30 Years with the UN: The Truth About Modern Slavery

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together – at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecuture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6.30pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night – pay as you go.

Your Topic:

30 Years with the UN: The Truth About Modern Slavery

CONTENT WARNING: This talk explores modern slavery, human trafficking and labour exploitation. While the presentation is educational in nature, some topics may be distressing for some audience members.

Until some 10 years ago, the UN refused to accept the term ‘modern slavery’, arguing that there is an international slavery convention, adopted in 1926, established to abolish slavery, the slave trade and forced labour worldwide. The convention defines slavery as “the status or condition of a person over whom any or all powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised”. In other words, slavery is defined as a relationship of owner/owned and quite clearly applies, for example, to the situation of African slaves bought and sold as chattels in the southern states of the US from the 17th to 19th centuries.

When the term ‘modern slavery’ began to be used by the media and by not-for-profits eager to raise profile and funds, the UN began using the term ‘conditions akin to slavery’ for such things as human trafficking and domestic servitude, but the battle was soon lost. Quite simply, ‘modern slavery’ is a ‘sexy’ term and by the 2010s it had become widespread and more widely defined, covering human trafficking, all forms of exploitative labour and child labour. The definition shifted away from the relationship of master/slave to the conditions of labour and status of the worker.

Having started her UN career in UNICEF dealing specifically with sexual abuse and exploitation of children, including the prostitution of children and child trafficking, June Kane moved seamlessly into the International Labour Organization in 1999 when the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour was adopted, and over the next 27 years worked on every issue covered by the term ‘modern slavery’, and across the globe.

In this talk, she will tackle the ‘myths’ about modern slavery, of which there are many, and explain why she prefers to call it ‘making money out of misery’.

Your Speaker:

June Kane is an internationally respected expert in human rights, specifically in Modern Slavery -child labour, human trafficking, forced labour and violence against children and women. She has worked in an advisory capacity to the United Nations, governments and regional bodies for more than 30 years, in particular with the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The ILO’s mandate covers the “world of work” and June has written widely on the links between human rights, child labour and labour exploitation and trafficking, and has developed training for UN staff, governments, trade unions and employers in these areas.

A Member of the Order of Australia and Adjunct Professor at RMIT University, June brings a rare insider perspective to this timely discussion, drawing on decades of frontline experience tackling exploitation across the globe.