Research Areas & Initiatives

For more information on the areas of research interest or to find out who might have an overlapping specialism with your own, please get in touch and we will help locate those Midlands ARC colleagues. 

​

​

​

Community Resilience and Survivor Support

• Sexual and gender-based violence in the refugee crisis.

• Survivor support journeys outside of the UK’s National Referral Mechanism.

• Housing, marginalised groups (including the homeless and Gypsy and Traveller communities) and Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking (MSHT).

• Austerity and urban governance processes and the ways in which they intersect with MSHT.

• Mental health and psychological recovery of MSHT survivors.

• Understanding the transport needs of survivors.

• Trafficking of migrant Roma for the purposes of labour exploitation.

​

Criminal Justice and Organised Crime

• Police accountability and misconduct; challenges and failings in national and transnational police investigations of MSHT crimes.

• Law enforcement response to human trafficking and modern slavery crimes; complexities and factors that influence police performance.

• Multi-agency collaboration in MSHT investigations.

• Links between terrorism and MSHT.

• Investigative interviewing, admissibility of evidence, victim welfare and the impact of trauma on memory.

• Understanding the criminal networks and organised crime groups behind MSHT.

​

Legislation and Policy

• Securing reparations for victims of MSHT.

• Human rights implications of MSHT.

• Closing the implementation gap between principle and practice in antislavery governance.

• Translating international antislavery obligations into domestic legal frameworks.

• Maritime Security Governance – Serious Organised Crime in the maritime domain, with particular focus on human trafficking and forced labour.

• Assessing antislavery governance frameworks and conditions in the top 20 countries of origin for victims supported in the UK.

• MSHT in conflict and post-conflict countries.

​

Business Supply Chains

• Understanding ‘County Lines’ through a business model perspective including how urban gangs operate as entrepreneurs.

• Business compliance with Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act, and supporting businesses to identify and address MSHT in their supply chains.

• Enforcement of labour standards by labour inspectorates.

• Vulnerability of workers in informal economy to labour abuses and exploitation.

• MSHT in the agricultural and garment sector, nail bars and hand car washes.

• Poverty reduction programmes involving young people vulnerable to, or exploited through, trafficking.

• The role of voluntary multi-stakeholder initiatives, including in sustainable development.

• Domestic work and modern slavery risks in the care sector.

• Consumer behaviour and attitudes and the role consumers can play in shifting business behaviour.

• Impacts of the point-based immigration system (also the Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Scheme) upon business traditional reliance on low-skilled labour.