Human Trafficking and the Law: The Importance of Interdisciplinarity in Learning and Teaching

Abstract

Human trafficking is a legal issue which can be found taught in standalone undergraduate modules and whose relevance reflects the volatility of today’s global world. Human trafficking is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions and consequently subject to judicial processes. However, it is also an example of a topic which is challenging to teach using legal frameworks alone. Drawing on a longstanding case study, this chapter argues that for students to make sense of the inherent complexity, law must take a backseat to the understanding of migration, criminology, policymaking, economics, employment and other key forces. That is the overconfidence that creating an Offence can solve an identified problem. The paper argues that there is a need to develop Learning and Teaching methods which cultivate adaptable and transferable skills which enable students to see the relationships between all of these elements, especially in light of recent trends (i.e. Covid-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution) that have markedly reshaped the socio-political landscape.

1 Introduction

The law as a traditional institution and practice, as well as one of the key foundations of liberal democratic nation-states, is facing some profound challenges. Globalisation, a changing labour market, diversity, as well as the technological changes brought on by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, all impact on the daily practice of law and therefore its teaching. Added to this is the observation that movements across borders presents a particular challenge since it requires lawyers to think beyond the boundaries of national legal frameworks.

Consequently, the legal profession is being forced to adapt rapidly, and those who work in it are required to develop a range of skills that are beyond many current learning and teaching methods in legal education. Law departments in universities across Europe are catching up with this at an accelerated pace in order that they might design courses and teaching methods that instil in students a range of transferable skills, which enables an interdisciplinary approach, as well as an enhanced focus on practice.

The aim of this chapter is twofold: firstly it will make the argument that recent changes to the world order, such as Covid-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, require the legal profession to change, and that as a consequence the teaching of law needs to move beyond traditional learning and teaching methods. Secondly, it presents a case study of a Liberal Arts module on human trafficking, which uses real-world case studies to explore the issues from a range of perspectives, including but not limited to law. The way that the module is designed, taught and assessed offers an example of good practice which shows that teaching international legal issues can (and perhaps should) be taught in an interdisciplinary setting with a strong focus on practice.

As a contemporary issue for law students and for many lawyers in practice, human trafficking ranks among the most important and challenging. It is little wonder that it can be found taught in undergraduate modules in universities globally. In most jurisdictions across the world, of course, human trafficking is a criminal offence and the topic can be addressed in a narrow legalistic way by students who can consider the provisions of legislation and the reach of judicial processes. However, as highlighted from a South African vantage point, anti-trafficking legislation and even UN Protocols have proven ineffective at combatting this crime.¹ The authors argue that ‘laws do not thrive in a vacuum’ and the broader range of factors and influences need to be raised in prominence. Human trafficking is consequently complicated and presents as a topic which is challenging to teach using legal frameworks alone. These provide but one perspective on a complex and difficult issue where it must be acknowledged that the law itself is one of the weakest tools available.

This chapter presents and describes a longstanding case study delivered as part of teaching undergraduate studies in a UK University. The case is used to illustrate practice, to demonstrate how academics can organise learning experiences, and also to advance the argument that for students to properly make sense of the inherent complexity of human trafficking, law must take a backseat to the understanding of migration, criminology, policymaking, economics, employment and other key forces. The value of this approach can be seen in the way that it develops students’ broader understanding as well as transferable skills. It does this because interdisciplinarity is at the heart of the learning and teaching philosophy.

Interdisciplinary approaches to teaching cut across discreet subject areas to create integrated learning spaces, encourage greater interchange of ideas and, consequently, support students to understand a given issue in a more holistic way. They also lend themselves to learning through authentic cases and ‘real-world’ scenarios that require students to apply they knowledge they are acquiring.

Before presenting the case study and considering practice, this chapter contextualises by discussing relevant recent developments in law pedagogy and practice and then advancing the case for interdisciplinary teaching in higher education. The chapter concludes with the argument that there is a need to develop continually learning and teaching methods which cultivate adaptable and transferable skills which enable students to appreciate the relationships between all the elements studied.

2 Law Outside the Vacuum—Some Context

The world is changing at a remarkable pace. Consider that today’s socio-political landscape looks markedly different from even the recent past due to various factors, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, a shift in the existing geopolitical order, and the rapid advances in technology with the current fourth wave in industrial revolution which has disrupted all industries, including the legal landscape. Combined, these call on the need to rethink higher education in all fields as courses attempt to form well-rounded professionals who are informed not only about their areas of expertise, but have a multi-disciplinary understanding of current issues, such as human trafficking.² In this regard, there is a need to form legal professionals with this type of mindset and contemporary understanding. What follows is some context setting which reviews these key forces that are currently impacting the current world order and what this means in terms of the changing higher education sector.

2.1 The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Technology is advancing at a remarkable pace and has already disrupted virtually every single industry. Currently, over 63% of the world’s population is connected to the Internet³ which is a transformation over the course of a generation. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is characterized by the introduction of technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and how these are merging with the way individuals interact and work1. The term was defined as ‘a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between physical, digital, and biological spheres.’⁴

This fusion and blurring of lines will have a significant impact on future workforces since it will signify the automation of many positions. The legal profession is no exception to this and neither is the Higher Education sector. On the one hand, technology will contribute $15 trillion to global GDP by 2030.⁵ The global AI market is expected to reach almost $135 billion by 2025.⁶ On the other hand, it will also translate into significant job loss, as many positions will become automatable, up to 30% by the mid-2030s.⁷ This phenomenon is expected to extend to all industries, including legal, once a protected profession. Of large law firms, 56% believe artificial intelligence will become mainstream in the practice of law within even the next 5 years.⁸ Initially, much of the automation in the legal space is likely to center on legal research and document analysis, but it will advance rapidly.⁹ To this extent, Tippett and Alexander¹⁰ report that ‘lawyers’ jobs are a lot less safe than we thought. It turns out that you don’t need to completely automate a job to fundamentally change it. All you need to do is automate part of it’. Davis¹¹ complements this by affirming that ‘the drudge work traditionally done by starting out lawyers is already vanishing and will ultimately disappear almost entirely’. This should translate into a shift in how legal services are delivered and consequently the nature of legal education.

Whilst such predicted changes may seem alarming, they also represent an opportunity for future legal professionals. For example, the automation of work processes will no doubt represent an opportunity for spearheading more creative endeavors.¹² This also extends to how we educate future legal professionals who, unburdened by the more menial tasks, will have to focus on the delivery of services artificial intelligence cannot provide, amongst which, judgement, empathy, and creativity,¹³ the latter being a trait which ‘cuts across disciplines and cultures as a highly coveted quality of human cognition’.¹⁴ Moreover, as the world becomes increasingly interconnected, the dependency of sectors and events should become even more apparent, as previously discussed, highlighting the need to be cognizant of the changing landscape; what happens in one field necessarily cascades into others. Human trafficking, as will become apparent in this chapter, is a prime example of the complexities of a legal issue much of which exist outside of the law itself. As such, how we educate students must also evolve, ensuring future professionals are able to analyze events through multi-perspective lenses.

Technology is already having a large impact in the classroom. Currently, 67% of higher education institutions report on the use of technology in the classroom.¹⁵ However, the level of technological penetration in the classroom still falls below its potential.¹⁶ The technologies on offer are merely tools, the affordances of which reliant on how they are leveraged and adopted.¹⁷ Thus, it can be concluded that the technology is not a substitute for quality of content. Rather, the technological evolution merely underscores the need for a shift in how we think about educating future legal professionals, not least by emphasizing the truly human contribution to understanding and tackling problems.

2.2 Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic represented a unique time in modern history, forcing the world to stop and do things differently. As observed by Chakraborty and Maity,¹⁸ the pandemic could be characterized as the ‘global health calamity of the century and the greatest challenge that the humankind [has] faced since the 2nd World War’ It forced entire countries into lockdown and, in the context of higher education, the pandemic forced teaching professionals to rethink the delivery of education, moving from exclusively in-classroom teaching to online and blended models.

The changes experienced in this sector, however, extend beyond modes of delivery. These also highlighted the need to rethink assumptions about the content taught,¹⁹ and the practice of delivering more meaningful learning activities.²⁰ In addition, the role of educators in supporting students’ learning is evolving,²¹ with a need to recognize that learning no longer occurs in silos but should instead consider the interdependency of world occurrences. Casey observed that law schools in the United States opened up greater spaces for students to discuss socio-political and economic issues in a more integrated way as a result of events spurred by the pandemic.²² In this regard, Hollander noted that the pandemic has forced educators to relearn their ways of operating, spurring teachers to become more creative and integrative.²³

Another resulting impact of the pandemic in the education sector refers to its adoption of technology. As Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, remarked, ‘We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months’.²⁴ This is a key reflection that needs to be reviewed alongside the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution itself.

3 The Case for Interdisciplinarity

The case for interdisciplinarity in higher education is both a contemporary and a perennial one.²⁵ That is, interdisciplinary approaches have long been acknowledged as offering fresh ‘ways of seeing the world’ but that the more acute demands of today’s world increasingly requires that the skills and mindset developed in students with these more challenging ways of learning are needed to prepare them as they graduate into that world. The rapid advance of technology is one reason for this: many of the tasks historically performed by skilled humans are increasingly being fulfilled by machines. This places greater emphasis on graduates and professionals who can think, adapt, and create in collaboration. Another is that graduates need to be prepared for career paths that are less linear, which are more likely to involve working across borders, and which will involve more job changes than was the experience of previous generations. Education needs to equip graduates with transferable skills and the ability to understand challenges from more than one perspective.

Law and the legal profession are no exception to this both in terms of having to adapt to a changing digital environment and the observation, made by Baron²⁶ last century, that the subject is not ‘just rules and the techniques of rule manipulation’. And yet, the experience in so many higher education institutions is that subjects all too often continue to be taught in silo, emphasizing knowledge acquisition. This is perhaps all the more stubbornly observed in subjects like law with its obligations to the practiced profession and professional bodies.

Many of the issues that law graduates will tackle during their professional lives will be complex in nature and where those ‘rules and techniques of rule manipulation’ or narrowly focused law will prove insufficient to properly address. For students, and the professionals they aspire to become, to make sense of complexity, they need to appreciate multiple perspectives of multiple stakeholders. It is here that interdisciplinary learning design delivered actively in the classroom will better develop students.

There is a further reason for drawing interdisciplinarity more deliberately into the teaching of law and this is reflected in the argument made by Bello and Olutola²⁷ in their sobering analysis of human trafficking as well as other scholars observing the policy-making process.²⁸ Students should appreciate the often severe limitations of law as a policymaking tool. There is an observable overconfidence by those who make laws as well as those who practice, that the act of creating an offense by way of legislation can solve an identified problem. It very often cannot and it should not be considered as the endpoint of addressing an issue. Interdisciplinary approaches allow law to be contextualized in the context of the broader case and multiple perspectives taken, allowing for a more rounded evaluation.

Interdisciplinarity, of course, is not without its challenges.²⁹ It places additional pressures on the tutor who is unlikely to be an expert in each of the perspectives employed. It also requires something of a change in mindset about learning resources. That is no longer relying on a single specialist text but rather curating materials that might be deployed, sometimes unpredictably, by students addressing the tasks or scenarios presented. Each of these challenges lends themselves to a more co-creational and exploratory relationship between tutor and student than the more traditional instructional approach and an environment that fosters collaboration.

4 Putting It into Practice—‘Global Human Trafficking’ Case Study

Having explored the evolving context and advanced the deployment interdisciplinary approaches to learning and teaching of Law, the remainder of this chapter concentrates on illustrating how this has been delivered in practice with a case study. Global Human Trafficking is a challenging module which is taught at level 5 to both students who need it to fulfil the core requirements of their degree, but also to those from other majors who can take the module as an elective. The approach is innovative in that it takes what might be considered a narrow legal issue and invites students to tackle it from a variety of different perspectives. This section highlights some of those perspectives in the shape of not only international law but also Globalisation, Migration, Crime and Gender. It shows how this interdisciplinary approach is aligned to the assessment and reflects on some of the benefits of the approach.

The ethos of the module should be considered and Global Human Trafficking forms part of the BA (Hons) Liberal Arts, which is historically made up of multiple majors. As a consequence, the interdisciplinary nature of the module's teaching and learning approach is supported by a broader programme and here it is recognized that radically changing a single module in isolation of a traditional course structure might be more ambitious.³⁰ Students on the Liberal Arts programme take half their modules in their chosen major, and the other half as electives from the other majors. The main aim of a liberal arts education is to achieve depth through the core modules and breadth through the range of electives.³¹ A particular feature of this is that it educates the ‘whole person’; the acquaintance with different disciplines offers qualitative intellectual experiences that ultimately train the mind.³² It develops students with the ability to integrate across disciplines and perspectives, learning to think critically and intelligently.³³ This often leads to innovation, citizenship, the ability to address global challenges³⁴ and sustainable development goals.³⁵

Given the interdisciplinary liberal arts context, the Global Human Trafficking module is designed on the premise that students have no prior knowledge of trafficking/slavery or even of the international laws that govern this issue. Instead, the module is designed to allow students to explore various global pressures and processes that contribute to the prevalence of human trafficking, as well as the tools to research a particular trafficking scenario and analyse which factors contribute to its existence. The module achieves these aims by investigating human trafficking from a range of perspectives and the relationships between them, including international law, globalisation, migration, crime and gender.

Students are given a real world scenario, a case study, as the basis for the module. The broad details are sketched out but there is plenty left unanswered for students to research, discover and ultimately shape as they work collaboratively through the planned curriculum. By way of illustration, two Case studies which have been used in the past are:

• The production of cocoa in Ivory Coast: this follows traffickers who move children across the borders of several countries, destined to work cocoa plantations. This case study looks at the families in origin countries who send their children across the border to look for work, the trafficking routes, the plantations themselves, policing and local governments, the European chocolate industry who are served by the plantations, as well as the international legal measures developed to counteract the practice.

• Sex trafficking into Western European countries: this follows organised international gangs operating from Eastern European countries where young women are recruited in their home countries by employment agencies who promise them jobs working in hotels. Instead, the women and girls end up in brothels run by criminals.

Different scenarios also allow for a focus on regions, for instance Latin America, Asia, Europe, America and Africa, as well as broader topic areas.

4.1 International Law

Law is a key component of the module and in understanding the issue but goes beyond legislative provision. The module begins the first few weeks by defining various forms of slavery and tracing the history of slavery, beginning with slavery in the classical era, in medieval times, slavery and Christianity, slavery and Islam, then moving on to transatlantic slavery.

After this, it moves onto the early development of international law following the establishment of the League of Nations after World War I. The resulting international legislation was the 1926 Slavery Convention, which defined slavery as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the power attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’. It is important to note here that this early legislation was developed in the context of a post-war world, where empire still ruled.³⁶ This international law was very much developed in the interests of the European colonizing states, not the interests of the people it sought to protect. This is a key observation for students getting to grips with the challenge.

In a similar way the 1956 Supplementary Convention was developed in the context of the emerging Cold War, and in a struggle of political ideology it was used to emphasise the slavery practices of the USSR in the gulag, rather than developed to protect those vulnerable to slavery at a global scale.

As the weeks progress, the module covers various legislation in different regions at different times. It does not so much teach the content of the law, but rather focuses on understanding the socio-economic and political contexts that surround the development of legislation. Students are encouraged to take a critical stance on how law and policy governing slavery and human trafficking is developed and indeed why. Sometimes, legislation is passed for political reasons rather than with the sole intention of tackling the issue it identifies in its provisions.

4.2 Globalisation

To enable a thorough understanding of human trafficking, the module explores the consequences of globalization in some detail, particularly questioning how globalization has changed the way we work across borders, how it has weakened structures and changed culture. Relating this to trafficking, it focuses on increases in communication, cheaper travel, and opening up of borders to capital. This leads to the increases in migration across the world most notably since the late 1980s.³⁷

4.3 Migration

The discussion in the module flows naturally from globalisation to migration, and it is typically at this point that students begin to make more profound connections across disciplines. They understand that slavery or human trafficking is not necessary an anomaly, but a consequence of global economic and political processes. They see the issue not simply in terms of legal remedy but multifaceted solutions.

Consider that since the late 1980s migratory flows have increased significantly, due to a range of contributing factors: the end of the Cold War; the opening up of borders; increases in global inequality; a breakdown of the political status quo in many regions leading to violent conflict; as well as more access to information and cheaper travel all lead to more people on the move globally.

In addition, where previously migration flows had followed historic colonial routes, and were more controlled by receiving states, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, migration became more spontaneous, less driven by the need of receiving states and was often portrayed as ‘out of control’: a domestic political issue. In response, receiving states in the West have increased border control and decreased legal avenues for migrant to enter for both migrants and refugees. The challenge for students considering these legal developments is to appreciate the motivation behind them as well as the behaviour they incentivise.

By the early to mid-1990s, we were in a global situation of increased numbers of migrants with fewer legal ways of entering destination countries, leading to migration journeys being pushed more and more underground. From a legal perspective as well as from multiple other disciplines, this is revelatory since it meant that transnational criminal gangs increased to run both smuggling and trafficking operations.³⁸

4.4 Gender

Here, the module focuses gender inequality and how this contributes, in particular, to sex trafficking. Student are introduced to feminist literature as well as UN legislation relation to Violence against Women and Girls. They are, therefore, able to combine an understanding of conceptual approaches with international laws. They learn how outdated attitudes, informed by toxic masculinity contributes to the prevalence of sex trafficking. Often women are recruited from regions where gender culture remains traditional and where women in general have little opportunity to make a life in their own right, making them vulnerable to criminal trafficking organisations (references to come).

4.5 Crime

This all puts understanding ‘crime’ into a different perspective than simply breach of the law and corresponding legal frameworks. In that sense, it serves as an enlightening ‘bookend’ to the international law first encountered in the module. The multi-disciplinary approach means that human trafficking as crime broadens out into understanding the rise of transnational criminal networks and the social, economic, and legal pressures that have incentivized their operations. Students, having been presented with real-world scenarios at the beginning of the module, start to appreciate the challenges they are working through as case studies and all that entails in terms of the multi-dimensional aspects of the problem and any potential solution.³⁹

4.6 Assessment and Outcomes

Finally, assessment needs to be described since it is important that the learning activities and outcomes of the module are aligned to the outputs expected of students. The overall aim of the module is that students learn to situate a real-world human trafficking case in the context of the global processes that cause the particular issue. This may be different per case study. Two assessments are set and these are designed to facilitate the learning process for students as outlined in this section (see Table 1).

Table 1 Overview of Module Assessment

4.7 Some Reflections

This case, which uses real-world studies to explore human trafficking from a range of perspectives, including law, offers an insight into the needs of law education in the future. The way that the module is designed, taught and assessed not only represents what might be described as ‘good practice’, but is also one which shows that international legal issues can be taught in an interdisciplinary setting with a strong focus on practice.

The interdisciplinarity of the learning approach outlined in this chapter encourages students (and eventually as graduates) to view and solve problems through multiple perspectives and collaboratively. Students learn to situate issues very quickly, placing cases into different global processes and legal frameworks and even comparing their own scenarios with those very different problems tackled by other students. On reflection, this prepares students for the challenges of the ‘real world’ by developing a mindset through which they adapt their skills and knowledge to an uncertain and emerging environment. In turn, this is a skillset that will serve them well as they navigate the impact of digital change throughout their professional lives.

Although this class is not a singular or even predominantly law module, students develop a sophisticated understanding of the nature of law and its allied frameworks. This is because of the international and national nature of the situations which invite students to reflect, critique and compare what they discover about the law and all which surrounds the situations. Perhaps departing from traditional legal approaches, which focus on remedies, here students tend to be more solutions focused, generating multi-faceted ways of analysing the scenarios.

For law students this is particularly enlightening since it equips them with a skillset that will prepare them for the vagaries of the career challenges they will face in professional life. A key reflection is that this approach begins to prepare them for the rapidly changing and complex nature of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in a way that traditional law education might be said to fall short.

What is offered here is not so much a blueprint for teaching delivery than it is a philosophical approach to learning that better prepares students for the world they are about to enter. Law graduates in particular will find this supportive of how they will need do their jobs by deploying knowledge; it moves somewhat from the objective to the subjective. Whereas new technology will be capable of generating higher knowledge that was once the preserve of a human professional, the ability to understand the true nature of a problem, empathetically, represents something of a uniquely human skill that must remain at the heart of higher education.

5 Conclusion

By reporting on a tried and tested approach to learning and teaching, this chapter has explored how students have been able to understand the complexities of an issue like Human Trafficking from an interdisciplinary perspective. They have been able to move their thinking beyond the narrow confines of law and instead draw upon and deploy a range of social science approaches and contexts to thoroughly investigate a topic given topic. This means seeing a topic for all that it is—the socio-political, economic landscape, in all its complexity and levels of interconnectedness, with issues that cut across disciplines and fields. The case made is that if the issue addressed presents with this level of complexity there is a need for tutors and students to rethink how law is taught.

In making the compelling case for interdisciplinarity in teaching topics that pertain to the law and beyond, the chapter observes that the broader skills developed reflect also the needs of the changing professional world. In particular, the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution places greater emphasis on multi-dimensional approaches to problem solving as it promises technological change that replaces many of the knowledge based skills of professionals like lawyers.

Events do not occur in silos, but rather are embedded within a wider context. Law cannot exist in a vacuum and neither can the teaching of it. The case study presented is offered as an illustration of how this might be achieved, with benefits observed in practice rather than as some sort of blueprint for delivery. It sees law as just one aspect of a more complex issue, the final remedy perhaps, rather than the simple solution to tackling the problem. It accepts that there is not a single predetermined answer to the areas of concern identified. As such, students are challenged to rethink how they view solutions to issues such as human trafficking, allowing them the experience to view it from a multitude of facets which may or may not be relevant, discussing the merit of each one.

In this context, law is not considered as a solution to a global problem, but as an instrument to be used once a criminal offence is brought before a Court. Such an approach aids in addressing the need for forming more rounded professionals who are aware of the world’s current complexities and are ready to tackle these more effectively.