Laura Gauer Bermudez is Director of Evidence and Learning at the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery. She is also a psychotherapist at Gold Therapy NYC and Westchester Psychotherapy. With over 15 years of experience in leadership, business operations, and grant-making, Laura is a social impact professional dedicated to making the clinical setting more human. She joins host Gwen Hassan to define and differentiate between human trafficking and modern slavery, and discuss GFEMS’ data-based approach to ending both.
 

 
Fundamentally, modern slavery and human trafficking are about people with more power taking advantage of those with less for profit. Often, the victims have a minority status, usually ethnic, religious, or gender-based. Though modern slavery and human trafficking often intersect, they aren’t the same thing. Human trafficking is the recruitment, transfer, transportation, harboring or receipt of persons using force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of exploitation. Modern slavery is an umbrella term that covers multiple forms of exploitation, including human trafficking, forced labor, commercial sexual exploitation, and forced marriage. 
 
Whether the term ‘modern slavery’ is appropriate is a point of contention within the US. The reason it’s up for debate is due to the US’ own history of the transatlantic slave trade; for some, it’s an insult to equate recent forms of exploitation to the purchasing and ownership of African people as property. 
 
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Global Fund To End Modern Slavery