How Can We Fight Slavery if We Can't Measure the Problem?

Recently, the US Government's Department of Health and Human Services released a survey of all the research on human trafficking, sex trafficking, and slavery in The United States. It’s a great report and you can read it here. The inescapable conclusion from the report is that there is no consistent and reliable body of research about slavery in the US. We don’t know how many slaves are here, how many are trafficked each year, or where to find them. We cant even agree how to define slavery when it comes to issues like prostitution. While this report is about the US, from all my other reading I can say the level of research worldwide has similar problems.

How can we expect policymakers, philanthropists and the human rights community to spend time and money ending slavery if we can't prove we know that much about it?

All of us who work in the field know that the problem here is with the research. Abolitionists in the field have plenty of knowledge about their areas they work in. So why is the research so immature and how can we fix this problem so that we can drive more funding and support to ending slavery?

If you look at other causes there is often a period where there is an early research gap between the field workers and researchers. Take HIV-AIDS for example: field workers often knew important facts about the spread of HIV and how to stop it well before the academic community could document and test these facts.

But AIDS is treated by doctors, scientists and public health professionals that are trained in the scientific method, and research is a part of their psyche, so it did not take long to close the research gap. In contrast, slavery is hidden from easy study. Many abolitionists work in secrecy or obscurity and they are generally activists and social workers, not scientists.

And there is the chicken and egg problem of insufficient funding. Its hard to convince an abolitionist working in the field that they should take some of their limited funds that they could use to help people, and spend them on measuring, recording, and testing. Research is just not part of the psychology, program goals, or competency of most abolitionists in the field. So when these abolitionists are asked to do research, they do their best, but their research tends to be structured to fit in with what they are already doing and to support their preexisting conclusions.

I've also heard abolitionists question the ethics of funding research. After all, they see people who they could help if they had the funds, so for a well funded researcher to come in, observe, then leave without helping is disturbing. Why not use that money to help people directly? This creates an uncomfortable dynamic between academics and practitioners that we need to get past if we are going to get the research we need to drive more funding to practitioners.

But, understandably, funders want data from their grantees, and that’s how we end up where we are now. The report I linked to above does not say there is no research, in fact it sites a lot of research. The problem is that the research is contradictory, often wildly contradictory. For example, there are plenty of studies that try to calculate how many minors are caught in commercial sexual exploitation, but those studies don’t use comparable definitions and have results that are so widely different there is almost no point in citing them.

So how do we get past this? Its certainly appropriate for funders to expect outcome and observation data from the field, but they need to separately fund independent and objective research. The funding community should expect abolitionists in the field to cooperate with research, but not expect them to conduct the research themselves.

The funding community also has to be willing to take some risk. If they are willing to do the due diligence and spend time in the field with abolitionists its not that hard to figure out which programs are the most effective and where there is the greatest need. Philanthropists should first work to build the anti slavery programs they wish to support until they are mature enough, and stable enough to really benefit from working with researchers.

We should give credit where credit is due. There are non profits like Free The Slaves that have research as a core part of their service model and have been invaluable in building the abolition movement. Free The Slaves clearly deserves our support! There are also foundations that get it: Humanity United is funding two research projects that we are involved in that are helping us improve our programs. But we don’t have to do all the work ourselves, thankfully, HU funded a team from Harvard to manage the research. Because the results of the research will be valuable to us, we are excited about the studies and have integrated them into our day to day work.

As the abolition movement grows, all philanthropists should consider how they can use research to improve the efforts of their grantees, or consider separately funding academics instead of expecting social workers to become scientists. Five years from now we don’t want to read another HHS report citing a whole bunch more studies, but coming to the same conclusion that we don't know enough about slavery.