Bales earned his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1994 with a thesis on Early innovations in social research: the Poverty Survey of Charles Booth.

[4] Bales has served as a Trustee of Anti-Slavery International and as a consultant to the United Nations Global Program on Trafficking of Human Beings.

[citation needed] Bales has also done editing in his line of work for the United Nations, and published a report on forced labor in the US with the Human Rights Center at Berkeley.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the book "a well researched, scholarly and deeply disturbing expose of modern slavery".

about Free The Slaves,[9] investigative journalist Christian Parenti wrote a criticism of Bales, alleging he had made false claims about the chocolate industry.

Specifically, Parenti argued that "Bales goes around fund raising, flogging his book and promoting himself on the basis that he has successfully reformed the chocolate industry and largely halted its use of child labor in West Africa.