Systems and Communities Programme

How do systems and communities interact to shape vulnerability, prevention and response?

Modern slavery and human trafficking emerge at the intersection of labour markets, welfare and health systems, governance structures, social networks, and digital infrastructures such as online recruitment platforms and marketplaces. These systems can obscure responsibility, deepen inequality, and create new forms of control and vulnerability, but also enable protection and accountability. Technology is increasingly positioned as part of the response to exploitation, through tools such as mobile rights-reporting platforms, digital grievance mechanisms, blockchain-based supply-chain audits, AI-driven risk assessments, and help-seeking ChatBots.

Systems and Communities examines how structural and technological systems interact with community and survivor contexts to shape experiences of exploitation, harm, recovery, and prevention—and how these systems can be reimagined and redesigned to support dignity, agency, and freedom. The programme examines how such interventions operate in practice, for whom they create access or exclusion, and how they interact with legal, labour, and social protection systems. It asks when technology supports justice and worker agency, and when it risks shifting responsibility onto individuals or masking structural drivers of harm.

At the same time, systems are encountered, navigated, and resisted within communities: families, workplaces, service ecologies, diasporas, online networks, and survivor-led groups. Community resources, social norms, access to information, and local institutions shape both exposure to risk and pathways to safety and recovery. Understanding exploitation therefore requires attention to how people experience, adapt to, and challenge the systems that govern work, life, and access to support.

Bringing together interdisciplinary research across systems science, behavioural and social sciences, health sciences, social-ecological approaches, digital ethics, and human–computer interaction, the programme explores how online and offline systems create conditions for exploitation and protection, and how communities and survivors absorb, mediate, resist, and prevent harm. Moving beyond deficit-based models, it centres survivor strengths and community assets, alongside rights-based and participatory approaches to technology and service design. Working collaboratively with survivors, civil society, policymakers, businesses, and technology developers, the programme generates evidence to improve prevention, protection, recovery, and accountability, contributing to more just, inclusive, and effective responses to modern slavery and human trafficking.