While anti-slavery actors recognize that forced labour, human trafficking and child labour disproportionately affect girls and women, gender is a sometimes unrecognized factor in how these forms of exploitation are counted and estimated. This, in turn, affects our perceptions of modern slavery, including how we design enforcement and remediation measures.
This was the topic of a Delta 8.7-hosted virtual symposium exploring how gender dynamics affect the ways in which modern slavery is identified, and how measurement and survey techniques may themselves reflect assumptions about men and women’s work and exploitation.
An official UN Commission on the Status of Women side-event, speakers from Walk Free, Repórter Brasil, Conservation International, and a survivor community leader shared their thoughts during this virtual event discussing how unrecognized gender dynamics affect the measurements of modern slavery and the effect of this issue on men, women, boys and girls vulnerable to or experiencing these forms of exploitation.