Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

Measuring Modern Slavery: Law, Human Rights, and New Forms of Data

Landman, Todd

Measuring Modern Slavery: Law, Human Rights, and New Forms of Data Thumbnail


Authors



Abstract

This article argues that many of the lessons learned and achievements made in the measurement of human rights over the past four decades are equally applicable to the measurement of modern slavery. It shows that modern slavery encompasses a significant subset of human rights found in international law, the parameters of which can be delineated and operationalized in ways that make the phenomenon amenable to measurement across a wide range of different data. These include events-based data, standards-based data, survey-based data, and new forms of data made possible through machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The article shows that the measurement of modern slavery needs to overcome many of the same challenges that confront efforts at measuring human rights, including the fundamental problem of unobservability, inherent bias through the use of convenience reporting, and the specification of the concept of modern slavery itself. Overcoming these challenges opens up new possibilities to make what many claim to be an intractable problem of development tractable and helps contribute to the Sustainable Development Goal target to end modern slavery by 2030 (SDG 8.7). Word count: 10, 955

Citation

Landman, T. (2020). Measuring Modern Slavery: Law, Human Rights, and New Forms of Data. Human Rights Quarterly, 42(2), 303-331. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2020.0019

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Aug 22, 2019
Online Publication Date May 13, 2020
Publication Date 2020-05
Deposit Date Aug 29, 2019
Publicly Available Date Aug 29, 2019
Journal Human Rights Quarterly
Print ISSN 0275-0392
Electronic ISSN 1085-794X
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 42
Issue 2
Pages 303-331
DOI https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2020.0019
Keywords slavery; modern slavery; trafficking; measurement; data analysis; quantitative; sampling; inference
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2517074
Publisher URL https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754938
Contract Date Aug 29, 2019

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations