Andy DaveyLiz is a national leader in the Public Health Response to Modern Slavery.
Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Such is an NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellow in Public Health at the University of Sheffield and a member of the VITA network. Our VITA Network Media & Comms Assistant Andy Davey took the opportunity to chat with Liz about her background and what inspired her to work to end human trafficking.
Liz grew up in “classic 1970s suburbia…like one of those estates that was built in a cul-de-sac in the nineteen seventies” where she could often be found playing on the streets. When she turned secondary school age, she attended the local comprehensive in the city of York, which was just around the corner. After finishing her schooling, she moved all over the place, exclaiming that she would still “prefer to be wandering, but I have children of my own and now seem to be rooted for a while, but yeah, prefer to wander, I think”!
Liz completed her A-levels and spent a brief stint in Poland teaching English in between studying. After her exams, she decided to pursue her passion for travel further and started working in Bradford to save up. When she had finally accrued enough for the journey, her chosen destination was Pakistan. Although she doesn’t remember the exact reason why Pakistan ended up being her destination of choice, she remembered the trip fondly saying, “I went to Pakistan, and it was the best thing I ever did”. The trip helped open her eyes to different views of the human experience. These experiences seemed to develop a world view that would later manifest itself into her current advocacy work.
Liz has always had a passion for sports and would label herself an “armchair sports enthusiast” despite doing competitive gymnastics at university and participating in long-distance running. The development of this passion into her current career came about when she made a move to university. She was the first to go to university out of her family, and with no road map laid out for her decision, she decided to pick a course that she liked. This decision led her to Loughborough University, a well-established sports university based in the county of Leicestershire. It was at university she blended her love of sports with social sciences saying, “sports…was kind of like a passion, a heart thing, whereas the head thing was really stimulated when I did some modules around the sociology of sport and the social ecology of leisure and physical activity, so various kinds of lecturers and professors inspired my interest in the social sciences”.
It was also through university that Liz first became aware of health inequalities; she can “remember it clicking that there’s social gradients and gaps between different groups in society. And that, although I didn’t know it at the time, was really about health inequalities, social inequality and social injustices.”
These interests in sports, social sciences and health inequalities were carried through and into her PhD where she studied the connection between physical activity and public health. Liz now continues this field of study at The University of Sheffield, where she has focussed on health equity and social policy. Liz was awarded a fellowship a few years ago now by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR). She elaborated, saying, “I fit within their kind of public health remit to work with local communities and local councils to try and develop health in all approaches to policies and practices”. It’s through this fellowship that Liz created the ‘Health in All: Yorkshire’ programme, dedicated to “exploring how health and health inequalities are included in policy-making throughout Yorkshire and the Humber. The Health In All program is with local authorities mostly, and the modern slavery work fits within that because obviously, local authorities have various duties relating to slavery….so I’ve been doing some work with West Midlands partners, including local authorities. Down in the southwest, I’ve been doing some proof-of-concept work around a public health approach to modern slavery (a multi-sector approach to slavery and trafficking prevention, intervention and survivor care) with local authority partners too.”
Liz describes her steady move towards Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking as an “underscoring slow realisation that I’d actually been working around it for a little while”. She clarified this by saying that when she worked for Doctors of the World in London that they “very much focused on undocumented migrants” and how in Sheffield, they worked with “really underserved populations, especially Roma Slovak populations”. Doing research with family doctors and community nurses and health visitors made her realise that acts of apparent benefit fraud, for example, were, in fact, forced criminal exploitation; a form of MSHT. Sadly, this was not always recognised as such and continues to be under-recognised.
Liz is also involved with BASNET, the Black and Minority Ethnic Anti-Slavery Network established by AFRUCA. Her role is as a research advisor who pursues race equality action plans as well as doing active workshopping with the research community “about how to take into account race, racism and ethnicity in modern slavery research.”
In 2017 Liz took another step forward in her counter-trafficking advocacy work by joining the VITA Network after an email exchange with CEO of VITA Dr Rosie Riley. Liz went on to say that “the network’s really important for connecting with like-minded people on the same topic area”.
Speaking to Liz, you can’t help but sense her immense passion for tackling modern slavery and human trafficking, especially through the public health approach. Liz believes that if there is one takeaway from the public health approach, it “is that a public health approach really puts front and centre the issue of prevention. That’s where I think one of its biggest contributions could be – it is the way of understanding and then addressing the root causes of exploitation, and then also seeing that prevention doesn’t stop there”.
To find out more about the emerging Public Health Response to Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking and how you can apply it in your areas of work please follow this link
A Public Health Response to Modern Slavery: An evidence-based approach to developing a strategy for action on modern slavery in the UK https://view.genial.ly/60a4e9647da7bf0dbe16703e
A further short summary by Dr Liz Such can be found here:
Moving beyond Reactive Responses to Human Trafficking: The Potential of a Public Health Approach https://www.glomhi.org/–echoes