Communities and Society Programme

Why does slavery persist and what creates resilience against slavery?

If we understand why slavery exists today, we will have a better chance of ending it. Efforts to prevent slavery, discover victims, and provide support for survivors draw upon a complex web of services at locality-level. Yet development of coherent anti-slavery policy at the sub-national and local level is frequently ignored or underfunded. Similar to other global challenges, such as climate change, modern slavery requires local action to underpin international and domestic legislation.

In our Communities and Society Programme, sociologists, political scientists, and scholars of education, law, cultures, and business are showing that community engagement remains—as across history—an essential facet of the anti-slavery movement. Our slavery-free communities project aims to establish how we might work locally, as well as nationally, to create sustainable and resilient localities where slavery cannot flourish. We are developing transferable, scalable and sustainable initiatives which can help communities to become slavery-free.

This includes national comparative research on multi-agency anti-slavery partnerships, research to understand the contribution of faith groups to anti-slavery action, work alongside statutory and community partners towards creating a slavery-free Nottinghamshire, and an expansion of our place-based approach to address slavery in a number of other cities around the world.

For example, we have built a resilience framework that supports our place-based approach to addressing slavery. We have theorised the social determinants of slavery-free communities, setting them in context with a systemic view of the anti-slavery agenda, that stretches from prevention through discovery to respite, recovery and sustainable resilience. By understanding the factors contributing to slavery-free communities, we can measure and compare resilience across a wide range of local settings, and so challenge and inspire communities to further action.