**4. A proposal for a legal definition of modern slavery**

When the studies on modern slavery are examined, it is seen that the majority of these studies prefer to focus on the practices that can be considered in the category of modern slavery, their sources and common features, rather than the definition of the concept. In this respect, modern slavery studies generally appear as a large corpus consisting of thousands of pages that contain many determinations about the concept but avoid defining the concept. The concept of modern slavery is not defined in national and international legal documents. For this reason, attempts to define modern slavery have been limited to the efforts of some non-governmental organizations and a few academics fighting modern slavery.

Nevertheless, it can be said that contemporary politics, international documents, activists and scientists have been able to reveal the image of modern slavery with modern slavery approaches. Although different approaches to this image vary in terms of some elements of the image, it is seen that there are three common elements in the denominator of the image. These; One person's control over another is the involuntary aspect of this control relationship and exploitation [7].

But this compromise, which seems to have been achieved in the image of modern slavery, is out of question when it comes to defining the concept. However, as in the fight against any problem, it is clear that a consensus should be reached on a definition related to the concept in order to fight modern slavery. For this reason, I will try to put forward an original definition proposal, with its justifications, in order to express modern slavery, in the hope that it will contribute, albeit in a small way, to meeting this requirement. In order for this definition to be able to develop an effective action at national, regional and global level in the fight against modern slavery; I care about the possibility of benefiting both researchers, administrative authorities and judicial bodies.

In this context, a modern definition of slavery appears to have the following characteristics:


In this context, I can express the four elements that I think must be present in any modern definition of slavery (**Table 1**):


#### **Table 1.**

*Essential elements of the definition of modern slavery.*

Of course, it can be argued that others should be added to these elements while defining modern slavery. Since I think that there is some justification for this view, I chose to characterize the elements in the table above as "elements that must be included in the definition". However, I would also like to point out that I am concerned that the addition of elements required for the definition that are not necessarily necessary to explain modern slavery and are applicable only to some instances of modern slavery will only add to the confusion about the concept. Therefore, I prefer to formulate the definition I am going to propose to include only these four absolute elements. Of course, there will be different forms of expression that include these four elements; however, at this point I propose to define modern slavery as:

*"The situation, in which, for the purpose of exploitation, a person is systematically detained over time being deprived freedom, getting his/her consent in control due to desperation and authentication opportunity, by violence and trickery, physical or verbal menace, abuse of authority."*
