Using Surveys to Estimate the National Prevalences of Modern Slavery: Experience and Lessons Learned
Addressing modern slavery remains a significant challenge for governments and non-government organizations (NGOs). Efforts are hampered by a range of factors, not least the absence of a road map for measuring progress. Central to measures of progress is a baseline against which changes in the scale of modern slavery can be assessed.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) signaled a global commitment to measurement as a driver of progress in international development. This commitment has been renewed through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the same way that the MDGs ensured a focus on priorities, elevating ending slavery, trafficking, and forced labor to a mandatory goal of the SDGs will bring much-needed focus and encourage consensus in the field.
As is the case for any crime, measuring modern slavery is complex, involving everything from differing definitions to the hidden nature of the crime. However, these challenges are not unique to slavery. For example, advocates and policymakers faced similar challenges in wanting to respond in an informed, proportionate way to gender-based violence in the 1970s (Kilpatrick, 2004; Krug, et al., 2002).
In the absence of clear crime statistics, researchers turned to random sample population surveys to better capture previously under- or unreported instances of sexual violence and domestic violence, among other relatively hidden crimes (Biderman and Reiss, 1967; Group of Experts on Gender Statistics, 2006). Household surveys are now widely used in that context.
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