Manuscript received August 25, 2023; revised October 10, 2023; accepted April 3, 2024; published September 13, 2024.
Abstract—Modern slavery, as an increasingly incessant problem around the world and in the United Kingdom especially, is driven by and influenced by many different factors. As such, this paper focuses on the changes towards the 2015 United Kingdom Modern Slavery Act (UKMSA) and how those changes can be applied to analyze and explain how the conceptualization of ‘race’ and racism are affected by issues such as Brexit and COVID-19. Little previous research has been completed on the correlation between those above factors, and so this paper will provide guidance for future research and for policy-makers to consider the different elements that affect modern slavery and human trafficking. This paper also includes a literature review whereby different pieces of literature are analyzed to gain a better-rounded understanding on the different topics, concepts, and themes that are present in United Kingdom modern slavery research. It was useful to compare the annual changes to the 2015 UK Modern Slavery Act from 2015 to 2022. Then, statistics from the United Kingdom Office for National Statistics were gathered to address the total number of potential modern slavery cases there were in the United Kingdom, starting from 2015, as that was when the first revision of the UK Modern Slavery Act was officially published. In the future, research can focus on how to disperse precise information on ways to prevent and spot modern slavery as a bystander and on ‘race’ and racism as social constructs, to reduce and eventually eliminate the issue of modern slavery.
Keywords—modern slavery, race, racism, Brexit, COVID-19
Cite: Leanne Nguyen, "How Have Changes to the United Kingdom Modern Slavery Act Affected the Conceptualization of 'Race' and Racism in Society?," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 214-219, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (
CC BY 4.0).