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Slavery Research Bulletin: Issue 49, September 2019

Bulletin
September 15, 2019

Welcome to the Slavery Research Bulletin, the Freedom Fund’s monthly brief designed to bring you new & compelling research from the global anti-slavery movement.

Improving social safety-net programs for child labourers

In Bangladesh, there are 1.7 million children involved in child labour, which accounts for about 4.3 percent of the child population. A report by the International Labour Organization reviews the existing social safety-net programs of Bangladesh to find out how the needs of children in child labour have been addressed and suggests ways to fill the gaps.

Challenges to decent work in southern India’s garment industry

Researchers from the University of Bath conducted 135 interviews to explore the labour challenges in the southern Indian garment industry. They found that exploitation persists in a variety of forms, including restrictions of freedom of movement, gender discrimination, and evidence of forced labour. The report offers recommendations for key stakeholders to tackle these challenges.

Hazardous child labour among Syrian refugees in Lebanon

A UNICEF report based on data collected from 12,708 refugees living in 1,902 informal tented settlements in Lebanon examines child labour among Syrian refugees in the agricultural sector. Of the children surveyed, 66 percent were actively working, and among them 30 percent have suffered an injury at work and 16 percent have experienced physical violence at work.

Giving Asian migrant women a voice

The Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women carried out a feminist participatory action research project on safe migration to capture migrant women’s realities of labour and migration. The research found that while poverty is a root cause of labour migration, women are increasingly expected be the breadwinner in families and to migrate for work to fulfil this role.

Purchasing practices performance in apparel and household textile supply chains

The 2019 Better Buying Index Report introduces country-level analyses and examples of the purchasing practices of individual companies. The report shows that locations with the lowest production costs, such as South-East Asia and Bangladesh, experience the highest pressure to lower prices. Also, the longer a brand and its suppliers have been in a business relationship, the more pressure is placed on suppliers during cost negotiations.

Read on…

  • A Human Rights Watch report documents human rights abuses against women and girls trafficked for sexual and labour exploitation within and outside Nigeria.
  • paper in the Journal of Development Studies investigates the gendered patterns and dynamics of labour exploitation and forced labour in the cocoa supply chain.
  • An article in the International Journal of Child Care and Education Policy examines the effect of cropland and livestock owners on child labour in Ethiopia.

And finally…

The editors at the anti-trafficking review are looking for papers for their special issue on “Everyday Abuse in the Global Economy”.

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Written by
Nuri Weitzman