Introduction

The failure of a public response in the ‘western world’ to the presence of unfree labour in the global economy, including exploitation of sexual, physical and emotional labour trafficked across and within national borders, has become a significant socioeconomic and cultural quandary. Recent policy and media discussions emphasise the lack of information as a limiting factor in the public's non-response to the increasing evidence of ‘modern slaves’ indentured in ‘our’ factories, on ‘our’ farms, begging in ‘our’ streets, and of products of forced labour increasingly available on ‘our’ supermarket shelves. The notion that ‘if people only knew they would act differently’ – that is, consume differently, question companies and suppliers of ‘unethically’ produced consumer goods and services, and recognise and report victims – underlies the majority of recent anti-trafficking awareness campaigns.

In 2011, the UK Government suggested that although ‘many members of the public already care deeply about the plight of trafficking victims’, ‘awareness and vigilance’ should be raised in ‘particular communities’ (UK Government 2011: 8). In 2014, it launched a ‘Modern Slavery is Closer than You Think’ awareness campaign (UK Government 2014a) to explain ‘the nature of modern slavery’ and to encourage reporting by members of the public. The focus of this campaign appears to be on ‘concerned’ citizens, who may not be sufficiently aware of the ‘signs of slavery’ and therefore may not be able to recognise and report potential cases of trafficking, or who may become ‘enslaved’ themselves. Such co-production of threat, fear and awareness by the UK Government has increasingly become one of its biopolitical tools of ‘managing’ migration. Tyler (2010), for example, highlights the government's capacity to control and fashion populations by marking out and failing specific groups against the background of a continually re-enacted myth of threatened national belonging and community cohesion. The evidence base used by the UK Government in making overstated claims on the extent of public awareness of trafficking appears to be as thin as the evidence base relied upon by many national governments in Europe in formulating their anti-trafficking responses. As the anti-trafficking ‘community’ prepares to mark the fifteenth anniversary of the Palermo Protocol (United Nations 2000) in December 2015, the lack of robust research and data continues to be one of the barriers in planning for, implementing and monitoring the implementation of numerous anti-trafficking initiatives.