How a Stanford Lab is Helping Brazil Detect and Prosecute Modern Slavery

The Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab led by Grant Miller, Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine, is poised to launch two new AI-driven initiatives to combat labor trafficking across supply chains and within the justice system in Brazil.

Chain-Link: Mapping Human Exploitation in Brazil’s Charcoal Industry

One of these initiatives involves a powerful new tool that mines public data to expose the hidden networks driving exploitation of both people and planet in Brazil’s industrial charcoal sector.

Despite growing regulations and public pressure for transparency, some 1 million people are held in conditions of modern slavery in Brazil on any given day according to Walk Free, though the lab’s research indicates the true number is likely much higher. A lack of comprehensive supply chain data linking abuses to specific producers limits the effectiveness of enforcement and corporate accountability efforts.

For five years, the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab (HTDL) has been collaborating with Brazil’s SmartLab Initiative in the Federal Labor Prosecution Office (FLPO) in an effort to significantly enhance counter-trafficking regulation and enforcement efforts. The dramatic pace of deforestation in Latin America’s largest country has led to thousands of workers being housed in isolated labor camps to log and burn rainforest trees in charcoal ovens, exposing them to smoke, high temperatures, and chemicals that can lead to respiratory illnesses.

Now, supported by Stage 2 funding from Stanford Impact Labs, Miller and his team are preparing to launch Chain-Link, a new data-driven technical tool to map exploitative supply chains in Brazil’s industrial charcoal sector. The project will evaluate the tool’s impact on procurement behavior and legal enforcement.

Chain-Link will identify labor trafficking and illegal deforestation in the supply chain by integrating data from siloed publicly available administrative and legal records. The aim is to help regulators, investors, and firms make evidence-based assessments to take targeted action against illegal behavior among charcoal suppliers.

“Our team will test if such technologies can effectively incentivize private sector action toward environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains,” said Miller, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

“We aim to ultimately release an open-source toolkit to enable replication in other sectors and countries, so as to advance supply chain accountability worldwide,” said Kimberly Babiarz, PhD, Stanford Health Policy senior research scholar and the lab’s director of research.

Strengthening Civil Prosecution Against Labor Trafficking

In parallel with its supply chain work, the HTDL is also expanding its collaboration with the Federal Labor Prosecution Office to evaluate a novel, AI-driven workflow designed to strengthen civil prosecution of labor trafficking cases in Brazil. Civil prosecution is a central mechanism through which Brazilian authorities hold individuals and companies accountable, secure financial restitution for survivors, and deter future violations.

However, prosecutors face growing caseloads and resource constraints that can delay investigations and weaken enforcement. With new funding from Innovations for Poverty Action's Human Trafficking Research Initiative, lab researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation of a human-centered, AI-driven tool that uses an adapted risk model to create more efficient workflows for prosecutors. The system is fully integrated into existing case management infrastructure and supports prosecutors to identify and prioritize cases with a higher likelihood of successful prosecution.

Other core members of the Stanford Human Trafficking Data Lab working across both projects are Luis Fabiano de Assis, PhD, an affiliate scholar at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice and a Brazilian federal prosecutor, data scientist, and professor at the National School for Public Prosecutors; Victoria Ward, MD, a clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine; Jessie Brunner, MA, director of human trafficking research at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice; and Lydia Aletraris, PhD, a social science research scholar at Stanford Health Policy; Benjamin Seiler, PhD, former lab postdoctoral scholar and now assistant professor of statistics at Williams College; and Haojie Wang, PhD; a postdoctoral scholar dually appointed with the lab and Stanford Data Science. The HTDL further benefits from the contributions of several external collaborators and Stanford students.

Advocates and Academics

Members of the trafficking data lab are not only anti-trafficking advocates, but academics conducting rigorous research. In an article recently published in the Journal of Human Trafficking, the team reported new evidence on the prevalence of labor trafficking, having used a large representative survey of agricultural households in four Brazilian states.

Using a large, population representative survey, they found that between 264,000 to 815,000 Brazilian agricultural workers nationwide have been trafficked at some point within the preceding five years.

“Importantly, we also find that nearly 95% of all workers experience at least one exploitative employment practice related to trafficking, even when not meeting established definitions of trafficking,” they wrote. “In general, these results suggest that labor trafficking is more prevalent in Brazilian agriculture than past estimates imply (particularly in the cocoa sector), and that the extent of worker exploitation is substantially understated by standard binary definitions of trafficking.”

This article was originally published by Stanford Health Policy.