Can the UK's trade and investment arrangements in the Indo-Pacific help reduce modern slavery risks? Given the Indo-Pacific is the region with the highest rates of modern, how can UK businesses and investors avoid exposure to modern slavery when they trade with and invest in the region? Our project seeks to develop answers to these questions, and use them to help the policy actors in the UK and the Indo-Pacific that are developing new trade and investment arrangements. To do this, we need to understand when foreign trade and investment increases the risks of forced labour and modern slavery, and when and how foreign trade and investment arrangements can be used to reduce those risks. We need to consider which legal and policy arrangements - such as bans on trade in goods made with forced labour, labor clauses in trade deals, or investor arbitration mechanisms - protect people and businesses against modern slavery risks, and which make it more likely. And we need to consider what role survivors, vulnerable populations and other people affected by modern slavery play in shaping trade and investment arrangements to prevent modern slavery. We will do this through four different areas of work. First, we will organize the first major global conference on these issues, online over 2 days in October 2022. This will bring together researchers, government practitioners, business and civil society to share new scholarship and develop new policy thinking. We will include representatives from affected communities, including survivors of modern slavery and affected Indo-Pacific communities. This conference will lay the groundwork for future exchange of knowledge and policy research collaborations, through a network of scholars and practitioners who will keep working on these issues after the project is complete. Second, we will build new data sets to help us understand how different trade and investment arrangements shape modern slavery risks and outcomes in the Indo-Pacific. One dataset will include international trade and investment agreements from across the Indo-Pacific, recording how those agreements handle modern slavery related issues. Another dataset will focus on the domestic laws and policies relating to trade and investment of countries in the Indo-Pacific. And third, we will update and develop a dataset recording government and company responses to allegations of large-scale forced labour in China's Xinjiang province. We will use each of these datasets to conduct original research into the questions we posed earlier. Third, we will conduct four in-depth case studies on China, India, Malaysia and Thailand. Working with our project partners Anti-Slavery International and the University of Nottingham Malaysia, the project research team will study how issues relating to modern slavery risks have been addressed when trade and investment arrangements have been developed and implemented. This will include direct, careful and safe engagement with stakeholders from each of these countries, including people vulnerable to modern slavery, to understand how these issues have been perceived and managed. Fourth, we will use the data and evidence developed in the previous work to produce policy findings and recommendations. Working closely with Anti-Slavery International and the Modern Slavery Policy and Evidence Centre, we will share these policy findings with policymakers, business leaders, civil society and researchers in the UK, in the Indo-Pacific, and in relevant international forums such as the United Nations and World Economic Forum.

Slavery is an issue of absorbing concern in today's society, as evidenced by the increasing number of news stories about trafficking and forced labour, many of them on our own doorsteps. It is estimated that there are 30 million slaves in the world today, a figure roughly equivalent to 50 per cent of the UK's population. Yet it is one thing to identify this problem, another to do something about it. The current project speaks to the need to create a modern anti-slavery movement and, as a first step, to educate our children about slavery, in both its historical and contemporary forms. To that end, the aim of the proposed engagement activity is to devise an educational package (songs, music, lesson plans, DVD) and a parallel music event for public performance, as a means of introducing school children and the wider public to the scale and complexity of slavery, as well as to the life experiences of those caught in its grip, past and present. The model here is 'Cargo', which was written and composed by Paul Field in 2007 with input from members of the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull. The success of 'Cargo', which has been seen by over 70,000 people in the UK, France, Holland and the USA, demonstrates that quite complex ideas about slavery and abolition can be conveyed through music and drama. The current proposal, 'Child Cargo', draws on the knowledge and expertise of the same creative artists, principally Paul Field, as well as the expertise of schoolteachers and researchers at WISE. As a first step, the project team will need to decide on content and choose appropriate themes and subject matter. This will necessarily involve a series of workshops involving all of the team members -- who will also seek the assistance of interested parties, including teachers and members of community groups (e.g. Hull Black History Partnership, Hull Freedom Festival). It is expected that most of the content consultation will be concentrated into this first phase of the project, which will take up to three months to complete. Thereafter, the emphasis will shift to the creative element of the project: writing songs, developing visuals, consultation with teachers, and, finally 'road testing' the end result at Hull's Freedom Festival in September 2015. By its very nature, this is a collaborative project, involving those working within and without higher education institutions. WISE already has established links with local schools in Hull and surrounding region. It also has close links with local community groups and with museums and archives, including the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the National Maritime Museum in London. We have already consulted widely with these groups and with the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT), Anti-Slavery International and Stop The Traffik, who have become Project Partners to add their expertise and weight to the enterprise. In developmental terms, we are able to draw on the expertise of digital media staff within the University of Hull (Scarborough) and across the University as a whole. The University of Hull is the lead institution in the AHRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Heritage. The management team will therefore have access to experts in museums and heritage interpretation, public engagement and the more than 70 international heritage organizations of the CDT. Similarly, members of WISE have links with Hull's Freedom Festival, which regularly attracts an audience of 80,000, and have been involved in the University's contribution to Hull City of Culture 2017. The project will therefore support the development of the comprehensive approach needed to raise awareness of modern slavery and to maximise impact from the completed research and this follow-on proposal.

As the UN explained on May 5, COVID-19 "is likely to increase the scourge of modern-day slavery." Victims and survivors of modern slavery are at greater risk of ongoing exploitation and re-exploitation. Traffickers will increase recruitment and seek to maintain revenue during economic crisis. Victim identification has become even more challenging as States shift protection resources towards combatting the pandemic. Access to shelters is increasingly limited, and provisions in the 2015 Modern Slavery Act on victim support may be compromised. Economic contraction and resource reallocation will undermine the anti-slavery work of third-sector organisations, law enforcement and local government. NHS staff are stretched to capacity and may not recognise victims. We respond to many warnings by the policy community that, as the UN noted, "inaction could lead to a sharp rise in the number of people being pushed into slavery" because of COVID-19. Elsewhere the UN has called upon governments to "urgently adopt inclusive measures aimed at protecting...trafficked persons in their national response to COVID-19," calling such measures "urgent and necessary." The OSCE has declared that the crisis brings an acute "obligation to combat the exploitation of vulnerable people" and that combating slavery during COVID-19 is "an urgent priority." A consortium of NGOs has warned that COVID-19 will have similar consequences to natural disasters, causing spikes in slavery. Yet while there is an increasing number of risks being articulated across the anti-slavery sector, they are not being gathered and assessed in a robust, coherent way. There is no attempt underway to complete a full COVID-19 risk/response assessment for slavery victims/survivors in the UK, although UK-based organisations are sharing their immediate challenges. As we do not fully understand the risks, governments and third-sector organisations cannot effectively respond to calls-including those from the UN-for the urgent adoption of protection and mitigation measures. The complexity of the risk environment may impede anti-slavery mitigation unless risks can be assessed. We need to analyse risk and recommend mitigation, in order to ensure that COVID-19 does not increase enslavement and jeopardise slavery survivors' recovery. We therefore answer the question: what are the accrued risks and mitigating responses of COVID-19 for victims and survivors of slavery? To answer this key question, we answer the sub-questions: What are the causal pathways throughout which mitigations are expected to work? Do these efforts reflect survivors' experiences? We systematically analyse risks and responses across a year, in order to provide large-scale evidence and best-practice recommendations. We do not duplicate the valuable risk mitigation work of front-line organisations, but support it with state-of-the-art risk assessment, using survivor insights and real-time data, for the sector's direct use. Derived from disaster response techniques and public health frameworks, our participatory risk assessment includes interview, survey and web-monitoring data. Our multi-method design includes qualitative and quantitative surveys, public information monitoring, a modified e-Delphi, evidence reviews, and risk analysis. We adopt a multi-level approach to consider risk and assess against a framework adapted from our social determinants model. As we assess risk, we analyse responses and recommend mitigations. To provide lessons, this includes comparative analyses of responses by other countries and during other disasters.

The Antislavery Knowledge Network offers the first extended effort to address slavery as a core development challenge in sub-Saharan Africa via innovative approaches from the arts and humanities that deliver community-engaged antislavery work. Focusing on the idea of "activated community memory," we champion the innovative use of heritage as a resource for social change. The network aims to demonstrate that participatory arts-based strategies, rooted in heritage, can empower Global South communities to play a central role in tackling contemporary slavery. The Global Slavery Index estimates that there are 46 million slaves worldwide today. The UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include the target of ending slavery by 2030 and African states have recognised slavery as a key challenge to their economic and social development. An estimated 6.2 million people are enslaved in sub-Saharan Africa and slavery's ongoing presence impacts negatively on many SDG targets for Africa, include those relating to health, education, equality, decent work, and sustainable communities. This is a region experiencing rapid change, where demands for enhanced infrastructure stretch political and economic resources; rapid population growth and urbanisation threaten heritage; and unplanned development fails to address persistent patterns of poverty and deprivation that are strongly gendered. But development and antislavery policies aimed at African states have too often ignored the complex historical backdrop of slavery in the region and failed to foster community antislavery strategies that draw on heritage and memory. Slavery and antislavery interventions sit at an intersection of politically sensitive issues around history, sovereignty, citizenship, religion, mobility, and economic governance. As the Chief of UNESCO's History and Memory for Dialogue Section put it in 2015, the historical slave trade's "tenacious poison... paved the way for new forms of slavery that continue to affect millions." Humanities-based research can provide innovative ways to navigate and address these intersecting issues through a focus on historical power dynamics and marginalised voices, and by partnering with artists, arts organisations and museums to invigorate development. Our community-based, regional focus harnesses this power of the arts and humanities to provide an alternative to the top-down focus of international legal agreements, trade and diplomacy, and intergovernmental initiatives. We build on "asset-based" and participatory approaches to development that recognize the transformative potential of existing cultural resources and heritage, and the value of co-designed and co-delivered work. We therefore move beyond the dominant paradigm of externally-designed interventions based on international rankings or standardised methods. Our approach tries to advance SDG target 8.7 (ending slavery) by strengthening antislavery strategies that re-set the relationship between development initiatives and local communities. We will launch the network with an initial programme of three pilots in African countries shaped by historical slavery that are also sites of contemporary enslavement: Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All three pilots will develop models for what works in different national and local contexts, via different methods of in-country partner collaboration. They will therefore lay the groundwork for a structured commissioning phase inviting new projects, of varying sizes and around three themes, that develop our core interest in establishing the value of the arts and humanities to challenging slavery. The commissioned projects will continue pioneering new participatory approaches to knowledge partnership that use arts and humanities methods. Together, the pilot and commissioned projects connect the long history of slavery, antislavery's unfinished work, and the symbols of heritage to current antislavery challenges.

The proposed knowledge exchange project builds on the applicants' on-going Precarious Lives project, a collaboration between academics at the Universities of Leeds and Salford. This research has filled a significant gap in existing knowledge. Despite longstanding recognition of migrants' susceptibility to serious labour exploitation in the Global North and a growing evidence base for the UK, research into forced labour among refugees and (refused) asylum seekers has so far been limited. In response, Precarious Lives set out to identify and understand experiences of forced labour among this highly vulnerable group, principally in the Yorkshire and Humber region, and to engage participants in a discussion of how to tackle it, primarily through 30 in-depth narrative interviews with refugees and (refused) asylum seekers, as well as 20 interviews with front-line practitioners and public agencies. The research has, for the first time, produced conclusive evidence of forced labour as well as other highly exploitative forms of unfree labour among migrants at different stages of the asylum system. The project has uncovered extremely low pay levels or withheld wages, very long hours, insecure and dangerous work. Work is often extracted through a complex web of power relations underpinned by instances of trafficking for domestic and sexual servitude, confinement, and threats/occurrences of physical violence and denunciation of immigration status to the authorities. The data show that international and national labour and human rights laws are not being upheld by UK employers and suggests that existing policy and legislation are currently unfit to adequately tackle these abuses. To respond to these challenges, we have worked together with nine Partner organisations located in different positions along the asylum-labour interface to develop a project designed to produce the most effective way of influencing policy and practice from the research findings. We will work with our Partners as part of a Knowledge Exchange Platform on Forced Labour and Asylum to oversee a programme of collaborative activities aimed at promoting dialogue between social scientists and research users and generating useful outputs for the latter. The activities consist of an opening and closing Platform Meeting, three Stakeholder Dialogue Forums, five Practitioner Surgeries, three User Workshops, and on-going General Networking and processes of Developing and Disseminating Outputs.