Meeting of the Global Expert Working Group on Multiple Systems Estimation of Modern Slavery

Ruth King co-hosted the Global Expert Working Group on Multiple Systems Estimation of Modern Slavery with Davina Durgana (Minderoo Foundation) and Sheila Bird (MRC Biostatistics Unit) at the ICMS on the 21-22nd March. Individuals attended from the UK, Europe, US and Australia. This interdisciplinary and pioneering work focuses on the challenges and approaches for estimating the number of individuals in different countries that are living as modern slaves and the associated policy impact, using modern statistical techniques. The meeting brought together individuals working across a range of different areas, including those involved with "on the ground" work for collecting data to those understanding the processes that lead to different types and forms of modern slavery and statisticians for developing rigorous techniques for extracting meaningful information from the data and obtaining estimates of the size of the problem from partial information. Multiple new interdisciplinary collaborations were formed at the meeting and draft outlines of several papers completed by the end of the two days for an organised special issue publication.