28/05/2025

Welcome to Gender Justice Research! This website has been created as part of my Wellcome Trust Early Career funded project ‘A Reproductive Justice Project for Modern Slavery Research and Practice’. It is a space to stay up to date with the project as it develops over the next five years, including activities and resources.

Where did the project come from?

The idea for my reproductive justice project came from my postdoctoral research with survivor narratives over the last three years. I analysed narratives housed in the world’s largest online archive of modern slavery survivor narratives, Voices, which I had been building since late 2017.

Voices brings together over 1,300 first-person narratives by survivors of different forms of exploitation, including forced labour, domestic servitude, sexual exploitation, debt bondage and forced marriage. Narratives are from all over the world, collected by NGOs, governments, court cases, news media, and published by survivors themselves. When building the archive, we analysed and tagged narratives for form of exploitation, country of exploitation, key themes, and we mapped them to relevant Sustainable Development Goal Targets.

After spending four years as the primary architect of the archive, I had the opportunity to deep dive into the over 200 forced marriage narratives as part of my colleague Dr Helen McCabe’s project interrogating the connections between forced marriage and human trafficking. As well as finding that life inside forced marriages often involved forced labour, particularly domestic servitude, and sexual exploitation, my research revealed additional violations and abuses of individual’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). This included examples of forced pregnancy, forced sterilisation, the prohibition of contraception and abortion and involuntary medical treatment.

I subsequently sought to re-analyse all narratives housed in Voices and found SRHR violations in other forms of trafficking, including forced abortion in contexts of sexual exploitation, and forced contraception in domestic servitude.

This opened a new area of interest and preparation over the last three years for a large-scale project addressing under-recognised and under-theorised forms of reproductive exploitation and violence occurring in contexts of human trafficking.

The project hopes to develop conceptual clarity regarding forms of reproductive exploitation including forced surrogacy, pregnancy and egg donation, as well as addressing the broader SRHR health needs of survivors through a reproductive justice framework.

Why reproductive justice?

With a background in intersectional feminist history and social movements, my research has always sought to address the ways in which individuals socially constructed identities intersect to shape lived experience at the interstices of systems of oppression. So, when developing this project, I was interested not solely in how gender shapes experience of human trafficking and reproductive exploitation, but in developing intersectional feminist approaches to SRHR outcomes for survivors capable of accounting for difference and not treating survivors as a monolith.

Reproductive justice, developed by women of colour SRHR activists in the US in the 1990s, provides a framework for moving beyond a right to choose binary when it comes to SRHR. It recognises the impact of systematic and structural oppressions on people’s ability to choose and, while encompassing a reproductive health (services) and reproductive rights (the law), moves beyond the binary to address access to SRHR.

The framework maintains the human right to bodily autonomy and is made up of core values:

• The right to have a child;
• The right not to have a child;
• The right to parent a child or children in safe and healthy environments.

As an intersectional feminist framework, it is concerned with how all intersecting identities and social positions impact on an individual’s ability to access these core values.

I will be writing more about reproductive justice as a framework for theory and praxis throughout this project.

What is this blog?

I envision this blog as a place to discuss my emerging thoughts and findings on issues of reproductive exploitation and sexual and reproductive health and rights in the context of human trafficking; a place to reflect on research activities, methodologies, debates and conversations occurring both within and outside academia; and a place to report on events and emerging research at the nexus of gender justice, SRHR, and human trafficking.

It is my hope that it will engage a broad audience to develop impact beyond research as we work towards addressing forms of gender-based violence and advocating for gender justice globally.