Excerpts from 'The Prospects and Perils of Quantification', held in October 2015 at the University of Sheffield.
Over the last year, we at Beyond Trafficking and Slavery (BTS) have published a string of critiques exposing the questionable research methods, phony ‘statistics’, and inaccurate analyses currently propping up misleading depictions of modern slavery, forced labour, and human trafficking. These articles have documented a widespread and fundamental problem: governments, activists, corporations and other actors routinely make claims and develop policies that, from a methodological and evidentiary standpoint, don’t stack up. In particular, the research and evidence base underpinning new national laws and policies remains dangerously thin.
News stories, NGO reports, and even academic papers too often simply recycle outdated, flawed facts and figures—such as there being “27 million slaves in the world today”—even though fact-checks routinely reveal these ‘facts’ to be false. The Global Slavery Index, for example, continues to be cited as accurate despite the “significant and critical weaknesses” in its methodology and widespread concern about its validity.
