thank you thank you I’m going to start
by talking about three cases in modern
slavery so the first one is about four
men from the Czech Republic who came to
this country thinking they had work and
when they got here they were met by
someone and their documents passports
were taken away
they were taken somewhere to live in
very squalid conditions and they were
made to work in a factory and they had
to hand over all their earnings to a
gang master and when one of them
objected and said well I can’t have my
money he was chained to a radiator he
was beaten and he was burnt with
cigarettes and then there’s another case
of a young lady called Maya British girl
who from the ages of 12 to 19 was really
very terribly exploited so they started
off by grooming her getting her to sell
drugs and then she worked up what was
the supposed debt a large debt and so
she was forced into prostitution sexual
exploitation she had to service after 30
clients a day and even when she went
away on a school trip with her school
friends her abuses were where she was
under such control that she they even
trafficked her to people in the
neighborhood the third case a Vietnamese
boy called Hong whose family put
together $30,000 to pay for him to be
brought into this country illegally I’m
sure when he got here he was forced to
work in a cannabis farm cameras factory
he was he escaped but then he was
recaptured re trafficked and put into
domestic and sexual abuse those are
three cases but modern slavery touches
all of us it’s all we come across we
can’t come across it in our everyday
lives in nail bars car washes block
paving and of course in supply chains of
goods and
services that we buy so I was how did I
get interested in this the home office
asked me as part of launching a modern
slavery strategy if I would try and
figure out how many victims there are of
modern slavery in this country there’s a
thing called a national referral
mechanism which is run by the National
Crime Agency which collects reports from
various sources of victims of modern
slavery and in 2013 they thought there
were two thousand seven hundred and
forty four victims but modern slavery is
a hidden crime people who are taken into
this condition are afraid to tell anyone
about it even if they escape they may
not even be identified as victims by
those who come across them and in some
cases they may not even realize
themselves that what they were in
amounted to slavery people just like
other crimes like domestic abuse are
often ashamed and in some of the cases I
talked about they may themselves have
got into it because of doing something
that they shouldn’t have done like the
young man from Vietnam and the other
reason of course we don’t have complete
data is that if you put out a call to
the police or whoever for data they
don’t all answer it so the data is
necessarily incomplete so there’s a
whole slew of reasons why 2744 was not
there number at all and why they were
considerably more victims and that was
where statistics came into the equation
let’s think of an old hidden population
problem suppose you want to discover how
many fish there are in a pond so one
method that was suggested a long time
ago was this you go fishing and you
catch say
a hundred fish then you mark all those
fish in some way and you throw them all
back and you let them swim around for a
week and then you come fishing again and
you catch another hundred and you
discover that 20 of the fish that you
caught the second time we’re in the
original cap so you had a hundred
originally you you let them all go you
you catch another hundred and twenty is
the overlap well many of you will have
figured out that means that the total in
the pond is about five hundred either
you’re mathematicians or you’ve done
intuitively so that’s that’s where it
comes to and that’s a method it’s a very
old method called mark recapture or
capture recapture in the case of modern
slavery and the National Crime Agency
the way they get the data is they get
lists of victims from different sources
they get victims from say the police
they get victims from government
organizations like the Border Agency
border force they get victims from
charities like the Salvation Army and
Barnardo’s they get victims from the
general public and they get big in some
local authorities so that’s five
different lists if you like of victims
and then what you can do is you can you
could think of those as fishing in the
pond five times and you can look at all
the possible overlaps between those
different lists and you can then fit a
mathematical model to it and from that
estimate what’s called the dark figure
which is the number of cases that don’t
appear on any lists at all well in order
to get the numbers right I have to read
them out so it turns out that for
example on the government organizations
list there are 695 cases that don’t
appear on any other lists at all if you
take the police force and the general
public lists the overlap between those
contains the eleven cases that aren’t on
any of the other lists and there’s
actually one case which is on four of
the lists local authorities
non-government
police force and government
organizations but not on the general
public lists and so on there are
actually lot there are 31 different
combinations of lists that you can
observe and so you get 31 different
totals in each of the possible
combinations and from those you can
estimate a 30 second one which is the
ones that don’t appear on any list at
all well if you go through all that and
fit a mathematical model which is
something as I did you find at the
estimate of a number of victims is not
two thousand seven hundred and
forty-four but it’s between ten and
thirteen thousand victims that figure is
very important why for two reasons
really the first reason is by exposing
the size of the problem it actually
concentrated the mind of government of
politicians of the public of the police
of everybody on the fact that modern
slavery wasn’t just a little niche thing
that happened to a few people it’s a big
and serious issue it’s one that we all
have to be concerned about and this
methodology that we’ve developed we’ve
we hope to apply internationally other
countries are doing similar things a lot
of my work now is about rolling out the
methods learning more about them and
rolling out the methods so we can use
methods like this all over the world and
get a much better pitch of what’s going
on so the first thing is raising
consciousness and the second thing is of
course making the case for the
allocation of resources and that is also
very important it’s is it the number of
victims that the National Crime Agency
now knows about has gone up every year
and it’s now quite a lot more than 2744
does that mean there are more victims or
does it mean we’re better at finding
them I think it means that we’re better
at finding them I was amazed how much
attention this work received it was
reported in national newspapers
it has had very wide attention indeed
and eventually all led up to the passing
of the modern slavery at 2015 I think
one thing I would leave you it as a
thought which is which is this if you
take a topic like climate change 30
years ago people knew that there was a
problem with climate change but they
didn’t really understand anything much
about the mechanisms and so on so he
knew as a problem but we had to learn a
lot more about it modern slavery you
know we thought – we’d abolish slavery
200 years ago or 150 years ago but of
course this is still with us as a
problem and if we are to address this
and we are to achieve a world where
nobody is in a situation of the people I
spoke about at the beginning then we
need to learn much more we need to do
much better research and it’s only the
step I and others have taken is only the
first step towards getting a much bigger
understanding so I hope I’ve given you
an idea of the way that statistics has
made a difference to what is a very very
serious depressing problem but one which
I hope we can all do our bit to do
something about thank you
[Applause]
by talking about three cases in modern
slavery so the first one is about four
men from the Czech Republic who came to
this country thinking they had work and
when they got here they were met by
someone and their documents passports
were taken away
they were taken somewhere to live in
very squalid conditions and they were
made to work in a factory and they had
to hand over all their earnings to a
gang master and when one of them
objected and said well I can’t have my
money he was chained to a radiator he
was beaten and he was burnt with
cigarettes and then there’s another case
of a young lady called Maya British girl
who from the ages of 12 to 19 was really
very terribly exploited so they started
off by grooming her getting her to sell
drugs and then she worked up what was
the supposed debt a large debt and so
she was forced into prostitution sexual
exploitation she had to service after 30
clients a day and even when she went
away on a school trip with her school
friends her abuses were where she was
under such control that she they even
trafficked her to people in the
neighborhood the third case a Vietnamese
boy called Hong whose family put
together $30,000 to pay for him to be
brought into this country illegally I’m
sure when he got here he was forced to
work in a cannabis farm cameras factory
he was he escaped but then he was
recaptured re trafficked and put into
domestic and sexual abuse those are
three cases but modern slavery touches
all of us it’s all we come across we
can’t come across it in our everyday
lives in nail bars car washes block
paving and of course in supply chains of
goods and
services that we buy so I was how did I
get interested in this the home office
asked me as part of launching a modern
slavery strategy if I would try and
figure out how many victims there are of
modern slavery in this country there’s a
thing called a national referral
mechanism which is run by the National
Crime Agency which collects reports from
various sources of victims of modern
slavery and in 2013 they thought there
were two thousand seven hundred and
forty four victims but modern slavery is
a hidden crime people who are taken into
this condition are afraid to tell anyone
about it even if they escape they may
not even be identified as victims by
those who come across them and in some
cases they may not even realize
themselves that what they were in
amounted to slavery people just like
other crimes like domestic abuse are
often ashamed and in some of the cases I
talked about they may themselves have
got into it because of doing something
that they shouldn’t have done like the
young man from Vietnam and the other
reason of course we don’t have complete
data is that if you put out a call to
the police or whoever for data they
don’t all answer it so the data is
necessarily incomplete so there’s a
whole slew of reasons why 2744 was not
there number at all and why they were
considerably more victims and that was
where statistics came into the equation
let’s think of an old hidden population
problem suppose you want to discover how
many fish there are in a pond so one
method that was suggested a long time
ago was this you go fishing and you
catch say
a hundred fish then you mark all those
fish in some way and you throw them all
back and you let them swim around for a
week and then you come fishing again and
you catch another hundred and you
discover that 20 of the fish that you
caught the second time we’re in the
original cap so you had a hundred
originally you you let them all go you
you catch another hundred and twenty is
the overlap well many of you will have
figured out that means that the total in
the pond is about five hundred either
you’re mathematicians or you’ve done
intuitively so that’s that’s where it
comes to and that’s a method it’s a very
old method called mark recapture or
capture recapture in the case of modern
slavery and the National Crime Agency
the way they get the data is they get
lists of victims from different sources
they get victims from say the police
they get victims from government
organizations like the Border Agency
border force they get victims from
charities like the Salvation Army and
Barnardo’s they get victims from the
general public and they get big in some
local authorities so that’s five
different lists if you like of victims
and then what you can do is you can you
could think of those as fishing in the
pond five times and you can look at all
the possible overlaps between those
different lists and you can then fit a
mathematical model to it and from that
estimate what’s called the dark figure
which is the number of cases that don’t
appear on any lists at all well in order
to get the numbers right I have to read
them out so it turns out that for
example on the government organizations
list there are 695 cases that don’t
appear on any other lists at all if you
take the police force and the general
public lists the overlap between those
contains the eleven cases that aren’t on
any of the other lists and there’s
actually one case which is on four of
the lists local authorities
non-government
police force and government
organizations but not on the general
public lists and so on there are
actually lot there are 31 different
combinations of lists that you can
observe and so you get 31 different
totals in each of the possible
combinations and from those you can
estimate a 30 second one which is the
ones that don’t appear on any list at
all well if you go through all that and
fit a mathematical model which is
something as I did you find at the
estimate of a number of victims is not
two thousand seven hundred and
forty-four but it’s between ten and
thirteen thousand victims that figure is
very important why for two reasons
really the first reason is by exposing
the size of the problem it actually
concentrated the mind of government of
politicians of the public of the police
of everybody on the fact that modern
slavery wasn’t just a little niche thing
that happened to a few people it’s a big
and serious issue it’s one that we all
have to be concerned about and this
methodology that we’ve developed we’ve
we hope to apply internationally other
countries are doing similar things a lot
of my work now is about rolling out the
methods learning more about them and
rolling out the methods so we can use
methods like this all over the world and
get a much better pitch of what’s going
on so the first thing is raising
consciousness and the second thing is of
course making the case for the
allocation of resources and that is also
very important it’s is it the number of
victims that the National Crime Agency
now knows about has gone up every year
and it’s now quite a lot more than 2744
does that mean there are more victims or
does it mean we’re better at finding
them I think it means that we’re better
at finding them I was amazed how much
attention this work received it was
reported in national newspapers
it has had very wide attention indeed
and eventually all led up to the passing
of the modern slavery at 2015 I think
one thing I would leave you it as a
thought which is which is this if you
take a topic like climate change 30
years ago people knew that there was a
problem with climate change but they
didn’t really understand anything much
about the mechanisms and so on so he
knew as a problem but we had to learn a
lot more about it modern slavery you
know we thought – we’d abolish slavery
200 years ago or 150 years ago but of
course this is still with us as a
problem and if we are to address this
and we are to achieve a world where
nobody is in a situation of the people I
spoke about at the beginning then we
need to learn much more we need to do
much better research and it’s only the
step I and others have taken is only the
first step towards getting a much bigger
understanding so I hope I’ve given you
an idea of the way that statistics has
made a difference to what is a very very
serious depressing problem but one which
I hope we can all do our bit to do
something about thank you
[Applause]
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