ABSTRACT
Processes associated with forced labour, child labour and trafficking occur in the shadows of the global economy, are associated with global and local crime and affect some of the most vulnerable people in the world. Doing research in this area posed considerable challenges, especially in terms of how one 'does' the necessary empirical work in logistical terms and how, methodologically speaking, one can approach the study of these issues empirically, analytically and theoretically. There are no systematic datasets on the problems of forced labour and trafficking. In the research conducted with collaborators on child labour in India, the household survey was constructed on the basis of a snowballing sampling technique, which was constrained by both the problem of inducing people to speak openly about matters of exploitation and the ethical considerations associated with such conversations.
