philbennett.me

Learning about Survivor Empowerment

2019-08-10T00:00:00+01:00

Of all of the modern slavery topics I’ve been studying, it is perhaps surprising that I’ve become particularly interested in survivor rehabilitation and empowerment. After all, it is a topic which is somewhat distant from my area of expertise. It began after my first trip to Kolkata in 2015. It was my first trip to India and I was working with experienced NGOs and survivors to investigate solutions and strategies to tackle human trafficking in the city - in fact this was my first introduction to the topic. As a career technologist I had never before been challenged to think seriously about an issue like this, and I found it difficult. I was fortunate enough to meet people at Destiny Foundation, who are a social enterprise supporting the most vulnerable survivors of sex trafficking and abuse. After the short trip I returned to Kolkata several times per year to volunteer and support the organisation. I spent a long time listening to experts about the challenges and successes of the organisation, and how their projects work. I realised the topic of survivor empowerment was extremely important, but complex.

On one trip, I went to an International Women’s Day event in Kolkata. A young woman called Shefali, (not her real name), was there to receive an award for the incredible progress she had made since she was trafficked as a child. She’s been supported by Destiny Foundation for years. Like many survivors in India, she’d missed her formal education and hadn’t had the benefit of a family support structure growing up. At the event, she received her award in front of more than 400 people. Seconds later, she took the microphone and delivered a flawless speech, thanking those who had supported her and talking about her career goals. Destiny’s CEO, Smarita Sengupta, reminded me that she’d seen more life than either of us and talking in front of a crowd didn’t really phase her. What were the ingredients of this empowerment?

Destiny is an organisation who have developed their programs with relatively few constraints from strategic funders or other stakeholders. Rather, their programs have simply evolved naturally to meet the needs of survivors. A few years ago, the significance of this hadn’t occurred to me. But now I realise that’s Destiny’s freedom to innovate has been critical to the empowerment of so many people.

Destiny began more than 10 years ago when Smarita started a business employing survivors to make fashion accessories. She’d noticed that vulnerable young women were at risk of re-trafficking because of poverty and a lack of job options. After the business had been running for a while, she noticed that although this tackled some financial issues for survivors, there were other issues which were causing distress and risked re-exploitation. Destiny built an accommodation service for survivors after noticing that homelessness was a risk factor. This provided reassurance, safety and independence for those who needed a place to live when they left the shelter homes at 18 years of age. After noticing that women leaving some shelter homes were particularly vulnerable, Smarita started coordinating with a government shelter home where the most vulnerable children were housed and educated. At an early age, Destiny worked with the home to provided outlets for the children’s trauma.

Chatting with survivors, Destiny’s program seemed to work very well. Actually, it was only relatively recently I realised that constructing projects and services for survivors was only a part of why Destiny was successful. Destiny’s mantra is “One Life at a Time”. It’s a slogan that took me about two years to fully understand and appreciate.

Last year, Destiny joined the GSBI accelerator program to develop the business plans necessary to expand the organisation. A big part of GSBI was examining Destiny’s own impact model. It took a lot of thought and some excellent support from our GSBI mentors, but we eventually began to understand why Destiny’s model was successful: The model is longitudinal.

Rather than pushing lots of beneficiaries through one or two of its projects for short periods, it focusses on offering more comprehensive support to fewer individuals, for longer, across all or some of its projects. Destiny’s focus isn’t numbers. It’s about personalised care. Many of Destiny’s beneficiaries have come from the shelter home which is where they first connected to Destiny. On leaving the home many choose to use Destiny’s survivor accommodation service, or work as an employee for Destiny’s social enterprise. Some just receive occasional counselling or mentoring. Some of Destiny’s beneficiaries choose to stay connected to Destiny long after they have found new opportunities, started a family, or moved elsewhere.

Destiny’s culture is one that feels very much like a family. It’s a warm and loving organisation. We realised that it was this community of support that binds together the various services that was a huge part of its success. In India, many sex trafficking survivors don’t have a trusted community. Survivors are often unable to go back to their family due to the stigma. When people don’t have the support from a trusted community of friends or family - particularly spanning major life events such as moving home or job - then it doesn’t matter how good the individual support programs are. If a survivor doesn’t have a community for support then there is a risk of re-exploitation.

It’s not quite the whole story. As I mentioned before, Destiny evolved with survivor needs as the primary concern, rather than impact metrics demanded by strategic funders. It’s meant that Destiny’s structure can be less rigid compared to many organisations. Rather than fixed term programs for beneficiaries, support is personalised to the individual. And most importantly, space is given so that survivors can explore their own spirituality - and their own destiny. Many survivors have moved on from Destiny. They have begun families, moved cities and developed their own support structures - they have done so on their own terms and at their own pace. Most choose to keep in touch with staff and supporters - it’s just one of the lovely things about the organisation.

I think I was drawn to this topic because it made me ask myself about my own empowerment. I realised that Destiny’s support programs and community structure is actually a reflection of what I was lucky enough to have as I grew up. If either money, accommodation or my family had suddenly disappeared then I would have become vulnerable too. We all need these things. We all need community. We all need a few close friends or relatives who we can confide in, seek advice from, or just to chat with. People who care. Perversely, criminals will often take advantage of the same vulnerabilities when searching for victims. The promise of a home, money and community are often used to lure vulnerable people into crime.

I spent 6 months in Kolkata in 2018 and when I returned home I compared the journey of survivors supported by Destiny with those in the UK. In the UK we seem to have attempted to make survivor empowerment into some kind of system or process. The UK system seems to be designed for the convenience of other systems and organisations rather than the very people it should be helping. Rigid processes create stress and are difficult to navigate. Processes like these are actually disempowering. If we are serious about helping people succeed and avoid re-exploitation then the UK must re-think the approach to be centred around the individual, not around rigid systems and fixed term programs. You can’t engineer empowerment.

Moonshot: an approach to cascading ethical behaviour in supply chains

2019-05-16T00:00:00+01:00

I label some of my ideas as “moonshots”. In my mind, moonshots might be difficult but potentially enormously impactful ideas. Of course, there is a risk of being perceived as naive or ludicrously optimistic by the establishment. But I think it’s worth the reputational risk of sharing an ambitious idea which has at least a small chance of being extremely valuable.

Today: Market Problems

The fact that so many companies in the world are connected in some way to each other via a complex network of commercial relationships is tantalising to someone looking for high-scale solutions to tackle slavery and labour exploitation in supply chains. The intricate and ever-changing web of interactions and relationships is driven by incentive structures based upon product, cost, logistics and probably many others. Nobody designed this structure. It develops organically and it continues to change and adapt every second to meet consumer and business demands. As a system it’s very efficient. Capitalism means where there is a demand, markets drive companies to fill this gap with a relevant product or service.

This system results in behaviour that drives down cost to compete. In recent years, automation, improved management practices and supply chain solutions have continued to improve efficiency which has resulted in some commercial structures becoming extremely sensitive to cost. This has resulted in greater pressures on all companies to reduce their costs and has led to exploitation and poor working conditions in some countries. Exploitation of workers remains as stubborn as ever. (I’d recommend reading this article from HRW to get a sense of the challenge for suppliers)

Much of our collective response has been “top-down”. This means we have been applying pressure on big companies at the top of supply chains to be responsible for improving labour conditions of their suppliers further down the chain. Modern Slavery legislation and pressure from financial institutions are examples of this pressure. (The usefulness of pressure from consumers is questionable in my opinion. In fact ethical products may be a lucrative commercial opportunity for retailers, and sometimes there is little benefit to at-risk workers). Given this pressure, big companies are reacting to mitigate the legal and reputational risk.

Most of the attempts by big companies to tackle labour abuse in supply chains have been via a “brute force” approach involving painstaking work to develop “supply chain transparency” and attempting to tackle labour abuse, somehow, within each of those companies. This article isn’t intended to comment on the effectiveness of any particularly method that companies use to tackle labour abuse in a supplier company. Others have explored the issues and benefits of certifications, audits, unions, worker-voice solutions, etc. My interest is that this has demonstrated a market for services which try to tackle slavery in supply chains (albeit a largely immature market at the moment, in my opinion).

If you are a large company with, say, 5,000 first tier suppliers, it’s quite a job to check labour abuse of every factory of every supplier. It’s no wonder you might consider outsourcing the challenge of discovering abuse to audit companies. It’s even harder to check all of your tier two suppliers. (It’s hard to even find out who they are). In fact it quickly becomes prohibitively impractical for one company to do this (even if they outsource the problem) for their entire supply chain. Remember that much of the abuse happens in services separate to the core product supply chain. If a company claims profoundly to have supply chain transparency then ask about who their tier two suppliers pay to fix their waste pipe system. Or where they buy lubricant for their machinery. And who they pay to fix the factory roof. The supply chain focussed on a material product is a narrow part of a wider supply network. A supplier in financial distress may well contribute to labour abuse in ancillary services overlooked by buyers.

If a company claims profoundly to have supply chain transparency then ask about who their tier two suppliers pay to fix their waste pipe system. Or where they buy lubricant for their machinery. And who they pay to fix the factory roof.

Whilst companies’ CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) departments face the uphill battle of tackling labour abuse in thousands of companies across the world, there is another game afoot. Sourcing and procurement processes are about finding and selecting suppliers. These are usually different conversations with suppliers, this time based upon logistics, price and product. Suppliers remain under enormous pressure to meet the demands of buyers (or their agents) by meeting price and logistics expectations. This has led to a perverse dichotomy where buyers apply pressure on suppliers to increase their cost to improve labour standards at the same time as forcing price reductions to improve their commercial stance. As a supplier, responsible for hundreds of jobs, it’s inevitable the buyer’s deal is the priority. This is because there are plenty of other suppliers out there willing to take their place and their own employees jobs are at risk.

We are seeing behaviours resulting from fierce competition in a fluid market. When companies (or indeed governments) attempt to improve the ethical status of either their own organisation or their first line suppliers, they are actually increasing costs and therefore pushing against the market. This is why “brute force” approaches don’t easily scale. If a supplier improves labour conditions then the supplier’s costs go up. If that happens then finding customers is harder and the business shrinks, and already struggling workers end up jobless.

A scalable solution to tackling labour abuse across the world would cascade throughout supply chains and would be driven by market dynamics. A scalable solution would make it commercially attractive for a buyer to actively seek out the most ethical suppliers, therefore encouraging other suppliers to become more ethical to compete. A scalable solution would drive ethical behaviour from a fifth tier supplier without a first tier buyer knowing they even existed.

Future: Market Solution

So might a scalable solution look like?

When you look at enterprise commercial sourcing software, they will often use an index or score denoting the likely risks with a supplier. It does this because the sourcing software companies have talked to their customers (big companies) and found out that procurement professionals want concise quantifiable insights to help them make a judgement. An index is also interesting. It is naturally conducive to making comparisons between companies and potentially encouraging competition, (more on this later). What happens if the index was a measure of a supplier’s own effort and outcomes of tackling labour abuse, instead of just “risk”? Although I can understand that risk indices can be useful, an index that directly measures suppliers’ efforts to improve lives of workers will empower the supplier to make changes far more effectively than a generic risk index. Some more details on this later, but for now, let’s bank this as the first component of our new solution:

An index of a company measures the company’s own efforts and outcomes to tackle labour exploitation.

If it was possible to have such an index, then a supplier might be incentivised to tackle their own labour issues to please a buyer, but this would only work if the buyer was sufficiently interested in the value of the index. This is often where current solutions fall short. Right now, most index solutions are purely informational for buyers. The potential of today’s indices to affect real change is dwarfed by the stronger forces from procurement variables - price, logistics, etc. How could we tackle this? Well, let’s make our index not only a function of a company’s own efforts and outcomes to tackle labour abuse, let’s also make it a function of all of their first tier suppliers’ scores.

The index of a company is also a function of all of their first line suppliers’ indices.

This is where it gets interesting! Now, buyer X is interested in supplier Y’s score because it directly affects their own score. This is important for buyer X because they may have their own buyers who are also conscious of their scores, or indeed concerned financial companies who are investing in buyer X. Supplier Y is now interested in improving their score because it wants to avoid buyer X selecting a different supplier with a better score. Supplier Y might choose to improve their own efforts to tackle labour abuse within their workforce to improve their score. But they will also look at their own supply chain and put pressure on their first line suppliers to improve their scores. What’s happened is that the incentive to improve workforce conditions has cascaded through the supply chain. Buyer X, through its pressure on its first line suppliers has affected change much further down the supply chain. Importantly, buyer X has never needed to find out who its second tier suppliers are, let alone work out if they are abusing their workforce. The only thing Buyer X has needed to do is find out who its first tier suppliers are.

Now we need to cover some details here, but first, I think our index deserves a name: We’ll call it Cascading Ethics Index (CEI). You’ll note that the name doesn’t mention slavery, labour abuse, etc. This is because I believe this concept is equally applicable to encouraging businesses to tackle all manner of humanitarian and environmental issues! However, tackling modern slavery is my passion right now and I’ll continue to use this as the primary example of cascading ethical behaviour.

Our first challenge is that calculating the CEI of a company isn’t straightforward, (that would be too easy). One challenge is that buyer X / supplier Y relationships can also have the reverse relationship. For example, Apple might sell iPhones to Microsoft at the same time as Microsoft selling business software to Apple. So how do we calculate the CEI in this situation? Well, first it’s important to remember that a supply “chain” isn’t really a chain. It’s a complex web of relationships. Mathematically this is called a graph. Specifically, supplier relationships can be modelled as a directed cyclic graph. The calculation is a lot more complicated than simply adding up the average of all of the supplier’s indexes. The calculation becomes an algorithm and is beyond the scope of this article, but if linear algebra and Markov chains interest you then contact me and I’d be happy to discuss.

One of my frustrations has been that the other market in this story, the auditor/solution/certification market, isn’t performing particularly well today either (in my opinion!). There seems to be evidence (as well as anecdotal testimony from me talking with experts) that the impact of these products and services can sometimes be questionable. A solution to this will never be perfect - we can’t always audit the auditor. But, we can create an environment in which auditors and other solution providers compete to develop the most impactful solutions, instead of solutions that appeal most to their business customers. Firstly, remember that in this new solution, companies have an incentive to demonstrate efforts to tackle labour abuse in their own company. If a company purchases a worker-voice service from a service provider, then it might get a certain contribution towards their CEI score. If the outcome was verified independently then that contribution for that company would increase still further. The market for service providers offering products to tackle abuse would drive innovation because companies seeking to improve their own CEI score would seek the highest impact services from service providers - they would look for the lowest cost services that improve their score the most. Any rubbish audit solutions that had previously survived due to marketing more than substance would have low CEI weightings and would be driven out of the market. As long as the weighting was verified and the outcomes of company’s purchases folded into the CEI score, the market dynamic would improve the products and services proclaiming to tackle abuse.

To verify the weightings a network of non-profit organisations with specialisations in certain geographies and industries would be needed to assess the products and services from solution providers to determine their weighting. These non-profits would also be responsible for certifying product purchases and outcomes, that would contribute to companies’ scores. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of this entire idea because it would require a step-change in the way products and certifications are evaluated and certified.

For the first time, procurement teams’ decisions would directly affect the external measure of their own company’s ethical status. Suppliers demonstrating efforts and impact to improve labour conditions would be rewarded with a higher CEI score. This would command a higher unit price for their products because their higher CEI score has commercial value to buying companies, whose own score would benefit. This adjustment to the balance of the market would draw in more money to organisations who today are beaten down by price. No longer would the procurement negotiations be based solely on commercial variables.

Hopefully you can see how this approach creates incentives that drive change. Indeed, because the CEI is a measure of effort and outcomes it creates a system of change. Because it is a market solution, it would be possible to codify new safeguards to verify necessary parameters such as first tier supplier lists and workers wages - verifications that would increase a company’s CEI. And so companies in developing counties would begin to pressure unofficial workforces to formalise their legal entities, pay tax and improve their own CEI scores. This is necessary for attestation by third parties authorised to verify contributions to the CEI.

The operation of a system like this has fascinating implications. Firstly, unlike risk indices today, it’s quite possible that the value of a company’s CEI could change every minute. This is because changes to scores near the bottom of the chain immediately affect companies further up the chain. Also, the algorithm means that changes to scores in companies who are direct competitors would also affect a score. The algorithm would automatically scale small differences between competing companies to maximise competition gradient, and therefore the speed of change. The algorithm could be surgically tuned for certain industries and geographies to maximise the competition so as to tackle the most pressing issues. And because trade crosses country borders, the effects would propagate to countries where driving improvements to labour conditions are most challenging. If a country banned CEI it would materially damage the competitive standing of all companies in that country. Conversely, there is an incentive for governments to encourage adoption of CEI to maximise their competitiveness.

Every score would be publicly available. A simple number that could be used for comparison by bankers and schoolchildren alike. The power of CEI is that it is a number that represents the ethical position of one company and its entire supply chain. Supply chain transparency shouldn’t be about identifying every company in your supply chain. It should be about the visibility of all of the combined efforts to tackle ethical issues in the supply chain.

The power of CEI is that it is a number that represents the ethical position of one company and its entire supply chain. Supply chain transparency shouldn’t be about identifying every company in your supply chain. It should be about the visibility of all of the combined efforts to tackle ethical issues in the supply chain.

The rapidly changing values of the CEI would help to make them interesting. For example, the declining CEI of a large company would not only indicate poor ethical standards, it could also indicate financial distress of an organisation unable to afford suppliers with a good CEI - something which investors would be very interested to know. As CEI tickers begin to appear on stock exchanges, it would unlock the strongest force available to tackle slavery and labour abuse in the markets - shareholders.

Hopefully this gives a sense of the potential power of cascading ethical behaviours using algorithmic incentives. As I mentioned earlier, I think this technique could be harnessed to encourage rapid change in companies’ ethics related to slavery, environmental issues and even corruption. But also note that there are a lot of operational and governance topics which go far beyond the scope of this article - please contact me if you’d like to know more or have any questions.

Technologists: be good volunteers

2019-05-14T00:00:00+01:00

As a technologist you’re probably acutely aware of the power and potential for technologies to help organisations transform and make them more impactful. As a would-be volunteer you’ve become passionate about “giving back” and want to use your valuable skills in a meaningful way. Surprisingly, the path to successfully volunteering as a technologist for a non-profit can sometimes be fraught with difficulties. It’s very possible to unintentionally negatively impact an organisation.

Perhaps we should borrow a section from the Hippocratic oath: “First, do no harm”.

Learn about the non-profit sector

If you’re new to this sector then take the time to do some background reading and research. Like all industries and sectors there is terminology and ways-of-working which may be unfamiliar. It’s very likely you’ll be volunteering with an organisation focussed on one particular cause. Every cause is a speciality and it’s worth spending the time to research the history of the sector. Read news articles and research papers.

When I first started supporting organisations tackling slavery I quickly realised (fortunately) how naïve I was in my understanding of the humanitarian issues the non-profits were tackling. Never underestimate the complexity of humanitarian issues. In my experience, NGOs have been generous in helping me understand a topic, so don’t be afraid to ask open questions about the subject. Become a knowledgeable volunteer.

Learn about “impact models”. This describes how an organisation’s work contributes to their mission. It usually forms a part of their funding applications and is very important to understand. A “theory of change” is about how an organisation links their activities with their outputs, outcomes and overall impact. This simple model will help you understand what part technology might play in supporting their mission.

Have the right conversations

Firstly, I would suggest setting up regular calls / meetings - every week for example. This is an important part of developing trust and building relationships within an organisation. It’s also helpful to keep momentum on the project. Offer to set up these meetings.

If the scope of your engagement as a volunteer is a bit unclear and you need to narrow down what you’re aiming to achieve, then I’ve found asking a simple question works: “What are your barriers?”. This is a useful technique that starts a conversation that will help you understand more about the problems an organisation is facing and also gives them an opportunity to hear ways technology might offer a solution.

On my journey I realised how problematic developing strategies to tackle humanitarian issues can be. It’s rarely black and white. There are a lot of grey areas and there is always a lot of discussion about the right way to do things. As you learn more about an organisation and its mission, remember you shouldn’t be there to attack their mission or strategy. Remember that as a tech volunteer you are working for the organisation.

Don’t be too distant

Given the nature of technology you’re quite often able to work remotely. However I would encourage you to visit the organisation regularly. I think part of being a good volunteer is establishing a great relationship based upon trust and understanding and there’s no better way than “being there”. Sadly, it’s never easy for non-profits to find volunteers with genuine commitment. So be interested!

When you volunteer, don’t always limit yourself to technology. I know that technology can be a bit of a safety blanket, but there might be an opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and get connected with how the organisation works on the front line. It sometimes means you might have to make yourself vulnerable to what’s happening around you. Sometimes there are difficult human issues that an organisation is dealing with. But I’ve found that making an effort in this way builds your empathy and makes you a better technology volunteer.

Don’t be a Seagull

Let me be clear: Under no circumstances fly in, dump some sh*t, then fly away again. Sadly I’ve seen horrendous instances where volunteer technologists (and also paid assignments) have caused distress through developing inappropriate and unsupported technology solutions.

Even if you’re certain that your custom machine learning solution with 10,000 lines of code is the most elegant solution out there, this in itself doesn’t qualify it as useful, and indeed it might result in problems ahead. Most small NGOs don’t have an IT department. This means that it is important that you take care to ensure your solution is supportable and resilient for the future. Answer the following the questions:

Can the organisation manage any system changes in the future without paying a huge cost for external consultants?
Does the organisation trust your proposed solution? Sometimes a spreadsheet is the most appropriate option.

If an organisation is not equipped to keep the system up to date when/if you disappear then it is likely to fall into disrepair. If this happens then it can become a risk to the organisation. So think ahead. What will this look like in 1, 2 or 5 years time? Try and build capacity within an organisation while volunteering. This means training and ensuring that basic administration of the solution can be done by the organisation. This builds trust and ensures it is maintainable in the future. Using commercial SaaS cloud services is also a useful strategy because commercial providers will regularly update their services with necessary security patches and keep the platform secure.

Keep things safe

Smaller non-profits are unlikely to have IT, security and legal departments. Be mindful of this and try to ensure your technology support doesn’t add risk for an organisation or their beneficiaries. (This is of course linked to the Seagull issue above). Particular pitfalls include GDPR/privacy and operational security. If you think there are gaps in an organisation’s capability or expertise then raise these issues.

Try not to make yourself indispensable

There’s a paradox that successful tech volunteering can create an unhealthy dependency. If a section of an organisation’s IT department becomes essentially “outsourced” to a volunteer then this can be a problem. (There are exceptions, particularly for very small NGOs who are growing quickly and reliant on volunteers to support that growth). A few strategies to avoid this are:

Make sure that training and knowledge transfer are a part of your volunteering work.
The organisation should be able to administer the technology you’re building. Day to day maintenance should be viable within the non-profit otherwise this may indicate an inappropriate technology solution.

Ensure the sovereignty of the tech solution you are building remains squarely with the non-profit organisation. This means the keys to the technology (particularly security credentials) should be with the NGO. Try to avoid paying for technology bills from your own bank account. Instead, if you want to pay then donate to the NGO and enable them to pay directly.

Volunteering as a technologist is a rewarding and impactful contribution to society. Hopefully, if you keep in mind these recommendations, then the emergent benefits of your work will continue long after the lifetime of the solutions you build!

National modern slavery helplines: what’s behind the number?

2019-05-13T22:23:37+01:00

Over the last few years I’ve come to understand the importance of a national modern slavery helpline. There are now several across the world and they’ve become vital services for potential victims, members of the public and organisations. But I sometimes worry there is a lack of awareness of what it really takes to run a busy helpline responsibly and why these helplines are so important. I will to try to give a sense of what it takes to setup and run a successful helpline. Much of this is based upon my career experience working with various for-profit and non-profit service desks and helplines, as well as my experience volunteering with Unseen in the UK.

Why do we need National Modern Slavery Helplines?

In a person’s life there are pivotal moments that affect everything that happens thereafter. For many of us these are decisions about a job, or about what exams to take. Where to live. Perhaps a moment at the beginning of a new relationship. But for many people that moment comes when they take the momentous decision to call an anti-slavery helpline, and ask for help. Victims of slavery will often have been exploited at various stages in their lives. Many will have been trafficked and end up in a country they don’t fully understand - many won’t know the local language. Victims are made to feel powerless: passports are taken; money is withheld. After months or years of surviving this brutality, if a person can summon the strength to reach out for help, then it’s imperative that a service offering support is qualified, prepared and confidential.

A few years ago I went to Greece to volunteer with organisations tackling the refugee crisis. I learned that confidential non-profit services are vital for vulnerable people. People’s experiences will often have led them to be suspicious of law enforcement or other government organisations. Making the leap to ask for help can be traumatic and frightening. Empowering a caller to make their own decisions will earn trust and begin a person’s journey to escaping a situation and rebuilding their life.

In that moment when a person calls, they may only have minutes to spare and their situation could be precarious. When I think about this scenario my first thought is that it’s unconscionable for someone seeking help to ever be met with an answer-phone message. The helpline must be available 24 hours per day. Every day. Given their situation, the helpline team must have the knowledge and human qualities necessary to offer the reassurance and empathy to build trust and support a person on their path to freedom and recovery.

What’s involved?

Setting up and running a sizeable anti-slavery helpline is not trivial. During my career I’ve seen big and small service desks (for-profit and non-profit) and sadly there is an enormous variance in quality. I regularly volunteer with Unseen UK who operate UK’s Modern Slavery Helpline service. This helpline (I’m happy to say) is one of the best and a benchmark in the sector. Perhaps some people think that a large and busy national helpline can be just a desk, a few phones and some people taking a call. Indeed, it’s possible to start advertising a phone number without any questions asked. But it might quickly fall over - so let’s step back.

A national helpline is likely to receive dozens of calls over a 24 hour period and this has several implications. Firstly, it means that a helpline needs staff handling cases on shifts and the necessary supervisor structures and workplace systems to handle this. Secondly, receiving multiple calls on the same number at the same time requires helpline telephony infrastructure which is set up, managed, and integrated properly with desktops. This is one of several vital IT systems required. Many callers may be potential victims of trafficking and could have been trafficked from other countries. Inevitably this can cause language barriers. This isn’t just an inconvenience for an anti-slavery helpline. A language barrier can quickly make it difficult to develop trust that will enable the helpline to support a potential victim. It means that many large helplines will need access to an on-demand multi-lingual service to communicate clearly and this needs to be part of the operational processes of the service.

Many helpline cases involving potential victims will last many months. It will take many calls offering support and help before someone will feel comfortable taking the next step. This means calls coming into the helpline will often be related to an existing case, and so there will be many cases running concurrently. Helpline cases related to slavery will often involve many different people from various organisations. A helpline will often become a centre of coordination on a case because of their relationship with the person or persons seeking help. Therefore it’s important that the helpline advisor team has access to secure case management and collaboration software to manage vital case data. I will probably go into more details about case management in another blog post, but for now some of the important aspects related to helplines are summarised below.

Case management software handles all of the data related to helpline’s case activity. The system must be configured with a data model that meets the operational requirements of the helpline, as well supporting reporting requirements, regional requirements and the needs of advisors who will need to relay vital information to potential victims. As you might imagine, a single helpline case might have dozens of connected records. The successful management of a helpline always requires a particular focus on data quality, and in fact larger helplines will often have dedicated staff responsible for data management. Workflows and business process management configuration is required to handle the case lifecycle; communications from other channels such as apps and websites; and referral processes. A security model must be developed which will codify data access control requirements of the helpline. The user interface must be carefully designed so that advisors instantly have the data they need to properly support a potential victim. Obviously, sensitive data must be operationally secure and managed appropriately. Careful consideration is required when determining appropriate administrative and reporting access and control policies, as well as legal privacy requirements.

Most anti-slavery helplines will receive calls from potential victims, businesses, health services, law enforcement, members of the public and various other statutory agencies. So there will be a wide variety of different types of cases and call scenarios, and many will be very complex. Members of the team will normally need several months of full time training before they are prepared enough to embark in their role as an advisor on a national helpline.

Anti-slavery helplines aren’t just about handling calls. Firstly, the nature of a national helpline requires them to build a large referral network of partners across the country - coordination is a big part of the work. Usually a helpline will need to collaborate closely with various Government organisations too. Partner organisations may also benefit from the detailed analytics that can be generated using helpline data, providing intelligence on the changing picture of trafficking and slavery in the country. Indeed, partnerships in general are essential. For example, UK’s Modern Slavery Helpline has enjoyed support from technology partners, volunteers, businesses and government organisations. But a national helpline must also be a generous partner - supporting and reinforcing other organisations in tackling slavery. Helplines must encourage positive partnerships across all sectors.

A national helpline service is an important way to increase public awareness about modern slavery. Awareness improves public vigilance and also increases the chance that a victim will discover the helpline and call. Helplines have a responsibility to do all they can to promote the service within the media and businesses. (Of course, they also have the challenge of preparing and planning for the inevitable spikes in call volumes caused by media attention!).

In recent years, national modern slavery helplines have become vital and proven national infrastructures that provide public awareness as well as support for potential victims and organisations. Please support your national helpline - let’s do all we can to strengthen and nurture these services!

Call the UK Modern Slavery Helpline on +44 (0)8000 121700 or go to www.modernslaveryhelpline.org.