Forced Marriage, Honour-Based Abuse, Human Trafficking, and Modern Slavery
Dr Helen McCabe is Associate Professor of Political Theory. She works on issues around forced marriage, honour-based abuse, modern slavery and human trafficking, combining political theory, history and law with social science and arts-based methods. She works with NGOs such an Karma Nirvana, Girls Not Brides, Walk Free, and Azadi, Kenya as well as policymakers in national and local government, and the UK Parliament.
One focus is on whether forced marriage is a form of modern slavery, as part of which her work has been cited by the UN, and she is about to launch an interactive database of the world's domestic legislation on child, early and forced marriage. Further work will involve co-developing model legislation for use by relevant policymakers and NGOs working to end child, early and forced marriage by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr McCabe works on questions about the prevalence of forced marriage and honour-based abuse, as part of which her work has been used by the Home Office and cited by the International Labour Organisation in their estimate of prevalence of forced marriage and forced labour across the globe. She has co-devised training for local authority staff to better recognise forced marriage, and is currently understanding how data is collected in the UK on these issues and working on recommendations for all relevant stakeholders to collect and share data in a way which can better inform evidence-based policy.
Dr McCabe has also worked on projects using art to better educate people about forced marriage, honour-based abuse and human trafficking. Her work explores how these methods can build capacity and community among survivors. Relatedly, she recently co-developed a toolkit for survivors considering engaging in advocacy. As part of this, a new NGO was developed by survivors in Kenya (Azadi), which now has over 100 members.
Building on this work, Dr McCabe was recently appointed the Thematic Research Lead for Arts and Humanities in UK Parliament. Her work involves understanding and increasing the use of arts and Humanities research across Parliament. For instance, she is helping run events for interested researchers, suggest witnesses and field trips for select committees, writing outputs drawing on relevant research across the sector for the House of Commons / Lords Library and the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, working on issues around supporting the taking of evidence by people with lived experience of issues on Parliament is holding government to account. This builds on work Helen did as a Parliamentary Academic Fellow with the Home Affairs Select Committee in 2021-2022.