Discovered on this typically infuriating community note.
^Twitter^ ^URL:^ ^/fOrGiVeNcHy/status/1803650691853959385^
Here it is: Walk Free's Global Slavery Index
What is modern slavery?
Modern slavery takes many forms and is known by many names. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, or deception.
Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. In all its forms, it is the removal of a person’s freedom — their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when, and whom to marry — in order to exploit them for personal or financial gain.
So, slavery includes being coerced into a job in which you are exploited for financial gain....?
So where did their data come from?
I spent an hour studying their methodology in hopes of finding the raw data for the DPRK, but I couldn't glean much except that it was not among the surveyed countries.
I emailed [email protected] asking about an hour ago and got the automated reply quoted below. I'll see if anyone gets back to me.
Thank you for your enquiry. Please be advised that your correspondence has been received and will be distributed to a Walk Free representative for follow up where required.
Walk Free reports and data
Walk Free’s Global Slavery Index report and data are available for free download here: www.globalslaveryindex.org/resources/downloads/.
All other publications produced by Walk Free can be found on our resources page: www.walkfree.org/resources/.
To their credit, they did remove several instances of North Korea from the Department of Labor's "list of products at risk of modern slavery by source country" because they "could not find recent evidence to verify the occurrence of forced labour".
However, they added to the list solar panels from China, because of the "well-known" exploitation occurring there. It then cites an article on the Uyghurs. lol
![](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/fc1efb9e-dc1c-40c9-ace0-75fca02647f1.webp)
Western opinions of the DPRK are downright wacky, the propaganda against this one country is absolutely saturated in society. The average westerner knows just as much about what the DPRK is actually like as the westerners who consider themselves well read on international politics. It's like the one country where almost all people think it's ok to just never read anything about it, never investigate it, and never make a single good faith attempt to understand it. Instead it's always just repeat the last insane gossip you heard coming from the last large news media company you recall talking about scary North Korea
I don't know if it's still like this, but there was once a wikipedia article about homeownership rates by country. It made note of the DPRK specifically just to say the home ownership rate was 0%. The justification for this in the talk page was that the DPRK is an absolute monarchy, Kim Jong Un is the monarch, and therefore he owns every home in the DPRK and the ownership rate is thus 0.
Nonsense like this so pervasive that I am of the occasional mind that near all English speaking media about the DPRK should just be dismissed out of hand.