Impact case study database

The impact strategy of the Wilberforce Institute is to raise public awareness of historical and modern slavery to influence public policy and education. In achieving this, the Institute has prioritised two distinct areas of activity that flow directly from its key research findings:

Anti-Slavery Opinion Building (KRF1)

Pathways to Impact: The Institute has designed and delivered public campaigns to raise awareness of historical and modern slavery, using music, film, teaching aids, exhibitions and web resources. Between 2015 and 2021 the Stolen Lives website had 34,000 pageviews and 8,185 views of the Repairing Broken Lives video resources. Alongside Stolen Lives (2015), the Antislavery Usable Past project (2019), the #HiddenInPlainSight campaign (launched in November 2016, which placed ‘human packaging’ at high-footfall locations), and the #BreakTheChain campaign (launched in London 2018, using a ‘human vending machine’) all draw attention to the 25 million people trapped in forced labour around the world.

Impact: The opinion-building initiatives developed by the Wilberforce Institute have been adopted by many key stakeholders and have directly informed national public broadcasting campaigns designed to bring modern slavery to the attention of the British people. This included TV adverts, The Telegraph and Daily Mail print and digital advertising (EVID 1). As Kevin Hyland, the first UK Independent Modern Slavery Commissioner, confirms the strap line of the Hull University campaign ‘hidden in plain sight’ has inspired subsequent anti-slavery campaigns, helping to highlight the role that the public can play in identifying potential victims of exploitation: “Following the ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ campaign, the phrase was then incorporated into a national media campaign on modern slavery and continues to be used in the bulk of public literature. I have personally participated in hundreds of events where the term is used including a BBC Radio Four interview following this campaign by the Wilberforce Institute to discuss some of its findings and the role the public can play in helping to identify potential victims”. (EVID 2).

Similarly, ‘Stolen Lives’, led by Professor Oldfield, has been presented at over 60 different public events and has won the endorsement of teachers’ unions, including NASUWT. Acting General Secretary of the NASUWT comments on the tangible benefits the Stolen Lives campaign has had for teachers and students: “NASUWT commends the work of the Institute on the Stolen Lives project and felt it such an important issue that they provided a stand for Stolen Lives at the NASUWT Annual Conference in 2016, hosted two workshops at the NASUWT Women Teachers’ Consultation Conference and two workshops at their BME Teachers’ Consultation Conference, collectively reaching almost 800 NASUWT members. The NASUWT also committed £6000 to the project, specifically to ensure that the NASUWT website was kept updated with the Stolen Lives work and that all 300,000 of our members had free access to the project’s resources on account of how indispensable they are for teachers working on this difficult, yet immensely important topic.” ( EVID 3)

Stolen Lives has also had international impact, most notably in Sierra Leone where it proved the inspiration for an exhibition on modern slavery at the National Museum of Sierra Leone (2017),** the first of its kind. Subsequently, the British Council in Sierra Leone, working in collaboration with the Wilberforce Institute, arranged for the translation of songs from Stolen Lives into local languages and used them as resources in its Connecting Classrooms programme. To date this has reached over 30,000 students and helped to raise awareness of modern slavery in Sierra Leone, West Africa. As the former Country Director and Project Lead of the British Council in Sierra Leone readily attests: “ The British Council in Sierra Leone used Stolen Lives as part of a school programme designed to initiate discussions about modern slavery through performance, debate, film and the visual arts. This programme, which I project led, called ‘Open Your Eyes” (referencing one of the specially written songs for Stolen Lives) directly involved 2000 students from ages 12 to 16 but indirectly reached some 30,000 in the wider school community and far more through media outlets. This work was integral in increasing knowledge, awareness and understanding around the topics of modern slavery and human trafficking amongst the students and their teachers and not least the wider school community (parents, the police, church and mosque leaders); equally, it was crucial in assisting prevention efforts by arming children with a better education of the risks facing them.” (EVID 4).

Finally, and importantly, the work of the Wilberforce Institute is also shared with the local schools and communities in the Humber region. Performances from Stolen Lives have been held locally at Hull's Freedom Festival which attracts audiences of over 130,000. Whilst the Wilberforce Institute has worked closely with the Freedom Festival over many years, the Artistic Director and Joint Chief Executive of Freedom Festival singles out the Stolen Lives programme at the 2015 Festival for special mention: “We were delighted to include Stolen Lives in our 2015 programme. The two live performances, involving three local schools, had a significant impact, not just in terms of underlining and articulating the serious message behind the Freedom Festival, but also in bringing to the public a real insight into the fact that slavery continues to occur today, even in our own communities.” (EVID 5).

In 2015 the Wilberforce Institute was awarded the Queens Anniversary Prize for Further and Higher Education because it had “won global recognition for its applied research into slavery in all its forms and for bringing the lessons of the past, through its ground-breaking Global Slavery Index, to the combating of modern slavery” (EVID 6).

The Quantification of Slavery (KRF2)

Pathways to Impact: The Institute’s role in developing the metrics for the Global Slavery Index (GSI) provided the first comprehensive and accessible measure of the extent of modern slavery in 167 countries around the world. Aimed at informing practitioners and policymakers, the GSI has been disseminated around the world. The 2014 GSI prompted a response from 38 governments and generated more than 700 news articles and broadcasts in all regions of the globe.

Impact: As a member of the Walk Free Expert Advisory Group (EVID 7), Professor Bales spearheaded the design, development and dissemination of the GSI which provides the key international measure of the extent and response to modern slavery (EVID 8). The GSI is used by governments, researchers, NGOs and charities around the world to support the liberation of slaves and their reintegration into society. As the lead author of the 2014 GSI, Professor Bales’ research led the Walk Free Foundation to co-found the London-based Freedom Fund – a multi-million-pound NGO whose sole work is slavery eradication. Professor Bales became a Director of the Freedom Fund which has gone on to impact 765,628 lives and liberate 28,040 people (EVID 9).

As the driving force behind uncovering the hidden extent of modern slavery, Professor Bales has been at the forefront of the global campaign to raise awareness of the suffering of exploitation of 35.8 million people across the globe (GSI 2014, EVID 8). As the world’s only country-by-country estimate of people living in slavery the GSI maps the prevalence, vulnerability and governmental response to global slavery and has raised the visibility of the victims of modern slavery across the globe. Kevin Hyland, the first UK Independent Modern Slavery Commissioner confirms the international reach of this research: “Kevin Bales led development of the Global Slavery Index (GSI) in collaboration with UN and Australian actors, providing estimates of rates of slavery in 167 countries across the world which was used to encourage Australia to introduce their own Modern Slavery Act in 2018.” (EVID 2).

Building on the successful launch of the GSI, Professor Bales developed a new collaboration with the Chief Scientific Officer at the Home Office to co-produce the methodological innovation called Multiple Systems Estimation (MSE) (EVID 10). This resulted in a radical reassessment by the UK Government of the number of people enslaved in Britain, revised the figure upwards to between 10,000 and 13,000 men, women and children: roughly four times the figure produced by the National Crime Agency’s Human Trafficking Centre in 2013. Taken together, the GSI and MSE changed our understanding of the prevalence of Modern Slavery in the UK and provided the impetus for a new British Government Modern Slavery Strategy and Bill. Launched by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May in 2014 the Modern Slavey Bill had the full, written endorsement of Professors Bales and Silverman **(EVID 11) and came into law as the Modern Slavery Act in 2015. ** The Act provides the first comprehensive powers to the Courts specifically designed for combatting modern slavery and created the position of the UK Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner. According to the 2020 UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery there have been 1257 convictions since the Act was introduced, delivering justice to many more thousands of victims.

Launching the UK Government’s Modern Slavery Strategy (and Modern Slavery Bill) in November 2014, Theresa May commented on the revised estimates provided by Bales and Silverman: “The first step to eradicating the scourge of modern slavery is acknowledging and confronting its existence. The estimated scale of the problem in modern Britain is shocking and these new figures starkly reinforce the case for urgent action.” (EVID 11). The role of Professor Bales’ research in shaping the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act (2015) is further reinforced by Kevin Hyland, who commended the impact of Bales’ work on the quantification of modern slavery: “[It] resulted in a dramatic reassessment of the scale of modern slavery in the UK and the figures established via the MSE continue to be widely quoted within official documents relating to modern slavery in the UK – not least in the Government’s Modern Slavery Strategy 2014 which set out its approach to tackling the issue and later paved the way for the introduction of the Modern Slavery Act 2015.” (EVID 2).

In recognition of his contribution to developing the Multiple Systems Estimation (MSE) tool whilst working at the Wilberforce Institute , Professor Bales was awarded the 2018 ESRC Prize for Outstanding International Impact for “helping to provide the first reliable estimates of modern slavery. National and global slavery estimates, including Walk Free's Global Slavery Index on which Professor Bales collaborates, are the baseline against which the United Nations can measure progress towards its Sustainable Development Goal of ending slavery by 2030”.