Loria-Mae Heywood is a Research Associate for the Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAST) initiative, a project based at United Nations University Centre for Policy Research.
Loria-Mae is a child trafficking specialist who has over ten years of experience in work that is central to children, human trafficking, and development. She has done sociolegal and comparative doctoral research and writing on child trafficking within the context of Vietnam, Albania, and Nigeria; conducted research on conflict-affected least developed countries; and contributed to a collaborative research project on social protection floors in Guyana, India, and Palestine. Loria-Mae has also engaged in outreach work with children from ‘at risk’ communities in Guyana, as well as raised funds in support of child literacy. Her work on issues pertaining to human rights has further included contributions to a brief on least developed countries that was presented at a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva.
She has delivered pre-recorded lectures and course content on the topics of: Children – rights, labour, exploitation; Defining slavery and trafficking in international law; Slavery, mobility and trafficking: Borders and nation-states; Who speaks? Questions of voice and silence; Exploring research as social justice praxis; Narrative research: Advantages, critiques, case studies; Connecting research to policy and practice; Evaluating Research; and Research Impact. Further, she sourced course content for: ‘Slavery, trafficking, other: The contested space of anti-slavery’; and ‘Ethical and political dilemmas in Contemporary Slavery Studies’.
Loria-Mae has also undertaken consultancy work for UNICEF, the International Labour Organization (ILO), UN Development Programme, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and UN Women. She likewise provided research support for a project focused on assessing the degree to which obligations to victims of crime under the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime in England and Wales were being met by criminal justice agencies in the Humberside region. She also co-managed the ILO’s Skills for Employment Global Public-Private Knowledge Sharing Platform.
Research Interests
- Human trafficking
- Migration
- Modern Slavery
- Organized Crime
- Social Protection
