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ENC 1102

28 February 2023

Destroying Slavery With Data

Imagine doing back-breaking labor, picking crops in the field for 13+ hours a day, and when

your pace slows even for a second you are beaten and told to work faster all while making no

money. You might be thinking that this is describing slavery events from the 1800s but that

assumption would be wrong. These are the same situations that people face today, even in our

own state of Florida. Most people believe that slavery died in the 1800s but it is still very real

today. A man named Kevin Bales is a Professor of Contemporary Slavery at the University of

Nottingham, he has done extensive research on this topic and has written a book called The

Slave Next Door and has given a TED Talk called How To Combat Modern Slavery. In that TED

Talk, he says that there are over 27 million slaves today in the world and that this is the most in

human history(How To Combat Modern Slavery, Kevin Bales). Now there are a few reasons

behind why this is the case, the population boom, is because there are many more humans today

than there were 200 years ago which also means that there are many more people to be enslaved.

The one good thing that has come from this is that today there is the smallest percentage of

people in slavery than ever before, but it is still a big problem. Another reason that it is still so

prevalent is the cost of a slave Bales said that throughout history the average price of a slave was

about $40,000 in today's money but today the average cost is $90(How To Combat Modern

Slavery, Kevin Bales). So when you combine the fact of there being more people on this planet
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than ever before on top of the price being lower than it ever has before, it is clear to see how

there can still be 27 million slaves today. But there must be a way to combat this, there are plenty

of anti-trafficking non-government organizations(NGO) that work toward this goal in many

different ways. As a computer engineering major, my background is in technology and science

my solution is to use analyze data and use technology to fight these traffickers and help find and

free their victims.

We need to take a deeper dive into what exactly happens when someone is trafficked and

what different kinds of trafficking are there. First, let's start off with what I described in the last

paragraph, this is called labor trafficking. Labor trafficking is the closest kind of slavery to the

one America experienced before the 13th amendment. There is a town in Florida called

Immokalee, this town is very poor and mostly immigrants. The only jobs they could find were on

the outskirts of town picking tomatoes. These men were the closest thing to slaves, they were

paid per ton of tomatoes they picked and in order for them to make a minimum wage of $6.75 an

hour they would have to pick over 2.5 tons of tomatoes in one day. On top of this, their only

source of lunch is over priced convenience store food. Situations like these are terrible, but they

can get much worse. A man by the name of Miguel Flores was the leader of a slavery ring in the

southern region of the united states. This is all described to us in the book The Slave Next Door,

there were multiple stories of people who had worked on these plantation sites and escaped.

Some people escaped and met with informants and told them about what was going on about

how they were forced to work long hours and if they stepped out of line then they were,

threatened with violence, they even said “the boss shot a worker who owed him money and was
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trying to leave to find work elsewhere.”(The Slave Next Door, Kevin Bales 55), and that people

who did die from gunshots were just reported to die by natural causes. Another situation similar

to this is the story of Antonio Martinez, he had lived in Mexico with sick family and wasn’t able

to maintain a living so he met with someone that said that he could take them to California where

he would be making $150, so after a bus ride, walk through the desert and a long car drive

Antonio arrived in Florida where he was bought for $350 dollars by Abel and Basilio Cuello and

he was put to work picking tomatoes. Eventually, he escaped when a guard dosed off, Florez, and

the Cuellos were eventually brought in on slavery charges. The reason this happens is that big

companies are trying to sell their product at low prices while also creating lots of profit, so the

only way for them to do that is to buy the produce at low rates. And when that happens in order

for a farm to make the most amount of money they must cut prices, and that's easiest when you

aren’t paying anyone to do the work, and that is how slavery has become so profitable for both

the big companies and the slave owners. Big companies will deny buying from slave businesses

but it happens all the time, and trafficking can be engrained in a business at all levels whether

they know it or not. In Bangladesh, there are kids that are kidnapped, bought, and sold into

slavery and are used for fishing. Bales says “ boys as young as eight are kidnapped and taken out

to remote islands like Dublar Char off the southwest coast. Sold to the fishing crews for about

$15”(The Slave Next Door, Kevin Bales 138). They are used for cleaning and processing fish,

the buyers will also string together these makeshift rafts float them off the shore up to 20miles

away, and put kids on them to catch and clean for 18 hours a day and people would come by to

check on them to beat them and make them work faster. They would also “sexually abuse the

boys and beat them regularly.”. Eventually, this little island was raided by the military but there's
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no telling how many are out there. Places in that region like Indonesia had seafood exports

making over 5 billion dollars in a year and places like the US are spending over 13 billion dollars

a year on seafood(The Slave Next Door, Kevin Bales 138-139). Again businesses deny that they

buy from slave labor but again there really is no way to know for sure.

This is a big problem to address, big brand companies get a lot of their products from

many different sources, and regardless if they know it or not slavery is probably a part of this.

And in order to check these companies to find out what is really happening you would have to

first find every single location worldwide that is selling to these companies then send people

undercover to find out the conditions in which these people are working. This is a big problem

because unless someone escapes or goes undercover it is almost impossible to locate where in

the company slavery is being used and free them. This problem can be helped using technology,

specifically something called the blockchain. If you’ve ever heard of words like Bitcoin or

cryptocurrency then you might have also heard of the term blockchain being used. An article

titled Using Technology to Battle Forced Labor in Supply Chain was created by Anti-Human

Trafficking Intelligence Initiative and QuantexaBY, in that article we see that “Blockchain is a

decentralized, immutable, and publicly accessible ledger of information that enables users to

share data and make transactions without a third party”. What this means is that the blockchain is

a way to transparently be able to store and transfer data without the need for a middleman and

without the worry of data being changed. This works because for example if 2 people needed to

transfer money a copy of each person's data is taken and shared with one another allowing each

person to verify this transaction data, and it is impossible for a third party to edit the data because

each person's data is encrypted. Now imagine this concept large scale over the span of an entire
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company, data that is shared through the entire supply chain that everyone can access and no one

could change. There are countless possibilities in which this could be implemented, the article

says that companies could ditch paper documents(that could be taken at any time) in favor of

digitally stored fingerprints and iris scans of foreign workers; they say it could also be used to

prevent wages from changing or additional fees from being charged( Anti-Human Trafficking

Intelligence Initiative and QuantexaBY,). Some companies are taking the initiative, the

companies Sea Quest Fiji, World Wildlife Foundation, ConsenSys, and TraSeable Solutions all

teamed up to implement this technology to track shipments and stop illegal fishing and slave

labor. The way they went about this is by “Scanning a can of tuna packaging using a smartphone

app shows the journey of the tuna fish, where and when the fish was caught and by which vessel

and fishing method”(Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative and QuantexaBY,). Every

step of the way the thing that the tuna goes through is documented all the way down to the boat it

was caught on. This helps to know exactly where the fish is coming from and make sure slave

labor isn’t being used. Another 2 companies are Diginex(a blockchain solutions company) and

The Mekong Club(an anti-slavery NGO), and they have created a blockchain-based app called

eMin. This app allows copies of employee contracts to be stored on the blockchain allowing full

transparency; this app allows workers, especially foreign ones, to always have access to their

documentation.

There is more than just one kind of slavery, when people hear the word trafficking the

first thing that they think about is sex trafficking, this is when people take mostly women and

children and make them into prostitutes against their will, and if they try to resist they are only

met with violence. Markie Dell is a woman who was trafficked and shared her story through a
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TED Talk titled Escaping The Pain Of Human Trafficking. When she was a teenager, she was

invited to party with her friend in a cabin in the woods and her friend drove her out there. After

that night when the friend was driving her back, they had stopped at a strip club and that was

where things took a turn. The friend told her that she owed her money and told her that she had

to dance for it and that there were people inside to make sure it happened. Dell was lured away

and brought to an unfamiliar area and was forced to do sexual acts for money, this is what

happens to most people that are sex trafficked. After she had danced she was taken back to the

cabin where she was drugged and rapped by her friend and other men. This had occurred every

day for over a year until a policeman was tipped off and was able to rescue her(Markie Dell).

This type of trafficking is far too common, where people will take women and children, they are

often taken over state or country lines in order to escape investigators and now they are in an

unfamiliar place with no money, no help, and no way to get home.

Sex traffickers are using technology to help traffic their victims so it's about time that we

catch up. That is what the company Thorn is doing, Thorn is a company that has come together

to try and used technology to stop this horrific act. When watching their We are Thorn

introduction video we learn lots of shocking information, like that the United States is the #1

producer of child pornography in the world and that the National Center for Missing & Exploited

Children(NCMEC) received over 17 million reports of child pornography in 2011(Thorn). This

is very important because sex traffickers will advertise their victims for sexual services online.

This was further proved by a study done by Thorn showing that 70% of sex traffic victims were

sold online. This is why it is very important to start looking at the internet for stuff like this,

luckily Thorn is working on that right now and has created something called the shared hash
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program. The shared hash program is a program where if a company finds a child abuse image

on its network, it can report it to NCMEC which will put a digital fingerprint on that image and

upload that fingerprint to a cloud, then other companies can pull from that cloud and can use that

fingerprint to locate if the image is also on their network and have it taken down(Thorn). They

have also helped with the Polaris project with the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Thorn

did something as simple as adding a text shortcut so that people could text instead of call and this

was revolutionary because people who felt like they didn’t want to be heard or weren’t in a

situation to talk, could text. But Thorn's biggest project is the Spotlight project, which basically

gathers data from online sex advertisements and previous cases to identify potential trafficked

victims. This allows us to take back the internet and catch people selling trafficked people online.

When talking about solutions as I said there are plenty of organizations out there ready to

help, but since I am a computer engineer I took a different approach to it, I thought about using

technology and data science to better understand and help trafficked people. There is a company

called Tech Against Trafficking (TAT) that has made it its mission to see what they can do with

technology to help stop this threat. They have large meetings with tech companies and

anti-trafficking agencies and come together and talk about what they have done to combat this

problem and they talk further about more ideas on how to stop trafficking. Tech Against

Trafficking also has a program named the Accelerator. On their main page, it says “The

Accelerator connects participating organizations with technology companies that provide

technical expertise, network access, mentorship, and educational opportunities, expediting

operational processes and technical advancements that facilitate scale and optimize for long-term

sustainability. ”(Tech Against Trafficking Accelerator). The Accelerator from my understanding

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acts as a middleman program where tech and anti-slavery companies can come together and

create a solution. As it says there are also people that can mentor and help the anti-slavery

companies and make what they are doing now sustainable for the future. In the article

Harnessing the Power of Data to Combat Human Trafficking published by BSR, they talk about

how “(TAT) brought together technologists, nonprofits, academics, governments, and

policy-makers from 60 countries” in a summit to discuss the accelerator and other things. One

project created from the Accelerator is the Lanter Project, this project uses and online platform

called Freedom Signal that help connect anti-trafficking organizations with people who are being

advertised for sexual services online(BSR). Another one is Unseen, this company runs the

Modern Slavery & Exploitation Helpline in the UK and Tech Against Trafficking has used

technology to help them “design a new data management platform that generates insights from

case data, improved its process that matches cases to supply chain data, and developed a

marketing strategy for its Business Portal, which helps businesses identify cases of human

trafficking across their supply chains.”(BSR). This is really important because data could be the

key to identifying and finding many trafficked people. They go on to talk about how important

data is and when using a dynamic graphing technology built by Microsoft, they are able to take

data from the unseen company and use it to see patterns in cases and help more people.

This has shown that through the efforts of like-minded companies, we can help end

modern-day slavery. It’ll be a long journey but we just have to keep trying and eventually, we

will live in a world where an 8 year-old girl doesn’t have to worry about getting trafficked on her

walk home from school.

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Cited Work

Bales, Kevin, and Ron Soodalter. The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in

America Today. 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2009. JSTOR,

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppk0r Accessed 16 Feb. 2023

Bales, Kevin. “How to Combat Modern Slavery.” TED Talks, 29 Mar. 2010,

www.ted.com/talks/kevin_bales_how_to_combat_modern_slavery?language=en

Dell, Markie. “Escaping the Pain of Human Trafficking | Markie Dell

TEDxDownsviewWomen.” TED Talks,

www.ted.com/talks/markie_dell_escaping_the_pain_of_human_trafficking?language=en.

QuantexaBY and Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative. “Using Technology to

Battle Forced Labor in Supply Chain.” Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence

Initiative, 25 Mar. 2022,

followmoneyfightslavery.org/using-technology-to-battle-forced-labor-in-supply-c

hain. Accessed 28 Feb. 2023.

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Tech Against Trafficking. “Accelerator Program | Tech Against Trafficking.” Tech

Against Trafficking, techagainsttrafficking.org/accelerator-program.

Tekisalp, Lale, et al. “Harnessing the Power of Data to Combat Human Trafficking | Blog

| Sustainable Business Network and Consultancy | BSR.” BSR, 17 May 2022,

www.bsr.org/en/blog/harnessing-the-power-of-data-to-combat-human-trafficking.

Accessed 28 Feb. 2023.

Thorn. “We Are Thorn.” YouTube, 14 Nov. 2013,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se4OvAGJu4U.