Innovate to Perpetrate: the Use of the Internet to Facilitate Modern Slavery

Rights Lab project lead: Ben Brewster
Funder: University of Nottingham (Nottingham Research Fellowship)
Duration: July 2020-June 2023
Programme: Health and Wellbeing

This Nottingham Research Fellowship is the first in-depth study into the role of online social spaces in the facilitation of modern slavery, including the role that platforms themselves can play in prevention and discovery. Online social spaces, or ‘online communities,’ increasingly play a role in modern slavery, providing a vector through which nefarious actors can lure, coerce, deceive and groom the vulnerable into a range of exploitative situations: from offers of employment and accommodation that result in labour exploitation, and offers of travel and companionship that result in forced sex work, to the grooming of children that results in criminal exploitation through ‘county lines’ child criminal exploitation.