Can A Single Number Indicate a Country’s Risk of Modern Slavery?

The process of quantifying modern slavery risk into a single overall number or ranking is becoming an increasingly popular method of presenting data in a way that is easy to understand and highlights the prevalence of slavery practices in global markets.  However, modern slavery is notoriously difficult to quantify due in part to varying definitions of what constitutes modern slavery and the hidden nature of slavery-like practices in the labour market.

Beneath the promise of a catch-all indicator that accurately outlines the prevalence or risk of modern slavery, lies complexities wrought with failures of enforcement, informal labour markets that make measurement near impossible, and a lack of social support systems that render workers at risk of coercion. While rankings can make complex information easy to process, they cannot provide give a complete story about countries’ potential risk for the purpose of supplier prioritisation.

Singapore, for example, is ranked as a Tier 1 country in the most recent Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) on account of the protections that are afforded to their citizens. However, the TIP fails to recognise the number of migrant workers in Singapore that are not afforded these same protections as citizens and are at high risk of slavery like practices. This creates a duplicity of protection where citizens are largely protected from exploitation and the large number of migrant workers in Singapore are not. These kinds of complexities cannot be summarised by a single quantified rank or indicator. For businesses, this may mean that some Singaporean suppliers are at higher risk of modern slavery practices depending on the prevalence of migrant workers in the industry.

In the name of simplification, rankings often draw upon binaries that differentiate the ‘success’ of the global North and the global ‘deviancy’ or ‘ineffectiveness’ of responses in the global South. In part, this can be attributed to the emphasis on formal responses such as criminalisation and costly victim identification and rehabilitation programs that favour countries with income to spend on combatting these goals. The Global Slavery Index (GSI), for example, only introduced analysis of the ways that G20 countries contribute to global slavery practices through supply chains in the 2018 GSI.

Focusing on only formal avenues of protection and recognition present rankings and indices that can be largely distorted by data. For example, Indonesia increased screening processes for victims of modern slavery and human trafficking at border crossings which led to a significant increase in victim identification. However, instead of increasing the responsiveness to human trafficking, many of the ‘victims’ identified were instead cases of attempted illegal migration and it was unclear whether they were victims of trafficking or modern slavery at all.

With the measurement and identification of modern slavery so difficult to quantify with any certainty, simplifying modern slavery risk into a single rank or index implies that the issue can be neatly summarised. In relation to issues where quantification is understandably difficult, reliable data can also prove to be scarce.

Many countries don’t report comparable data, or don’t report data at all making it difficult to assess risk on account of incomplete data sets. Presenting data by way of a single indicator does not provide scope to assess the reliability of that data set, or examine where sets of data may be incomparable across countries. While prevalent indicators such as the GSI use estimations based on regional data sets, a single indicator gives no indication of the strength of the measures used. In this case, not only do rankings present an oversimplified assessment of a country’s modern slavery risk, it also may be making representations based on incomplete data.

Recognising the need for corporations look beyond a simple index value to accurately and meaningfully prioritise their supply chain, there is significant value in conducting multi-tiered analysis that considers a variety of aspects of a country’s risk. Understanding where a country’s risk lies can inform well-rounded and practical solutions that address modern slavery risk in a way that is appropriate to country-specific and industry-specific risk.