A cup of tea with Professors Judy Stephenson and Ella Cockbain

Join Professor Judy Stephenson in conversation with Professor Ella Cockbain, Professor of Human Trafficking and Exploitation, and Research Director for UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. They discuss the limits of anti-trafficking approaches and criminal justice responses to exploitation, and Prof Cockbain shares her journey from advertising to security and crime science.

Prof Cockbain co-edited Evaluating Anti-Trafficking Interventions: Critical reflections and lessons from the field alongside Prof Aiden Sidebottom and Sheldon X. Zhang. This book, available as a free PDF from UCL Press, offers practical guidance and critical reflections on anti-trafficking interventions from cross-discipline specialists.

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Join UCL academics as they uncover ground-breaking new ideas and fresh insights on diverse topics such as queer histories, neurodiversity, and climate justice.

Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!

Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/

Judy Stephenson: I'm Judy Stephenson. I'm a Professor of Economic History at UCL. Welcome to a Cup of Tea, where we are interested in how academic research can make the world better. I'm with Ella Cockbain, Professor of Human Trafficking and Exploitation. Welcome. Thank you very much for joining me for a cup of tea. Tea is a global commodity, but an English tradition. Can you tell me what you've chosen and why?

Ella Cockbain: I went for lemon and ginger, because anything that's not herbal, people always put milk in it and milk in tea is just, ew.

Judy Stephenson: Another person who doesn't like milk, okay.

Ella Cockbain: No, I like milk. I like milk in coffee, where it belongs, but not in tea. But not tea.

Judy Stephenson: I see. Okay, well thank you. Cheers. Thank you for joining us. So our first question for you is if you had 1 million pounds research budget now, what would you research and why with that million pounds?

Ella Cockbain: One, PhD funding, because PhD supervision is one of the best parts of this job. PhD students come in with amazing ideas, or ways of approaching things, and it's really sad that it's getting harder and harder to get funding for great PHD students. So that would be some number one. Thing number two, mixed methods research.

Judy Stephenson: I am absolutely loving that.

Ella Cockbain: At the moment, I'm working with so many cool colleagues on a project that has like a survey at its heart, gathering quant data. And then we've got interviews and focus groups around the qual side.

Judy Stephenson: So tell us a bit more because in human trafficking and exploitation, how does mixed methods work?

Ella Cockbain: So this particular project is looking at labor market exploitation in the UK, particularly as it affects precarious workers. So it's not the kind of sharp end of extreme criminalised exploitation under the trafficking umbrella. It's more your sort of everyday routinised wage theft, not getting the breaks you’re entitled to, things like that. So you've got live respondents, you're working with people who are experiencing these things and you're researching with them. So I am co-leading this project with my colleague, Kris Posch. So the project has a representative survey of people in precarious work and of the UK workforce more broadly. And we're asking them in that survey about their experiences at work in the last two years and the various things that they've experienced, concerns they might have. And then kind of embedded within that, we did follow-up, in-depth interviews with deep insights, like to try and understand more about the messiness and complexity of the lived experiences. And then we also did focus groups with workers around, attitudes and experiences of trade unions. So it's kind of bringing- the project’s about the scale and nature of labour market non-compliance. Quant is great for scale, but it’s not so good for messy human realities.

Judy Stephenson: And the million pounds would help that by?

Ella Cockbain: I mean, research is expensive.

Judy Stephenson: So you said PhDs, mixed methods. Anything else that you'd be looking at?

Ella Cockbain: Impacted communities, listening to and learning from them. A lot of research on trafficking and related areas tends to be really top down. There's so much importance that gets lost from what's actually happening on the ground and there's a lot of spin on the agendas.

Judy Stephenson: Tell us a bit more about what the impacted communities are.

Ella Cockbain: I mean, it's two fold. So human trafficking gets talked about as if it's like this thing, right? That's really easy to discern. And you get all these campaigns like 'spot the signs of human trafficking'. In reality, human trafficking isn't one thing. It's a ton of different things together under this big umbrella concept. And there's a real discoherence in that. So you've got child sexual exploitation, you've got criminal exploitation, you've got exploitation in global supply chains. You've got organ trafficking. So there's so many different things put in. And then anti-trafficking is also talked about as if it's just one thing and there's some really bad dominant response trafficking that causes a lot of damage on the ground.

Judy Stephenson: Tell me more.

Ella Cockbain: So right from the start, historically, the human trafficking agendas have been very tied up with kind of moral panics around migration. And so people turn to migration control as if that were a solution. Now, and also a tendency to conflate sex work, so when adults consent to sell sexual services, with sexual exploitation, and kind of try and treat all of that as trafficking, which is wildly unhelpful, really quite disrespectful to people's lived experiences in the sex trades. And because of that, a lot of anti-trafficking interventions, they cause a lot of collateral damage to sex markets

Judy Stephenson: And so would you have more PhD students look at this on the ground impact or what would you-?

Ella Cockbain: I'm really bad at choosing one thing. In this scenario, I guess the dream would be to be able to fund several PhDs, ideally the PhD students themselves come from impacted communities.

Judy Stephenson: Tell me a little bit more about how you got into the field first.

Ella Cockbain: So I did a language degree as my undergrad. And then I went and worked in advertising. Then I was losing my mind. I was working for a big, multinational corporate giant, on a washing powder account.

Judy Stephenson: We have this in common, by the way. We've just discussed-

Ella Cockbain: Yeah, exactly. So my first ever published book was an analysis of laundry powder, thinking about, you know, what color, maybe less choice. But it was so- I hated it. But while I was also working on my charity account, around trying to address how there was a lot of vilification of children. And I was much more interested in that side of things. So I sort of was looking for a way to get out, I guess. I found scholarships on countering organised crime, terrorism. And I thought that was quite cool. So I applied, and they said we've also got a new PhD program with funding, would you be interested in that?

Judy Stephenson: And here you are.

Ella Cockbain: Here I am now.

Judy Stephenson: I see why now- I see why you think funding is important because you wouldn't have got here without that funding.

Ella Cockbain: Yeah. I mean, I have no idea how you could come in like I did, but I think you get students who have come in via quite unconventional routes who have done many great things.

Judy Stephenson: So tell us about some misconceptions in the field that you would really like to clear up.

Ella Cockbain: I think one of the biggest ones is the idea that you can police and prosecute your way through this. There absolutely is a place for criminal justice responses, I think there are funds, victims and survivors that want that, but that alone is not going to make a big substantive difference in terms of levels of exploitation.

Judy Stephenson: So when you say that you can't just police and prosecute your way out of it, what could change or reset things, what could be like an actual kind of sustained, meaningful investment in prevention?

Ella Cockbain: I'm thinking about what are the kind of systemic and structural factors that could be changed or modified to sort of reduce the likelihood of exploitation, but also reduce its impact and make it easier for people to seek redress and justice in whatever form justice means to them.

Judy Stephenson: So we actually have to set it up properly. It won't just sort itself out.

Ella Cockbain: So a lot of kind of anti-trafficking responses kind of fall into two main camps. This is a bit of a simplification, but essentially on the one hand, they are very focused on sort of individual offenders and the idea that this is all these kind of super evil guys over there. And don't get me wrong, there's like- people do have these things under the banner of trafficking. That is true. But chasing after the sort of idealised evil offenders is only gonna get you so far. On the other hand is a camp that focuses a lot on the big structural policy drivers, which are also really important. But again, I think it only gets so far- it doesn't necessarily acknowledge that there are also some pretty horrible people out there. And then the bit that gets kind of forgotten often is that sort of middle layer, under the kind of social, physical environments where the opportunities are present to exploit people, and how those might be modified.

Judy Stephenson: So what I'm hearing is that this, this stuff, when you're saying it's baked in, you know, are big employers part of the problem? Or is this something that happens in what we could call the informal economy?

Ella Cockbain: I think it's like the idea, you know. We funded a postdoc fellowship where I was looking at labor trafficking in the UK and kind of identified victimisation. And that wasn't really happening. Then you instead go through the case files and it's in the very informal work, like the markets, but it's also popping up in the supply chains.

Judy Stephenson: Okay. Cool. Well, what are you working on now and what are the particular challenges or barriers that you're coming up against?

Ella Cockbain: So three really cool things about this. One is we've just had a book published with UCL Press on the evaluation for anti-trafficking interventions. What's really exciting about this is that it brings together people from across, public health, politics, crime and social work and beyond to kind of think more around how to encourage a more evidence-based approach, and ways to kind of explain the challenges in practice and case studies from that. So I'm hoping that will go out and it's widely read as it's open access and you can download it for free.

Judy Stephenson: Congratulations.

Ella Cockbain: Thank you. Thing number two is the project I mentioned earlier about the nature of labour market noncompliance and other work-based harms. It's a bit of a mouthful; essentially labour market exploitation and precarious work in the UK. We'll be in the final stages of that next year.

Judy Stephenson: So I'm hearing that when you're going into the field and dealing with people who are, you know, working every day or living the experience of labor market exploitation, what are the challenges of getting into the field and, and, you know, actually doing the research on the ground?

Ella Cockbain: Figuring out who you want to talk to and how and understanding where the biases lie. So I guess with that particular project, the interviews were with people who were already in our survey respondents also, that indicated that they might be interested in the follow up. But we're acutely aware that, you know, we're not able to through that design and kind of access the people who in the most extreme and isolated situations and exploitations, we don't have time to do that. More generally, when you're looking at tracking there's potentially often really big ethical risks, and you need to think very, very fast about the impact of the research. And guess how to design it in a way that it's useful for the people who are affected by these issues so that it's not kind of flying in, maybe super extractive, putting people's lives at risk.

Judy Stephenson: Yeah. How you care for the people that you're studying. Okay.

Ella Cockbain: I won an award. The Philip Reeves Hume Prize. I do some stuff around solidarities and grassroots resistance; community organising across kind of multiple areas. So this is where there's grassroots resistance in a community to an organisation or a set of exploiters. One of the things I talked about was kind of wanting to disaggregate tracking rights. And then once you've disaggregated, like the different trafficking issues overlap with so many different things that they, you know, they overlap with drugs policy, they overlap with migration, with domestic, sex workers rights, with LGBTQ, plus people's rights with sexual reproductive health, racial justice, reparation issues, like a whole bunch of things. And one of the things that colleagues and I've been talking about recently is that it feels- and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say- the world is getting worse, right? There is definitely a strong authoritarian turn in politics in many places internationally, and the ascendancy of the far right kind of in the face of all that, one of the things we're keen to think about is we know that the kind of current top down trafficking sort of raid and rescue models can often cause more harm than good. So thinking from a kind of bottom up, what's already going on because there's loads like solidarity is nothing new. There's loads of communities across the world who are already doing incredible kind of grassroots organising against different forms of oppression, violence, exploitation, and injustice. So I'm keen to explore that area of cyber, to learn more from people doing that kind of grassroots level. It's a really cool prize because that is sort of all in a bit of a different direction

Judy Stephenson: Congratulations.

Ella Cockbain: Thank you.

Judy Stephenson: Is there a researcher either in your field or elsewhere, who you find inspiring

Ella Cockbain: I can't choose one favorite because now you said you can choose one. Yeah, you can navigate me.

Judy Stephenson: So who are your favorites?

Ella Cockbain: My favorites are people who communicate in a way that is clear and engaging and accessible and precise and not wrapped in jargon and unnecessarily long words. And I like reading any academic work that is like a joy to read in its clarity, even if the subject matter is also something that you know. The kind of slip of it is, you know, when you read academic papers, sometimes you feel like you're sort of walking in a maze and you're like, sure, you've got a point, but I can't find one. So I don't like those.

Judy Stephenson: What's the last really good thing you read like that?

Ella Cockbain: I read a book by Nicola Kelly who is one of the best journalists working on migration at the moment, called Anywhere but Here about the UK asylum system. But again, that's a book that deals with a very heavy topic, but in a really thoughtful, reflexive, well-written way that gets the points.

Judy Stephenson: All academics beware!

Ella Cockbain: I've really enjoyed being able to work with shorter form writing, being able to commission people. That has kind of interesting, cool things to say and things coming around much quicker, because that's another thing that can be frustrating and can take years, especially if you're working on kind of social policy issues that are urgent, in fact. And it can be frustrating to become so formalised. By the time you're through the academic journal system, you know, the peer review system is three years down the line. You're like, this is no longer the front. It can take a really long time. Whereas with openDemocracy we've been able to be like, okay, this is an issue, will you do an interview with us, will you write something for us?

Judy Stephenson: Tell us a bit about openDemocracy and your role in it.

Ella Cockbain: There is a big media platform on it, they have various projects. One of them is called Beyond Trafficking and Slavery. It's been running for about 11 years now. It was set up as a kind of public education, bridging a set of academia and journalism to challenge misinformation. Misinformation is kind of like dodgy assumptions and myths around trafficking. It's evolved over the years, and it's become a kind of platform for critical writing, so it's got the academic impact, but you know, speed is of the essence if you like. So we have academics writing for us as professional journalists. For us, we have people from some affected communities, people from NGOs, people in all sorts of different organisations as well. So it's a real mix.

Judy Stephenson: So tell me three significant things- three big problems in the world that your research speaks to and can make better. What are those top three? I haven't asked you for one. I've asked you for three!

Ella Cockbain: The ways that people get exploited in everyday life. Improving responses to that, trying to prevent that. Trying to, I guess, try and help make the world a bit less rubbish. But I don't think research alone is going to do that. I think we have an important role to play in terms of building stronger evidence. The base of that is trying to figure out, you know, what societies and what circumstances. But at the end of the day, a lot of this is politics and has to be first not just for politicians and other power structures. So, you know, businesses love anti-trafficking when the anti-trafficking is about raising awareness. But there are signs businesses are not so keen to think about everyday labour exploitation of workers in their supply chains.

Judy Stephenson: Hot topic. Artificial intelligence. How is it going to impact your work? Is it going to replace you, replace your PhD students, or is it going to transform your work?

Ella Cockbain: I'd be lying if I- if I pretended to know. There's a lot of exploitation connected to AI, so it's definitely there, with things like deepfakes. That's a massive kind of problem area around deepfake child sexual abuse. Also, I guess if you think on the environmental side, the data centers are already causing devastation in most communities around the world. And I guess there's questions around what the impacts are in terms of local populations and things and how that kind of shapes the contours of opportunities, constraints, exploitation. I would say I'm not more worried than excited, but that's okay if I like- if I looked into the future like it could be.

Judy Stephenson: So tell us a bit about the field of human trafficking and exploitation. Tell us a bit about your hopes and fears for what academic research is going to contribute to the world more generally. I think it would be really lovely for universities to look at the labour exploitation within universities.

Ella Cockbain: I mean, they really don't- What are my hopes I have? No, I have no hopes. No fears.

Judy Stephenson: Okay. It's a- it's a dark time to be a researcher, particularly in your field, but, you know, so the greatest fear is the chronic, underfunded universities. I'm worried about the mass closures across the United States because we really need creative, critical thinking. We need creative thinking. Lots of people on the more violent side of things do not always think. It's like asking about the human side to interventions. And, I don't like the way subjects are being split- so it's really important to have that interdisciplinarity in the whole.

Ella Cockbain: I think there's a lot around how we think about ethics and research funding.

Judy Stephenson: What is the scariest thing you've ever had to do as a researcher?

Ella Cockbain: Dealing with death threats.

Judy Stephenson: To you?

Ella Cockbain: Yeah.

Judy Stephenson: Can you tell us a tiny bit more?

Ella Cockbain: Yes. So one of the areas I've worked a lot on is child sexual exploitation. There has been since 2009 a very narrow focus in the UK on this idea of child sexual exploitation. My PhD was on complex child sexual exploitation and the child trafficking involved. Cases in, you know, towns and cities that have now become kind of synonymous with grooming gangs, places like Telford in Northern Ireland. There's been a huge amount of misinformation and disinformation in this space. It's really dangerous because it lets racism get in the way of child protection. It makes it very, very easy to ignore all sorts of other child sexual abuse.

Judy Stephenson: How does that lead to-

Ella Cockbain: It may not surprise you that the far right makes a lot of political hay out of this. And then more recently, you know, Elon Musk has been weighing in on this issue, and I sort of got dragged into it as this is my research that's been misrepresented again online. Yeah. So once Musk started tweeting about this- UCL put out a misinformation statement because it got so ridiculous. But, I mean, it has been happening for years because I've done quite a lot since I'm writing in the media around challenging some of these kind of faulty assumptions and trying to encourage a response to child sexual abuse. The focus is on protecting all children, which isn't at all about, you know, covering up, you know, pretending that some cases don't exist. They do, they're horrific. I know that. It's horrible. Just needs to be depoliticised.

Judy Stephenson: I'm so sorry you experienced that. You said UCL had to put out a statement. So were they able to do that?

Ella Cockbain: Yeah. So they put out a statement this summer and- and that helped. I think it's useful as a corrective against misinformation. So, you know, people see all the reports and stats like that because the thing is, like a lot of very high profile people, one of which is the richest man in the world, says that's why I'm sharing things, saying the Cockbain report finds x, y, z. So I think that, you know, if you now Google it, you've got this thing explaining that is actually not covered before, which I think is quite useful.

Judy Stephenson: Well, we'll do our best to make sure there is no misrepresentation of any kind of reports or of anything you said. Thank you so much for sharing a cup of tea with me. You might be working on depressing stuff, but it's inspiring to talk to you.

Ella Cockbain: Thank you very much indeed for having me.