A World Free from Exploitation: A Conversation with Joanna Ewart-James of Freedom United

Confronting the Systems Behind Modern Slavery

Kyeol : Thank you for joining us. Could you begin by introducing yourself and Freedom United to our readers?

Joanna Ewart-James : My name is Joanna Ewart-James, and I am the co-founder and executive director of Freedom United. Freedom United is primarily a digital-based global community of people standing against all forms of modern slavery. We are a U.S.-registered nonprofit, but our community is international, and we mobilize people, building public support and pressure behind campaigns for change.

Kyeol : Freedom United has described itself as part of a modern abolitionist movement. What do “modern abolitionism” and “modern slavery” mean from your perspective? They are both powerful terms.

Joanna Ewart-James : We have used the word “abolitionist” frequently in the past, although we use it less often now. We are inspired by the historical movement to end the transatlantic slave trade, which pioneered campaigning methods still familiar today, including petitions, public meetings, and campaign merchandise. The term helps express the scale of our vision: a world free from slavery. At the same time, it can be problematic because abolishing these forms of exploitation is extraordinarily difficult. Slavery has existed for thousands of years in different societies and forms, so we must examine the underlying systems that facilitate exploitation today. I would now place greater emphasis on holding institutions and society accountable, empowering communities, and strengthening their resilience against exploitation. Our vision remains a world in which no one is subjected to the extreme exploitation covered by the term “modern slavery,” but achieving that vision requires us to confront the structures that allow exploitation to persist.

Kyeol : Would it be fair to say that you are fighting against systems rather than simply against particular groups or individuals?

Joanna Ewart-James : Yes, our campaigns target particular organizations, companies, legislators, governments, or other decision-makers to achieve concrete changes. But despite decades of campaigning, extreme exploitation continues. Sustaining our vision therefore requires us to examine the systems that underpin it.

Turning Public Pressure into Change

Kyeol : Freedom United addresses forced labor, human trafficking, forced marriage, and many other forms of exploitation. How do you decide which campaigns to prioritize?

Joanna Ewart-James : We use a campaign-assessment tool with weighted criteria. A central question is whether public mobilization can realistically make a difference. Have similar efforts succeeded? Have we identified the right decision-maker, and can that person or institution be influenced? Sometimes we target a secondary decision-maker who can influence whoever holds direct power over the change we seek.

Partnerships are also essential. We work closely with organizations that possess deep knowledge of a particular form of modern slavery or geographic context, but may lack the public reach needed to influence decision-makers. Freedom United can mobilize its community in support of their work.

We also consider how many people could be affected and whether a campaign contributes to a more complete public understanding of modern slavery. We therefore operate along two tracks: influencing concrete change and building an informed, engaged community capable of supporting longer-term transformation.

Kyeol : Could you share some examples of campaigns that produced meaningful results?

Joanna Ewart-James : One recent campaign concerned U.S. funding for trafficking-survivor services. Congress had already approved the funds, but the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime had not released them, placing approximately 3,000 survivors at risk of losing essential services, including shelter, legal assistance, counseling, and case management. After organizations had pressed the government for months, we mobilized our community to contact the relevant agencies, and the funding was eventually released. It was a bittersweet victory because the delay should never have occurred, but it showed that collective public pressure could help produce a response.

We have also campaigned for a Cambodian journalist imprisoned after exposing trafficking into scam compounds,^[1] opposed orphanage trafficking with volunteer-travel companies, and supported ending forced child marriage. A long-running campaign led by our former board member Payzee Mahmod contributed to raising the legal age of marriage in England and Wales to eighteen without exceptions.^[2]

Kyeol : Who are the principal targets of your campaigns?

Joanna Ewart-James : They generally fall into three groups: governments, policymakers, and legislators; businesses, such as volunteer-tourism companies, fashion, and cocoa companies; and the broader public. Communities cannot become resilient to exploitation unless people understand what modern slavery is, how it operates, and what conditions allow it to persist.

Kyeol : What kinds of organizations do you collaborate with?

Joanna Ewart-James : We have collaborated with well over one hundred organizations worldwide. Many are anti-trafficking organizations whose specialized geographic or thematic knowledge complements our global reach and campaigning expertise. We also work with trade unions and organizations outside the anti-trafficking sector when their work intersects.

Coalitions are important because Freedom United is only one piece of the puzzle. For example, we sit on the Steering Committee of the End Uyghur Forced Labor Coalition, which includes organisations with a wide range of expertise from research, lived experience, policy, and workers’ rights amongst others. We depend on partners with expertise in policy, research, survivor services, and direct advocacy. Through our My Story, My Dignity campaign, for example, we have encouraged anti-trafficking organizations to reconsider how they present survivor experiences.

How Migration Policies Create Vulnerability

Kyeol : Let’s move on to Freedom United’s campaigns for safe migration. What does safe migration mean in practice?

Joanna Ewart-James : Safe migration means providing routes that do not force people to take unnecessary risks or rely on traffickers. People do not intend to be exploited, yet they may not be able to secure a visa, access the asylum process, or a viable path to refugee protection. When safe routes are closed, people are pushed toward intermediaries, and some may be prepared to exploit them. Restrictions presented as a way to stop trafficking can therefore create a market for traffickers instead.

Kyeol : Governments often justify restrictive migration policies as necessary for border control and the prevention of irregular migration. How can those restrictions increase vulnerability to exploitation?

Joanna Ewart-James : Anti-trafficking language is sometimes weaponized to support migration restrictions driven by political pressure to reduce migration. When safe routes disappear, people in desperate circumstances have few choices and must take greater risks.

Libya is a powerful example. Eritreans and others escaping highly coercive systems may travel through North Africa because they lack safer alternatives, only to face further exploitation in Libya. European policies have supported the interception and return of migrants crossing the Mediterranean despite extensive evidence of abuse in Libyan detention centers, where migrants may be subjected to forced labor or sexual exploitation. People are not inherently vulnerable; they are made vulnerable by the absence of protections, discrimination, marginalization, and government policy.

Kyeol : The Japanese military “Comfort Women” system during the Second World War involved the deception, transportation, control, and exploitation of women and girls across borders and occupied territories. What similar patterns continue to appear in trafficking today?

Joanna Ewart-James : The patterns remain recognizable: deception, coercion, debt, control, and isolation. People may be promised legitimate employment abroad and travel through legal channels, only to discover that the job, wages, or conditions differ from what they were promised. Recruiters or employers may then impose debts that trap in debt bondage.

Conflict, climate-related disasters, and economic insecurity also push people to seek opportunities elsewhere, and traffickers exploit those pressures. Isolation—physical, linguistic, or social—remains especially powerful. Migrant domestic workers, for example, may work alone in private homes, be prevented from leaving, lack support networks, and know little about the country in which they are living.

Kyeol : Freedom United has campaigned regarding the United Kingdom’s Overseas Domestic Worker visa. What concerns do you have about the current system?

Joanna Ewart-James : Overseas domestic workers may enter the United Kingdom with an employer on a six-month visa. Although they can theoretically leave an abusive employer and find a new one, they generally cannot extend or renew the visa making securing new employment unrealistic in practice. Employers know that and so the visa rules facilitate them exploiting the worker’s precarious immigration status to commit abuse.

We are campaigning to restore the pre-2012 system, under which the visa lasted two years and could be renewed. That gave workers a realistic ability to leave abuse and find another employer. Limited changes introduced in 2016 allowed workers to change employers in theory, but the inability to renew the visa remains a major obstacle. A worker should not have to endure treatment severe enough to be formally recognized as a victim of modern slavery before being able to leave an abusive workplace.

Kyeol : How do race, nationality, and migration status shape the conditions migrant workers face?

Joanna Ewart-James : Marginalization and discrimination are central to modern slavery. In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, intense anti-migration rhetoric makes it harder to improve migrant workers’ conditions. Migrant status has become a basis on which people are “othered,” excluded, and denied rights, creating a serious obstacle to decent work and meaningful protection.

Kyeol : Freedom United has called for a more global approach to migration. What might such an approach look like?

Joanna Ewart-James : Public discussion often suggests that Europe, North America, or Australia bear the greatest responsibility for receiving migrants and refugees, although the facts show that many other countries, particularly in Africa, host much larger displaced populations. Migration must be addressed collectively rather than through narrow national politics.

There are also striking contradictions: countries with low birth rates and labor shortages may simultaneously promote anti-migration policies, even as farms and other industries cannot find workers. We need a strategic approach based on social and economic realities rather than anti-migrant sentiment.

Challenging Stigma and Centering Survivors

Kyeol : I’d like to ask about your campaigns on sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. What are some of the most damaging misconceptions about them?

Joanna Ewart-James : People often assume that sexual exploitation happens only to girls, that victims are usually kidnapped, or that police raids are always helpful rescue operations. None of those assumptions accurately reflects the full range of trafficking experiences.

Exploited people are not necessarily uneducated, visibly impoverished, or socially isolated before the exploitation begins. Trafficking can also occur within families, with relatives facilitating or participating in it. Such stereotypes make trafficking harder to recognize and reinforce stigma and victim-blaming.

Kyeol : Those stereotypes and victim-blaming may be connected to the “Comfort Women” issue as well. “Comfort Women” survivors, despite the suffering they endured during the war, have faced denialism, victim-blaming, and pressure to remain silent even after the war. How can anti-trafficking advocacy challenge such stigma while meaningfully centering survivors?

Joanna Ewart-James : Creating safe spaces and using language responsibly are essential. Anyone who speaks publicly about exploitation exposes a profound vulnerability, and their experiences must be presented in empowering rather than extractive ways.

Our My Story, My Dignity campaign asks organizations to think critically about the use of survivor stories and images. Meaningful engagement means more than placing a survivor’s voice at the center for appearance’s sake; survivors should help shape objectives, messages, and decisions. We must also avoid defining someone solely by the worst experience of their life. Public demand for testimony can pressure survivors to disclose painful experiences repeatedly, so finding an ethical balance remains an ongoing challenge.

From Historical Memory to Survivor-Centered Justice

Kyeol : Do you see connections between the history of Japanese military sexual slavery and contemporary struggles against trafficking and modern slavery?

Joanna Ewart-James : Yes. State-led gender-based violence and sexual slavery are not confined to history, and states continue to participate in forced labor and other forms of extreme exploitation. Contemporary examples include the exploitation of Uyghur, Turkic, and other minority communities in China through detention, coercive labor programs, and workplace transfers.

The connections are especially visible in war, displacement, and crisis. Sexual exploitation continues to affect people caught in armed conflicts, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Wars, political instability, or climate-related disasters also expose women and girls to sexual violence and trafficking. Historical circumstances differ, but the relationship between state power, displacement, gender-based violence, and exploitation remains very much alive.

Kyeol : Many survivors of the “Comfort Women” system have emphasized that justice requires more than criminal punishment. They have called for official recognition, apology, education, compensation, and the preservation of historical memory. How does Freedom United understand justice for survivors of modern slavery?

Joanna Ewart-James : Justice is deeply personal, and we need to listen to what survivors seek. For “Comfort Women” survivors, an official apology and public acknowledgment may be crucial. For others, justice may mean compensation, legal accountability, services, or ensuring that the same harm they’ve experienced does not happen to anyone else.

Compensation is often difficult to obtain in trafficking cases, while prosecution is rare and may not provide what a survivor most needs. A survivor advocate once described healing and justice as a framework rather than an outcome. That is important because justice also concerns the process through which acknowledgment, recovery, remedy, and agency become possible.

There is no single remedy—prosecution, apology, compensation, or reparations—that applies to every survivor. Freedom United seeks to listen in each context while working to prevent exploitation and dismantle the systems that perpetuate it. Prevention can itself form part of justice when it protects others from future harm.

Kyeol : What role can education and public campaigns play in that process?

Joanna Ewart-James : Education and public campaigns are essential because structural change requires public support and political will. Reforms often conflict with powerful interests, so informed communities must call for change and build the collective power needed to move decision-makers.

Public campaigns build the collective power required to move decision-makers, change policies, and challenge the conditions that allow exploitation to continue.

Building the Movement for Lasting Change

Kyeol : What are Freedom United’s most important current priorities and future plans?

Joanna Ewart-James : As we approach Freedom United’s tenth anniversary, we are considering our role over the next decade. The political context is difficult: commitment to ending exploitation has weakened in some areas, the wealth gap has widened, and anti-trafficking language has been used to justify harmful policies. We need to build on what we have learned while confronting deeper systems connected to exploitation, including marginalization, anti-migration rhetoric, poverty, colonialism, and concentrations of power.

Our ongoing campaigns include forced labor in U.S. prisons and immigration detention, as well as the exploitation of migrants in Libya. Another priority is examining how billionaires and concentrated wealth create or perpetuate exploitation. Public participation remains essential: the more people who support these campaigns, the greater our power to create meaningful change.