Tag: partnerships

Modern Slavery Partnership Workshops

Dr Alicia Kidd

Postdoctoral Researcher

Wilberforce Institute, University of Hull

alicia.kidd@hull.ac.uk

I am currently leading on a project funded by the Modern Slavery Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre. This project sees the development of a resource pack of innovative training workshops which aim to improve practitioner responses and engagement around various aspects of modern slavery. This resource will be shared with all regional Modern Slavery Partnerships across England and Wales in order to provide them with the tools they need to be able to deliver engaging training sessions to their partners at a pace, and in an order, that suits the needs of their region.

To ensure that each workshop is of maximum relevance to its audience, I am supported on this project by partners from the Humber Modern Slavery Partnership, the University of Nottingham’s Rights Lab, the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority and Fresca Group (a supplier of fruit and vegetables to the UK). These partners are using their expertise to provide real life insight into the experiences of victims of different forms of modern slavery in the UK, and also to offer advice on best practice for prevention, response and victim support both for frontline practitioners and for businesses.

In order to develop effective and engaging workshops, each one is written as a standalone exercise and is targeted at a different audience. There are workshops specifically for businesses, recruitment agencies, non-governmental organisations and frontline practitioners such as police, healthcare providers and local authorities. Each workshop is developed with its specific audience in mind and is supported and contextualised by legislation and policies relevant to the target audience which have been developed into accessible handouts. These handouts offer attendees straightforward summaries of complex information outlining key statutory responsibilities, points to consider and ways in which the provisions of policies can be implemented in different situations.

Instead of offering training in the ‘regular’ sense, of one expert running through definitions and statistics of modern slavery, signs to spot and possible ways to respond, these workshops place the attendees as the experts of their respective organisations. There is no single ‘leader’ of the training, but instead, attendees are divided into groups with peers that they would not normally work with in order to maximise the potential to learn about the capacities and capabilities of other organisations local to their own. Each group is supported by a facilitator with knowledge of modern slavery. From running pilot versions of these workshops, we have discovered that open conversation training like this allows for attendees to share experiences, insights and knowledge which they rarely have the chance to divulge in typical teacher-student training.

Each workshop is based on a different scenario of modern slavery, whereby attendees receive small sections of information as the session progresses. Each piece of the scenario builds upon the previous piece and, as in a real life situation, the attendees must use only the information they have in order to identify what the situation could be indicative of, whether a response is required and when, who would be responsible for leading a response and what the most effective ways of dealing with the situation would be. After each section of the scenario has been discussed, the groups are brought back together to share and debate ideas. Here, the facilitators are also able to offer the advised actions that the project team has devised in response to each section of the scenarios.

The scenarios have all been developed based on the experiences of victims of modern slavery in the UK and they include situations of criminal, labour and sexual exploitation as well as domestic servitude. The scenarios include adults, children, males, females, British nationals as well as EU and non-EU nationals in order for attendees to recognise and respond to the different rights and entitlements available for different cohorts of the population.

This project equips Modern Slavery Partnerships with the tools required to be able to run successful and impactful partnership learning exercises for a range of organisations, depending on the needs in their region. The workshops are innovative training tools, enabling partners to identify best practice, share knowledge and experience, improve prevention and victim care, and identify gaps in knowledge or provision. The Modern Slavery Partnerships will then be able to use the findings from the workshops to set actions in order to plug any identified gaps before they are experienced in reality.

If you’d like more information, please contact Alicia via email.

Then and now, campaigning against Modern Slavery in Hull and the Humber

Andrew Smith

Coordinator

Humber Modern Slavery Partnership and the Wilberforce Institute

a.smith9@hull.ac.uk

Times change, as does the seemingly endless tide of social and humanitarian injustice that weighs on some of the most vulnerable members of our communities. Brought to the forefront of the public consciousness once again and increasingly apparent this last decade is the global epidemic of modern slavery and human trafficking. Here in Hull the focus and determination to fight is as stout as it has always been.

Hull has long played a leading role in campaigning to abolish slavery, from the work of William Wilberforce who was the leading parliamentary spokesperson in the movement to abolish the slave trade (c.1759-1833), to Christian preacher and antislavery advocate Salim Charles Wilson (c.1859-1946). Our efforts in Hull have always been focused on one aim, a safer community.

But where are we today? In a somewhat fitting homage to the original Hull Anti-Slavery Committee, our efforts are channelled and coordinated in part by the Humber Modern Slavery Partnership currently based at the Wilberforce Institute next to Wilberforce House Museum on High Street in our historic old town. Today’s efforts are much more of a whole partnership response across statutory, third sector and business organisations. We still focus on the ideas of freedom, equality and social justice as our forebears did but in an updated and more contemporary way.

I have had the enormous pleasure to work in the social sector for the last ten years in my role as founder of a small local homeless charity after my own experience of losing everything. Our approach is holistic at its core, with the aim of – you guessed it – creating safer communities. Over this time, I have seen our collective approach towards at-risk adults and children change, mostly for the better, but I know you will agree that our task is harder than ever before.

It feels to me that poverty, destitution, homelessness, conflict, our fragile global economy, our unquenchable consumer greed and strained public services are making it almost effortless for organised crime groups to exploit our most vulnerable. Be it through forced or bonded labour, sexual exploitation or sex trafficking, county lines, domestic servitude or forced criminality, the trade in human misery is lucrative with often seemingly minimal risks for the perpetrators. The world has shrunk there is no doubt, and in many ways our now close-knit global community is more susceptible to crisis and abuse than ever before. It is often easy to feel like we live in a tiny Tupperware microclimate of injustice and some unseen power is holding the lid down so we can’t breathe. The time has come for us get together and punch some air holes in the side, or even lift the lid.

So, what can we do? I am certain we can use the positives of our condensed world to our advantage, much like exploiters and the countless menacing organised crime groups do. Using instant methods of communication, data sharing, awareness, training, campaigning and positive social action we can strengthen our net to protect victims and make sure the trade in human suffering is no longer an attractive prospect for these criminals. In Humberside we are working closely in partnership across the whole region better than ever, certainly in my professional life, to bring together everyone who can make a difference. Local authorities, the NHS, criminal justice organisations, charities, businesses, the University of Hull, the Wilberforce Institute, places of learning and worship and local support services share a vision of keeping people safe from abuse and making the area around the Humber a hostile environment for would-be exploiters.

Looking honestly at the factors that make people vulnerable to slavery will help us understand the steps we all need to take to make our communities more resilient. If we can prevent homelessness in more cases, empower children to say no to criminal gangs, or help people understand their healthcare entitlements for example, we will stop more people being in a situation of impending risk. Many young people and vulnerable groups on the fringes of our communities are not always aware of what support mechanisms we have in place to prevent crisis; they are, simply put, slipping through the net.

Over the next few years we will continue to make unwavering strides to identify and plug these gaps in provision with meaningful and substantive solutions that will afford everyone equal access to the full range of services that keep us all safe. A community is as good as the people in it, and I believe wholeheartedly that there is no place in Humberside for this woeful and rancid crime. I know that by learning from our past, and adding a spoonful of innovation and lashings of passion, we have a recipe that will transform our region into a safe space for everyone regardless of social or economic status.

#HiddenInPlainSight campaign at the University of Hull. See https://www.hull.ac.uk/work-with-us/more/media-centre/hidden-in-plain-sight