Modern Slavery

An estimated 40.3 million people were victims of modern slavery in 2016, a quarter of them children, according to new global slavery statistics from the UN’s International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the Walk Free Foundation.

 24.9 million people across the world were trapped in forced labour and 15.4 million in forced marriage last year. Children account for 10 million of the overall 40.3m total.

The 2017 Estimates of Modern Slavery report calculates that of 24.9 million victims of forced labour, 16 million are thought to be in the private economy, 4.8 million in forced sexual exploitation and 4.1 million in state-sponsored forced labour including mandatory military conscription and agricultural work.

“What is startling about these new estimates is the sheer scale of the modern slave trade and the fact that we have 40 million people across the world in some form of modern slavery is simply not acceptable,” said Fiona David, executive director of global research at the Walk Free Foundation. “When you have 24.9 million people working under threat or coercion in farming, fishing and construction or in the sex industry and yet according to the United Nations only 63,000 victims of slavery were reported to the authorities last year, the gulf between the problem and the insufficient global response becomes very clear.”

Many forced labourers reported violence or threat, the majority of them are exploited through debt bondage and non-payment of wages.

“We found that 50% of the 24.9m people in forced labour are in debt bondage, often arriving at a job with high recruitment debts to pay off or forced to take a job to pay off debt and with 7% of forced labourers saying their employers are forcing them to pay fines while at work,” said Michaëlle de Cock, senior statistician at the ILO. “How forced labour affects the whole family is also very clear with 18% of male forced labourers surveyed saying that their employers directly threatened their families or children.”

These figures are a marked increase from the ILO’s previous estimates of 21 million people in forced labour worldwide. The ILO and Walk Free attribute the rise to better reporting and research methodologies and the inclusion of forced marriage as a form of modern slavery.

“It isn’t clear why forced marriage has often been overlooked as a form of slavery in data reporting,” said David. “If you have a situation where someone is sold into marriage and is providing free domestic labour and has no sexual autonomy, then when you take the label of marriage away from this situation it’s often nothing less than slavery and we need to shine a light on this so that people can see it for what it is.”