All the preceding discussion is an elaborate contextualizing exercise aimed at concealing the fact that my own methods of data collection have been simplistic and driven less by epistemological concerns than by prac-ticalities. While it may sound as if I brought the surgical precision of the scalpel to bear on my data, in fact I simply employed the social science equivalent of the vacuum cleaner, sucking up data from every possible source. I began my work at the macro level, by drawing up a large data-collection form, or, in the jargon, a “systematic protocol.” My unit of analysis was the nation-state. For each country, I recorded the basic eco-nomic and demographic information available from the UN and other sources. Then several research assistants and I began to troop (physically and electronically) through every store of information that might bear on slavery.
Re p o r t s o f U . S . Gove r n m e n t A g e n c i e s
The State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices were useful as background materials but had worrying political inXuences.13 The clear discrepancies between, for example, what I had observed on the ground in Mauritania and what the report had to say about that country 96 T H E C H A L L E N G E O F M EA S U R I N G S L AV E RY
gave me pause. The U.S. government has initiated a period of rap-prochement with the Mauritania regime, and this has led to a willingness on the part of the U.S. government to interpret the human rights situa-tion in that country charitably. The United States is playing politics with slavery and with knowledge in exactly the way discussed earlier. This is not surprising, but it doesn’t aid data collection. The State Department’s 2001 TraYcking in Persons Report was not available when I Wrst compiled my data set.14However, it has been useful for the background information given on the eighty countries listed. The report’s system of tiers is an interesting variable, but instead of actually measuring human traYcking, it measures the response of a given country to traYcking. (This variable is highly correlated with the sale and movement of slaves from a country.) The 2002 report included more countries. Information collected by the OYce to Monitor and Combat Human TraYcking, from State Depart-ment staV around the world, must surely oVer a mother lode of data, but it is seen as politically sensitive and, to my knowledge, is not available at this time to other researchers.
Re p o r t s by t h e In t e r n a t i o n a l L a b o r Or g a n i z a t i o n
These reports, too, such as the Stopping Forced Labour report, are useful for gleaning pieces of information that can then be assembled in a coun-try-by-country data set.15However, in many ways, the nonsynthesized, nonaggregated information generated by the ILO is more useful. The reports on each session of the ILO, which include the reports of the Committee of Experts on the Application of Conventions and Reso-lutions, and of the Committee on the Application of Standards, run to many volumes and contain the transcripts of reports by country, labor, and employer representatives. These reports contain large amounts of obfuscation and justiWcation by countries that have been criticized.
(Sudan, for example, consistently and at length insists that they have
“abduction” not “enslavement.”) There is also useful information, but a great amount of sifting is required to uncover it. Here, too, politics plays a part: in response to demands—primarily by member states—to reduce criticism, information is edited before release. I have watched this process close at hand in the meetings and seen the results in the reports of the United Nations Working Group on Contemporary Forms of Slavery.16 This report presents incidences of slavery around the world that have been documented by non-governmental organizations and others. The annual
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reports of the working group consistently water down this information to lessen any criticism of speciWc countries. In short, there is much more information to be gained by sitting in the sessions, information that never reaches the oYcial reports. This points up a distinction for researchers:
there is a diVerence between “raw” information available in meetings and the “cooked” version that exists for public consumption.
Re p o r t s by Ex p e r t s
If the United Nations has information more likely to be free of political tampering, it is in the reports commissioned from experts. These are not usually made generally available. One example is the report on vulner-ability to debt bondage commission by the ILO Social Finance Unit and prepared by the Institute for Human Development in India.17 Researchers developed and tested the “Vulnerability to Debt Bondage Scale,” which signiWcantly furthers our understanding of this form of slav-ery. They used aggregated information for agricultural workers and multivariate analysis to test the scale. A second example is the work on child traYcking in West Africa done by the Norwegian child-labor expert Anne Kielland for the World Bank, probably the best research on this topic I have ever seen.18Carefully sampled, sensitively carried out, pre-cisely analyzed, it dramatically moves forward our understanding of this phenomenon.
Re p o r t s by No n - g ove r n m e n t a l Or g a n i z a t i o n s
These reports are a narrower, but rich, source of information. Like the reports of consultants to UN bodies, they often are not generally available, but for diVerent reasons. For a non-governmental organization, “publi-cation” may simply mean making a number of copies on the photocopier.
Likewise, since non-governmental organizations are concerned with mov-ing public opinion, the only version of a research report that reaches the public may be a press release. Moreover, with non-governmental organ-ization reports, there is also the need to separate outrage and analysis.
While countries often try to diminish reports of labor abuses within their borders, non-governmental organizations are sometimes tempted to overstate the same abuses (though this may also indicate a lack of agreed-upon deWnitions). Of course, some non-governmental organizations have a long history of careful and precise reporting. Anti-Slavery International 98 T H E C H A L L E N G E O F M EA S U R I N G S L AV E RY
is the leader in this, and Human Rights Watch, with its legalistic bent, provides sound information. Smaller and more local non-governmental organizations are more problematic; they are less careful in documenting their assertions—which is not surprising, since they see their job as right-ing wrongs, not presentright-ing detailed documentation. With all non-governmental organizations, it is most fruitful to speak in person to the staV working on a particular issue to discover what reports are available.
This points up the need for a repository of these often informal human rights and labor rights investigations. Well organized and well cared for, the archives and library of Anti-Slavery International in London are a rare exception, as are their publications.19Most non-governmental organiza-tions are dealing with today’s crises and neglecting the solid information they may have collected yesterday.
A positive step worth mentioning, though one that might not imme-diately seem positive, is Human Rights Watch’s criticism of the State Department’s 2001 TraYcking in Persons Report.20The criticism calls for more and more detailed information. LaShawn R. JeVerson, executive director of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, states,
“It’s crucial that each country chapter relay basic information about how many people are traYcked into, through, and from it; the types of forced labor for which people are traYcked; the number of actual prosecutions and convictions for traYcking; and how many state agents have been investigated, tried, and convicted for traYcking-related oVenses.”21This can be very diYcult information to gather, especially from embassies and consulates. In many countries, the U.S. government is neither given access to such information, nor allowed to collect it independently.
Given that gathering this information requires research infrastructure that may not exist, it is somewhat unfair to expect embassies to discover what national and international agencies are unable to determine. That said, the more attention given to research methods, and the possible inXuence of political concerns on the reporting of traYcking information, the better.
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), one of the authors and sponsors of the legislation that established the OYce to Monitor and Combat TraYcking in Persons, has also criticized the 2001 TraYcking in Persons Report, calling for clearer recommendations for sanctions. Undoubtedly, the original mandate of the report, which concentrates on the preventative or reme-dial programs set up by foreign governments, is part of the problem, and I feel certain that the authors of the report must be frustrated by the nar-rowness of their terms of reference. Yet the report is a positive step made not two years into a major research and development exercise. Moreover,
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important new information will come from it, and a public debate on that information has already begun. Over time this exchange can only serve to improve the quality of information—especially if organizations like Human Rights Watch also agree to feed their data into the 2001 TraYcking in Persons Report.
Re p o r t s by Na t i o n a l Gove r n m e n t s
Governmental reports that are immediately useful are not common. Of course, more governments may be carrying out research than is being dis-seminated. But the resources of governments are so much larger than those of non-governmental organizations that, when they bring them to bear, the results can be fruitful. One example of this is the Incidence of Bonded Labour in India: Area, Nature, and Extent, by the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, in India, one of the most comprehensive studies of debt bondage ever undertaken.22The academy is a central training school for social workers; its students were deployed across the country to collect data. The results present a remarkable snap-shot of a dynamic situation of debt bondage in India in the late 1980s.
Sadly, there has been no follow-up. A second example is the report International TraYcking in Women to the United States, by Amy O’Neill Richard.23Being able to call on the information and analytical capabili-ties at CIA headquarters in order to collect data may be the fantasy of many researchers; when it does occur it produces remarkably deep infor-mation. The CIA and human rights organizations may seem to be strange bedfellows—or perhaps not, given that human traYcking is both a crime and a potential threat to security. It would be good if other governments and agencies within our own government devoted such resources to research. Of course, they do; but few researchers are likely to see much of it. For example, I have two reports that shed new light on conditions of slavery and traYcking in two countries, but I was given them with the express condition that I not share them with other researchers.
T h e Wo rk o f Ac a d e m i c Ex p e r t s
Academic studies tend to be most important in contextualizing and organizing the interpretation of more speciWc reports on labor abuses such as slavery. Few academics study slavery or traYcking up close.24Their work is more likely to be synthetic and interpretive. This is still important, 100 T H E C H A L L E N G E O F M EA S U R I N G S L AV E RY
as the great preponderance of factual reports must be lodged within the-oretical frameworks. However, it can be discouraging to Wnd a group of extremely talented academics devoting their time to arcane discussions of the ways that one might intellectually subdivide information about slav-ery (if one ever collected it). I have been drawn into debates on several occasions concerning the precise conceptual diVerences between feudal-ism, debt bondage, and indentured servitude, and whether any or all of these are forms of slavery. It is important to understand the past, and the relation between diVerent forms of exploitation, but if these discussions concern contemporary slavery, then they must be grounded in research that tests assumptions and debates against the realities found in the Weld.
Perhaps most exciting is work like that of Jok Madut Jok, a Sudanese his-torian based in the United States who has written about contemporary enslavement in Sudan; and the work of Binka Le Breton, who lives in Brazil and studies labor exploitation there.25
Pre s s Re p o r t s
By far the largest source of information on labor abuses, press reports are utterly without organization. The Listserv called Stop-TraYc generates several news reports per day concerning human traYcking and enslave-ment.26The important point is that journalists are normally recording facts or government statements of facts that do not make up large reports, but that, when aggregated, present larger pictures. The investigative reports of large newspapers are often superior to all but the most exten-sive academic research. The resources devoted to, and the international travel and investigation behind, a single news story may be wide-ranging.
Recent investigations by the New York Times have illuminated the links between slave labor in Brazil and its key export products.27In its voracious hunger for information, the media also scoops up the work of academ-ics and non-governmental organizations, relaying it to other academacadem-ics and non-governmental organizations in a way that is much more eYcient than that of their own organs.
I have canvassed all these types of sources in order to build up a data set on slavery across countries. Whatever the case, I logged every number, estimate, guess, and suggestion on a separate large sheet for each coun-try (or sometimes, for populous and well-documented countries, I assigned a sheet to each region of a country, to be aggregated later). The
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result, after nearly three years, was a great hodge-podge, but one that con-centrated information and organized it by nation-state. Overlapping this process was the Weldwork that provided case study data; some informa-tion collected from secondary sources in the countries I visited was added to the mix. Otherwise, I used the on-the-ground observations, where possible, as a check on the reports logged.