'The UK Modern Slavery Crusade; a Migrants' Rights Perspective'

In the past decade, modern slavery has become a global cause célèbre within religious, political, civil society and celebrity spheres. In 2015, the UK government energetically clamoured to be one of the first countries in the world to legislate against modern slavery. It did this whilst simultaneously imposing some of the harshest immigration and welfare reforms the country has ever seen, repealing key human rights legislation and largely ignoring a crisis which continues to leave thousands of refugees vulnerable to trafficking and modern slavery. This research intends to examine the contradictory existence of a zealous modern antislavery movement in parallel to ever-increasing anti-immigration rhetoric and erosions of migrant rights. The two main aims of the proposed research are to examine the process of legal mobilisation which accounts for how and why modern antislavery has emerged as a hugely 'popular' movement, and to examine individual experiences of this movement, from a Legal Anthropology perspective.