Measuring and Combatting Modern Slavery
Professor Todd Landman is Research Director of the Rights Lab and Head of its Prevalence Estimation Team. Drawing on his underpinning research on ‘rigorous morality’ and systematic comparative analysis of human rights, measuring modern slavery, and large-scale quantitative analysis on the drivers of modern slavery and its conceptual and empirical location within the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he is carrying out prevalence work across a variety of different country settings.
He is part of the research team that produced a robust prevalence estimation of victims and perpetrators involved in trafficking for the on-line sexual exploitation of children (OSEC) in the Philippines.
He is currently working on trafficking prevalence estimation projects funded by the US State Department Trafficking in People (TIP) Office and the US National Institute of Justice (NIJ), and in partnership with International Justice Mission (IJM). This work combines context-specific sampling and survey techniques, earth observation and remote sensing, geospatial modelling of novel data streams, and out of sample projections to provide robust prevalence estimations of slavery, forced labour, and human trafficking.
These studies provide important baseline data for NGO programming and interventions designed to help end modern slavery, in a growing number of countries. For example, the prevalence study with IJM in the Philippines has been used as evidence in the US Congress for new legislation on regulating on-line financial transactions and has been taken up as a call to action by the President and Congress of the Philippines.