratives. These are 1) those who go straight to engaging, 2) those who were victims first and then engaged, and 3) those that alternate between victim and engaging. The third narrative contributes to the existing research and portrays the nuances and complexities of the modern slavery reality. The research found specific push/pull factors for engaging in modern slavery offences and coined them the ‘five instabilities’ (economic, family/early life, polity, environmental, and emotional). The research offers a contextual understanding of the five instabilities by applying Messner and Rosenfeld's Institutional Anomie Theory (2013). The research demonstrates that, in theory, primary prevention measures would be able to address the push/pull factors for engaging in modern slavery offences. However, in practice, it would require systems change to achieve a whole-systems approach to implementing primary prevention measures. The thesis argues that modern slavery is, first and foremost, a political problem caused by political decisions, and it is these policies and inaccurate immigration rhetoric which, if left unchanged, will allow modern slavery to thrive.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Sophie Emma Wilkinson: orcid.org/0000-0003-3263-3016

ORCID for Jenny Fleming: orcid.org/0000-0002-7913-3345

ORCID for Michelle Newberry: orcid.org/0000-0003-0085-3751

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