When Victims of Modern Slavery Became Offenders: The Unravelling of the UK’s Modern Slavery Agenda

ABSTRACT

While victims of trafficking who commit crimes have a defense in law in England and Wales, this has not been without controversy in the courts and is increasingly threatened in practice as British government ministers heap suspicion on those formally seeking recognition as victims of modern slavery. In the first part of this article, we review recent criminal cases decided by the Court of Appeal in England and Wales to explore why it is that some victims of trafficking break the law. These cases reveal the impossible choices that constitute the nexus of circumstances that lead victims to offend. In the second part of this article, we examine the cases of three people convicted of modern slavery and allied immigration crimes that are excluded from the statutory defense in English and Welsh law to show how morally comprehensible the commission of serious crimes can be in the aftermath of exploitation, destitution and trauma. We conclude by urging academics and activists in the modern slavery field to be vocal about how few victims fit their stereotypes and to help articulate the irreconcilably difficult choices that explain why some break the law in immigration contexts that are overtly hostile toward them.

KEYWORDS:

• Modern slavery
• section 45 defense
• nexus
• illegal immigration
• national referral mechanism

Introduction

While efforts to count the number of people worldwide trapped in “slavery,” or conditions like it, have mobilized many national governments to tackle trafficking in people, the idealization of victimhood accompanying this quantification has not been without consequence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the UK, where what was once pitched as a “world-leading” modern slavery agenda that other nation states should emulate has been deployed by ministers to heap suspicion on the many thousands of potential victims whom earlier administrations promised to “rescue” and “protect” (Craig et al., 2019).

In this article, we chart the emergence of this new demonizing discourse about modern slavery victims, exposing its roots in “hostile” immigration policies as well as misunderstandings of section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015¹ (the Modern Slavery Act): a legislative provision that was designed to protect victims whose offending derives from being exploited. Having reviewed how senior Conservatives in the UK have recast victims of modern slavery as suspects, we then explore how the parameters of the section 45 defense have been clarified in cases heard by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales. Its rulings reveal not that justice is easily gamed but just how unforgiving the law in practice has become to those who commit criminal or immigration offenses in the aftermath of acute exploitation. In the penultimate section of this article, we introduce case study material from interviews we conducted with three research participants in our Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study (ES/R004471/1) of people convicted of modern slavery offenses. The three case studies reveal how complex the “nexuses” of circumstances are that lead many victims of crimes involving fraud, deception, coercion, and exploitation to commit other offenses, including those that are routinely presented to the public as “serious” and “organized crimes”, such as people smuggling and modern slavery. These case studies also reveal how few protections there are in practice for victims of exploitation who do offend and, hence, how misleading it is to claim that many are “taking advantage” of British “tolerance” or loopholes in the law.

Gaming the System?

Over the last decade, the UK government’s policy on modern slavery appears to have gone full circle. In 2013, the Home Secretary, Theresa May (2013), announced to the Conservative Party Conference that she was going to tackle the “appalling crime … known as human trafficking”, by calling “it what it is – modern slavery,” an “evil in our midst,” and bringing forward a Modern Slavery Bill that would “give the authorities the powers they need to investigate, prosecute and lock up the slave drivers” who exploit the “thousands of people in Britain … bought and sold as commodities” with “little chance of escape.” By way of contrast, in 2022, Suella Braverman addressed the 2022 Conservative Party Conference by promising to confront “the hard truth” that our modern slavery laws, together with the Conservative’s “proud history of offering sanctuary to those in need,” are “being abused … by people smugglers and criminals pedalling false promises”. Launching what subsequently became dubbed the ‘Rwanda policy’ - an attempt to deter would-be migrants from crossing the North Sea in small boats - Braverman had told a televised press briefing how she’d ’love to have a front page of The Telegraph newspaper with a plane taking off to Rwanda. That is my dream. It’s my obsession’.² Braverman (2022) consolidated the point in her conference speech by asserting that many asylum seekers are actually “convicted paedophiles and rapists trying to game the system” by presenting as “modern slaves:”

We’ve seen a 450% increase in modern slavery claims since 2014. Today, the largest group of small boat migrants are from Albania – a safe country. Many of them claim to be trafficked as modern slaves. That’s despite them having paid thousands of pounds to come here or having willingly taken a dangerous journey across the Channel. The truth is that many of them are not modern slaves, and their claims of being trafficked are lies. Moreover, it’s not just illegal migrants. Since entering the Home Office, I have seen egregious examples of convicted paedophiles and rapists trying to game the system, making last-minute claims of modern slavery to block their removal from our country. Some have even gone on to commit further crimes in the interim. In one case, we convicted a sex offender from South Africa who spent a year in prison. He was about to be deported from the UK – and lo and behold, he claimed modern slavery. Our removal was stalled, and he went on to commit a further rape.

Then the Home Secretary extended the argument made repeatedly by her predecessor Priti Patel, who brought forward the 2022 Borders and Nationality Act on the unsubstantiated premise that “major increases in child rapists, people who threaten national security and failed asylum seekers” are “clogging up the modern slavery system” (Home Office and Patel, 2021). Braverman (2022) promised to resolve the logjam by withdrawing the UK from the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction:

UK policy on illegal migration should not be derailed by abuse of our modern slavery laws, Labour’s Human Rights Act, or orders of the Strasbourg Court … [W]e cannot allow this abuse of our system to continue … we will redouble our efforts to go after them … The Labour Party will try to stop this … I won’t give up on the British people … Now is the time … to put the will of the hard-working patriotic majority at the heart of all we do … It’s time to tackle the small boats – no ifs, no buts.

Her most conspicuous claims about how easy it is for convicted foreign national sex offenders to secure release from prison – seemingly without the input of the Parole Board or oversight from the police or National Probation Service – notwithstanding, the overall tenor of Braverman’s speech was remarkably like the one May had delivered nine years prior. May (2013) also equated the values of “hard-working,” “law-abiding” “British people” with those of the Conservative Party. May had also constructed immigration as an insult to British tolerance and a gateway exploited by criminals threatening the nation’s security. Both Home Secretaries attributed this threat to people smugglers and traffickers: the two groups conflated in ways that conceal the differences between paying to migrate across borders that are closed to them and being coerced into exploitation (Gadd & Broad, 2018). Both Home Secretaries depicted the Conservative party as the only party able to restore the “law and order” needed to fend off this international security threat, May (2013) also postulating that Labour “deliberately let immigration get out of control … passed the Human Rights Act and put the law on the side of criminals.”

Offending Victims

The critical difference between the two speeches, however, was that May (unlike Braverman) delineated a subgroup of exploited migrants toward whom the public should be sympathetic – very vulnerable women and children forced or duped into “work in the sex industry” - from the broader populace of those deemed “illegal immigrants” and asylum seekers the Conservative government cultivated hostility toward. Braverman, conversely, raised suspicion about the motives of anyone and everyone reporting modern slavery victimization, implying that many of those who claim to be exploited are foreign national offenders seeking to avoid deportation. This cast all those claiming to be potential victims of modern slavery as a suspect population, leaving little room for the idealization of a vulnerable subset of victims that had initially been used to rally a coalition of interest groups to support the Modern Slavery Bill a decade prior (O’Connell Davidson, 2015).

This shift in emphasis in Conservative rhetoric prompted various commentators from within the anti-slavery sector to challenge the government on its betrayal of victims and those working to safeguard them. Dame Sara Thornton, the former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, explained that the number of referrals to the National Referral Mechanism (NRF) had risen in recent years, not because the system is being abused, but because the Home Office, police and immigration authorities became better at identifying victims (Dearden, 2022). Likewise, Elysia McCaffrey, the chief executive of the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA), responded to Braverman by explaining that the GLAA had not seen anyone “gaming” the modern slavery system for immigration purposes (Dugan, 2022). Instead, cuts to their own – already vastly understaffed (Kenway, 2021) – service had rendered it impossible for the GLAA to investigate all but a tiny minority of reports of exploitation in UK supply chains. Subsequently, the NGO, After Exploitation, coordinated a formal complaint to the Office of Statistics Regulation on behalf of 23 NGOs, alleging that Home Secretaries Braverman and Patel had knowingly deployed “misleading” statistics to secure sensationalist newspaper headlines. At the same time, the British government had unjustifiably withheld the data requested in both Houses of Parliament, as well as via Freedom of Information requests, needed to evaluate the veracity of its claims-making (Esslemont, 2022) and policymakers were unable to point to any specific evidence when asked about this by the Director General for Regulation (Humpherson, 2022).

Indeed, Braverman’s speech misrepresented her department’s role, not only regarding its duty of care toward victims of modern slavery but also the processing of asylum claims, managing immigration detention, and controlling crime more generally. It is the Home Office that oversees the NRM, border control and immigration enforcement, as well as large parts of the criminal justice system. As the Migrants Right’s Network highlighted, annual reports from these various agencies revealed that 90% of those forcibly held in immigration detention and referred to the NRM are subsequently confirmed to be victims of trafficking (Qureshi et al., 2022). NRM referrals are made by officially recognized first responders, predominantly police officers, social workers, immigration enforcement, and border control officers, leaving little scope for baseless applications. “Positive conclusive grounds decisions” officially validate applicants’ claims to be victims of modern slavery and are issued by either the Single Competent Authority (SCA) or the Immigration Enforcement Competent Authority, both of which are part of the Home Office. However, these do not guarantee any right to remain in the UK. While 87% of adult and 90% of child applicants to the NRM received positive grounds decisions in 2022, on average, only 7% of those confirmed as victims of trafficking from overseas were granted leave to remain in the UK (Home Office, 2023; Taylor, 2022).

Compulsion and the Section 45 Defence

What few of the government’s critics were willing to explain publicly, however, is that some victims of modern slavery do break criminal and immigration laws as they attempt to navigate the near-impossible choices displacement, destitution, and desperation confront them with (Hodkinson et al., 2021; Schwarz & Williams-Woods, 2022). To some degree, the Modern Slavery Act anticipated this, taking inspiration from European legal frameworks addressing the needs of exploitation victims who had little choice but to engage in crime (Muraszkiewicz, 2019). As a signatory to Article 26 of the (2005) Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, for example, the UK committed to do the following: provide for the possibility of not imposing penalties on victims for their involvement in unlawful activities to the extent that they have been compelled to do so.

The UK remains legally committed to Article 8 of Directive 2011/36 issued by the European Parliament (2011) on “Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Human Beings and Protecting its Victims”. This requires states to:

take the necessary measures to ensure that competent national authorities are entitled not to prosecute or impose penalties on victims of trafficking in human beings for their involvement in criminal activities … as a direct consequence of being subjected to any of the acts referred to in Article 2. [which defines “Offences concerning trafficking in human beings”]

Section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act represented a somewhat perfunctory attempt by the UK to comply with the 2005 Convention and Directive 2011/26. By contrast, both European provisions aim to prevent punishment rather than introducing a defense once proceedings have been established. Contrary to the inferences made in Braverman’s (2022) Conservative Party Conference speech, adults and children have no defense under section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act for most serious crimes. Robbery, manslaughter, murder, sexual offenses, acts of terrorism, and possession of firearms, alongside many other offenses against the person – including threats to kill and wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and abandoning children – were explicitly excluded from the section 45 defense, as was the immigration offense of assisting unlawful immigration (Muraszkiewicz, 2019). The breadth of these offenses betrays the commitment to protecting survivors since some of them are committed by victims of trafficking who consider themselves as having few other choices in the context of their entrapment. Other offenses can, however, be excused if the following criteria in s.45(1) are met:

(a) the person is aged 18 or over when the person does the act which constitutes the offence,

(b) the person does that act because the person is compelled to do it,

(c) the compulsion is attributable to slavery or relevant exploitation, and

(d) a reasonable person in the same situation as the person and having the person’s relevant characteristics would have no realistic alternative to doing that act.

If the accused is under the age of 18, the element of compulsion is not relevant. In these cases, under s.45(4) the person is not guilty if:

(a) the person does that act as a direct consequence of the person being, or having been, a victim of slavery or a victim of relevant exploitation, and

(b) a reasonable person in the same situation as the person and having the person’s relevant characteristics would do that act.

Neither “compulsion” nor the absence of a “reasonable alternative” is adequately defined in section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act. Deciphering what these terms mean has thus fallen mainly to the Court of Appeal, which, since 2017, has heard a small but growing number of cases where the section 45 defense has not been adequately applied at earlier stages (see Table 1). Definitions of key terms in the section 45 defense have thus developed piecemeal across official documents and case law, as the Court of Appeal has attempted to achieve clarification and consistency through reference to broader aspects of jurisprudence and international law.

Table 1. Number of Appeals Heard by the Court of Appeal of the Section 45 Defense. Source: Lexis+ UK.

Year	Number of appeals heard by the Court of Appeal of the Section 45 defence for slavery or trafficking victims who commit an offence
2016	0
2017	1
2018	2
2019	3
2020	3
2021	3
2022	6

In the Principles and Guidelines for Human Rights and Human Trafficking set out by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the “trafficked persons shall not be detained, charged or prosecuted” for unlawful activities that were a “direct consequence” of their victimization (Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights [OHCHR], 2002, p. 1). The Organisation for Crime and Security in Europe’s (OSCE) Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combatting Trafficking in Human Beings Policy and Legislative advocates for “an interpretation of compulsion based on the consequences of the victim's situation as a trafficked person” (Knight, 2023, p. 197; Organization for Security and Cooperation across Europe [OSCE], 2013). Building on this, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) expanded the meaning to include offenses which victims “have been compelled to commit as a direct consequence” of their victimization (ILO, 2014, Article 4). “A defendant needs to prove a nexus between their offending and their status as a VoT [victim of trafficking]” (Knight, 2023, p. 192).³ Knight (2023) argues that despite the broad view of “compulsion” by the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE) and International Labour Organization (ILO), the term has been defined too narrowly and inconsistently in England and Wales. Its courts need, therefore, to take a more “expansive view” defined as “the direct consequence of the victim’s situation as a trafficked person” (Knight, 2023, p. 193). Not doing so, Knight maintains, is inconsistent with the UK's obligations under international law and fails to protect trafficked victims effectively.

Previous rulings of the Court of Appeal have exposed how difficult it is for defendants to evidence a “nexus” between trafficking victimization and their offending and hence how hard it is for many to exercise their rights under international law (PEC, 2022). Many victims of trafficking suffer severe forms of mental health issues in the aftermath of years of complex trauma and stress, and few have the resources needed to mount complex legal defenses (Evans et al., 2022). Within the lower courts, establishing what “a reasonable person” with the same “relevant characteristics” would consider as having “no realistic alternative” (as per the section 45 defense) has also proved challenging. What might it be reasonable for someone told they will be deported if they report their years of sexual or criminal exploitation and physical abuse to do if they have no money of their own and no faith that there is any help, professional or otherwise, available to them? How “reasonable” can one be in the aftermath of extreme and prolonged trauma? Furthermore, how might one persuade a jury with little-to-no experience of what it is like to suffer destitution, live in servitude, or fear deportation that one has been so?

The Court of Appeal’s rulings in this regard have typically articulated a preference to assess reasonableness more in terms of whether there is an immediate connection between being trafficked and committing an offense than a willingness to grapple with the impossible choices made by destitute people who have endured a lifetime of trauma. For example, in 2020, an appeal was refused in the case of R. v A⁴ an 18-year-old Afghan man who had pleaded guilty to burglary charges. The defendant came to the UK aged 11 after the murder of his father and had subsequently become involved in a criminal gang while in the care of the British state. Though he was recognized by the NRM as a victim of trafficking when he was 16, the Court of Appeal took the view that the defendant’s vulnerabilities were insufficient to prove that the “aggravated burglary was committed as a consequence of the dominant force of compulsion from his traffickers.”⁵

In a subsequent case (R. v BYA⁶), the Court of Appeal reconsidered the case of a defendant convicted in November 2009 of being in “possession of a false identity document with intent” contrary to the Identity Cards Act 2006 s.25(1). The defendant had pleaded guilty to the charge but managed to resist deportation in 2011 because she had a legitimate asylum case, having been smuggled from Ghana to the Netherlands to escape female genital mutilation. The defendant was sexually exploited in the Netherlands only to be re-trafficked, first to Spain and then to the UK, where she was forced into prostitution. The Court of Appeal accepted that the defendant had been:

trafficked … and … re-trafficked … sexually exploited and subjected to sexual abuse (including daily rapes) over a lengthy period, having fled her family home because of the threat of female genital mutilation … . The effect of these experiences upon her must have been to cause significant trauma… [S]he knew nobody save for her traffickers, to whom she was in debt bondage. She spoke no English … felt isolated and alone … was obviously vulnerable [and] knew nobody in the UK to whom she could turn for help.⁷

The Court of Appeal quashed the defendant’s conviction in 2022, 13 years after it had been secured, on the basis that due process had not been followed, both with respect to identifying her as a victim of trafficking and whether it was in the public interest to prosecute her:

the speed with which she was processed, interviewed by police and then prosecuted following her arrest gives rise to the inference that there was … inadequate consideration … [of] indicators of human exploitation and/or trafficking … when she was introduced into the criminal justice system … Accordingly, we consider it open to this court to consider the public interest question without trespassing on territory already appropriately considered by the prosecuting authority.⁸

The Court of Appeal accepted that there “was a strong nexus of compulsion to flee her traffickers”, which included the victim’s desire to reunite with her son in the Netherlands. However, it also noted that this was “not a paradigm case in the sense that the compulsion the applicant was under did not lead directly to the offending.”⁹ In other words, the court did not deem it proven that a woman who had been trapped in sexual exploitation in three European countries, raped, and physically abused over many years – someone who simply could not find safety anywhere in the world – had no other reasonable alternative but to seek out false travel documents. Its position was primarily that the Crown should consider on a case-by-case basis whether the public interest is served by prosecuting those who offend in such circumstances.

The former Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s review of how the section 45 defense was working suggests that such considerations need to begin much earlier in the criminal justice process, noting how police officers often fail to consider “from the outset of an investigation whether a suspect could be a victim of trafficking and whether the statutory defence may apply” (IASC, 2020, p. 7). The review found that when the defense was raised early in investigations, cases were sometimes dropped, either by the police or the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), without a proper investigation or the being case fully prepared because some criminal justice professionals assume incorrectly “that past exploitation provides immunity from prosecution.” However, this is “not the case and ironically could make the young person even more vulnerable to further exploitation as their exploiters view them as having a ‘get out of jail free card’” (IASC, 2020, p, 20). This misguided presumption has been made in cases involving young people, predominantly British men, involved in so-called “county lines” drug-dealing. In these county lines cases, the section 45 defense can be mobilized when defendants explain their own “possession with intent to supply” offenses as a “direct consequence of their exploitation” or intimidation by more senior figures within criminal gangs (Ahluwalia, 2018).

There is, however, little evidence to support the view that such a defense is readily accepted in the UK. There is evidence to suggest that law enforcement is often less-than-supportive of suspects who claim to be victims of trafficking (IASC, 2020), and legal precedents that reveal that the courts can deem a conclusive grounds decision from the Single Competent Authority (SCA) insufficient to evidence that one is a victim of trafficking. In the case of R. v Brecani,¹⁰ in 2020, a 17-year-old Albanian national convicted of conspiracy to supply cocaine faced trial before the SCA accepted that there were “conclusive” grounds to consider the defendant a victim of modern slavery. The original trial judge had rejected an application by the defense to submit the conclusive grounds decision as expert evidence. The Court of Appeal upheld this decision, noting that:

It is not sufficient to assume that because administrators are likely to gain experience in the type of decision-making they routinely undertake that, simply by virtue of that fact, they can be treated as experts in criminal proceedings.¹¹

The Court of Appeal noted that the reasoning of the SCA had not been documented in a form that is accessible to the courts, that its decision-making processes do not meet the standard of proof – beyond a reasonable doubt – required by juries, and that in this instance the conclusive grounds decision had been made prior to new digital evidence coming to light to the effect that the defendant had “an entirely different history from that accepted” by the SCA caseworker. The defendant’s phone record revealed a history of:

independent trips … across northern France prior to entering the United Kingdom and thereafter travelling freely within this country. The digital record was devoid of any suggestion of trafficking, including by way of relevant contact with the individuals who were suggested to have recruited and exploited the appellant, and instead it tends to demonstrate a happy and carefree life on his part. He maintained seemingly cheerful contact with his family and booked the services of escorts for himself and a friend … Given none of this vital material was reviewed by [the SCA Caseworker], we regret to conclude that his opinion was rendered valueless.¹²

While some legal commentators read the precedent set by this decision as undermining the viability of the section 45 defense (Munro Kerr, 2021) – defendants who have been trafficked unable thereafter to rely on conclusive grounds decisions as supporting evidence – the Brecani judgment also re-iterated the UK’s obligations under article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights to protect victims and for its criminal justice system to “investigate situations of potential trafficking”¹³ (Topolski, 2021). In turn, the circumstances in which prosecutors may disagree with a positive conclusive grounds decision were clarified (Knight, 2023). In VCL and AN v UK,¹⁴ in 2021, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found the UK to have violated both Article 4 and Article 6 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms when conclusive grounds identification as a trafficked victim (a child) was questioned (Youth Justice Legal Centre, 2021).

Further protections for victims were reestablished in 2022 in the Court of Appeal’s decisions to stay proceedings in cases where the defendant had been identified as a victim of trafficking, R v AAD, AAD and AAI^iv. These rulings established it as an ‘abuse of process’ when the Crown Prosecution Service fails to follow is own guidelines regarding the non-punishment of victims of trafficking (Gregory, 2022). How consistently this will happen in subsequent cases remains to be seen. Victim-blaming, criminalization and deportation are all adverse consequences that greet foreign national victims of trafficking in the context of the UK’s hostile immigration policy (Gearon, 2019; Rodríguez-López, 2020) and the resulting calls to “quit” the European Convention on Human Rights the politics around this have yielded (Forrest, 2022). As criminologists, this suggests to us that a much fuller deconstruction of what lawyers call the “nexus of compulsion” is urgently required. It cannot be just that the tough choices that lead many victims of exploitation to offend have no defense in law, especially when many of these choices are enmeshed by the UK’s social and immigration policies. The case analyses that follows is offered in this spirit.

Methodology

Between 2016 and 2021, the authors conducted primary research in the UK with 30 people who had been convicted of modern slavery and associated immigration or drug-related offenses (Broad & Gadd, 2023). Participants were recruited primarily through HM Prison and Probation Service, with the consenting process initiated by probation officers responsible for managing those still serving sentences. The interviews were audio recorded and conducted using the Free Association Narrative Interview Method (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). All but two participants were interviewed twice (of the remaining two, one was interviewed once and the other three times). Participants were invited to tell their life stories in the first interview, and the interviewer used narrative-focused questions and active reflection to encourage them to complete their stories. The authors then reviewed transcripts of the first interviews to identify areas where there was a lack of detail, unexplained changes of tone, or inconsistencies. These were then further probed in the second interview. The authors then reviewed and analyzed both transcripts to generate case studies to capture the stories’ complexities, including any contradictory elements.

For this article, we revisited the 30 case studies to identify those where connections between experiences of victimization, exploitation and engagement in criminal behavior were described as crucial features of the life histories of our participants. Half of the sample (n = 15) met this criterion, though a more significant number could have been included had we incorporated those who had experienced domestic or sexual abuse or neglect as children (n = 6) or who were born into families that were routinely engaged in criminal enterprises (n = 4). The 15 cases where there appeared to be connections between experiences of victimization or exploitation and engagement in criminal behavior that constituted modern slavery could be further codified into three subgroups (see Table 2):

1. Victims of exploitation who were either adults who were (arguably) “compelled to commit” a criminal act, or children, at the time, who began offending as “a direct consequence of their exploitation.” Three participants appeared to meet the criteria for the section 45 defense. A further one would have done so had their offenses not been so severe as to be exempt from the defense (n = 4).

2. Those who were victims of other (non-exploitation) offenses who, though not compelled, were cajoled or manipulated into offending due to an enduring vulnerability (n = 8)

3. Those previously subject to exploitation that had ceased when they began offending (n = 3).

Table 2. An Overview of the 15 Participants with Details of Exploitation Perpetrated and Victimization Experienced.

Name	Age	Sex	Nationality /Ethnicity	Exploitation Perpetrated	Victimization-Offending Nexus
Group 1: Victims of exploitation who were either adults compelled to commit a criminal act or children at the time who began offending as a direct consequence of their exploitation.
Susan	20s	Female	British (White British)	Trafficking for Child Sexual Exploitation	Sexually abused by co-accused. Previously sexually exploited while substance dependent.
Nina	40s	Female	Slovakian	Sexual exploitation	Domestic abuse by boyfriend and co-accused, sex trafficker
Vicky	20s	Female	British (White British)	Forced County Lines Drug Dealing	Groomed by uncle into drug dealing
Rasheed	30s	Male	Pakistani	Forced Marriage Rape	Victim of labor exploitation, including a history of indentured labor in Pakistan and hired into exploitive labor in the UK while living where worked, and at risk of deportation because working illegally on a tourist visa.
Group 2: Those who were victims of other (non-exploitation) offences who, though not compelled, were cajoled or manipulated into offending due to an enduring vulnerability.
Aron	20s	Male	Albanian	Facilitating Illegal immigration	Threatened with a gun before fleeing to become a migrant with false papers.
Alessandro	40s	Male	Albanian	Facilitating illegal immigration	Fell into debt borrowing money for brother’s operation. Suffers PTSD, having been a young soldier
Thierry	40s	Male	British (Black British)	Facilitating Illegal immigration	Tricked into giving a lift across the UK border to an undocumented migrant.
Raja	50s	Male	British (Asian)	Making False Documents Labour exploitation	Defrauded by business partners into applying for work permits for migrant workers whose qualifications were falsified.
Andrei	30s	Male	Romanian	Sexual Exploitation Keeping a Brothel	Substance dependency led to engagement in working to produce marketing for sex workers to finance substance use and treatment.
Anton	30s	Male	Romanian	Sexual Exploitation	Became drug dependent, then encouraged by the dealer to undertake further driving jobs for sex workers.
Estelle	30s	Female	Portuguese (African Portuguese)	Sham marriage	Was cajoled into accruing gambling debts and obligations to the man who helped children come to the UK.
Linda	40s	Female	Zimbabwean	Sexual exploitation	Debts and substance dependency coincided with facilitating the sexual exploitation of her daughter to men she had become obligated to.
Group 3: Those previously subject to exploitation that had ceased at the time of the offence.
Naz	40s	Male	British (British Asian)	Sexual Exploitation	Exploited as an underpaid worker in the takeaway industry, socially isolated, becomes engaged in the sexual exploitation of young women who rely on him for food and somewhere to stay,
Idris	60s	Male	Nigerian	Sexual Exploitation	Child soldier who became a drug trafficker, hiring vulnerable people to carry illicit substances across international borders.
Grace	40s	Female	Kenyan	Sexual Exploitation	Victim of domestic servitude who becomes implicated in profiting from the sexual exploitation of other women.

In the following section, one case is selected from each of these categories to exemplify how exploitation, coercion and vulnerability contributed to modern slavery offending. We present these cases to reveal the different forms taken by the nexus of relationships between criminal victimization and crimes of exploitation. We argue that when adequately explained, this nexus of relationships can render the perpetration of “serious and organized” forms of trafficking and immigration crime morally comprehensible.

Case Studies

Vicky

Vicky was a British national serving a seven-year sentence for conspiracy to supply class A drugs (heroin) in the context of county lines drug dealing. Vicky’s mother had died when she was aged 10, and she had become estranged from her abusive dad. Aged 13 and still consumed by grief, Vicky was permanently excluded from school, having “set the toilets on fire”. She left school with no qualifications and, at 16 moved into a flat with her brother James, then aged 18, “far away from family and friends”. Her Uncle Steve used to “ring” James and “ask if he … needed anything”. When it “got to the point where” James and Vicky “couldn’t pay the rent” – partly because James “was feeding his girlfriend’s [drug] habit” – Steve offered them money. Neither James nor Vicky wanted to “go down that path,” but Steve kept saying “you need it,” which became his way of recruiting his niece and nephew into a county lines drug supply chain that endured for eight years.

James initially made “thirty grand a week” selling the drugs locally, while Vicky resisted, worrying that her “mum wouldn’t have been happy.” But after James offered her £100 a day, Vicki agreed to support James in running the drug supply, wrapping small packets of heroin. When Vicky was 23, she was arrested for intent to supply, bailed, and banned from the town where she had been dealing. Vicky and James were then charged with conspiring to supply drugs for over eight years alongside seven men – all friends of James’, two of whom alleged that James and Vicky were “forcing them” to move the “supply” and threatening to “beat” them up if they did not. One of the co-accused friends said he’d “never got paid, he’d lost everything … lost his kids, he’s lost his house”. In return, the two friends were given very short prison sentences, while James and Vicky took the rap for their uncle, who was never charged.

Alessandro

Alessandro was an Albanian man in his late forties, serving a three-year sentence for conspiring to facilitate the illegal entry of 11 Albanian men and women into the UK, including bringing people “for slavery.” At 18, Alessandro had been conscripted into the Albanian army before joining the Kosovan Liberation Army. There, he became an escort for Albanians attempting to flee to Kosovo. This involved him carrying dismembered children and soldiers across the mountains and “helping” them escape the ethnic cleansing that was pervasive at this time.

When the war formally ended in the 1990s, Alessandro became a decorated war hero, but the threats to his life persisted. He fled on foot to the UK, where he was detained in an immigration centre. This detention was remembered positively, as immigration officials had tried to “help” Alessandro with “everything” and directed him to an asylum hearing, where he was recognized as a refugee on the first day. Alessandro then married and found a job as a laborer in the construction industry, but the trauma he had experienced during the war limited his ability to work. He became depressed and suffered nightmares about “friends … being killed in the war.” He worried for the wives and children of the war dead left in “poverty” and starving while others became rich and powerful members of the political elite. These worries escalated when his brother suddenly became ill and asked Alessandro to help him find the money needed to pay for heart surgery from a private clinic, as no public health care was available to him in Albania.

Alessandro turned to a man – Denard – whom he knew from the building sites and who was acquainted with his brother back in their village. Denard lent Alessandro £2000 but made it clear Alessandro needed to repay the money immediately in case his brother did not survive. Knowing that Alessandro was “off work,” Denard asked Alessandro to do him a “favor” and go with a younger man who spoke no English by taxi to collect a “bag of clothes” from the back of a lorry parked 50 miles away. While denying he knew there were Albanian migrants in the back of this lorry, Alessandro explained that he was trying to “help people”, “men” “with no work” “to cross border” and “make some money”, as others had once helped him when he was a young refugee. Arresting him at the scene, the police discovered both men and women in the lorry’s cargo, one of whom claimed to have been “kidnapped”. Now in prison, Alessandro feared he would be deported, as the Home Office had begun to question whether he was Kosovan as opposed to Albanian, the village from where he originated having been contested territory. While in prison, Alessandro missed his wife, who was terminally ill and was thus unable to travel hundreds of miles from their home to visit him. He expressed no ill-will toward Denard, who continued to deny knowing there would be migrants stowed away on the lorry.

Grace

Grace was a Kenyan woman in her 40s, serving a custodial sentence of over ten years for trafficking for sexual exploitation. When Grace was 13 and living in Kenya, her mother moved to a nearby town to escape Grace’s abusive and ‘alcoholic’ father. Grace was left alone to look after her sisters for five years, “cooking, cleaning, going to the farm to look for food” whilst attending school. When Grace resisted taking on these responsibilities, her mother returned to “beat” her “so badly.”

At 22, Grace traveled from Kenya to Ireland “looking for a better life … to help a family” care for their children. Grace’s family saw this as an opportunity – telling her “Don’t forget us, help us, support us”. Grace nevertheless became entrapped in domestic servitude for three months. The couple paid for her flights to Ireland, where Grace was told she would go to college in exchange for “looking after the … children”. However, the college enrollment never materialized. Instead, the couple mistreated Grace, refused to pay her, and “confiscated” her passport.

Grace turned to a friend, Amanda, who suggested she could escape her predicament by working as a receptionist in a brothel where she might make “five thousand a month” and would also live. Without better options, Grace “had no choice” and earned enough to send money home to her family - £50 notes sent in envelopes – though she never disclosed to her mother how she came by them. Cajoled out of the receptionist role and into providing sexual services, Grace endured the work for a year before teaming up with a British man she had met there who invited her to run a brothel in partnership with him. Grace recruited some of her coworkers and advertised their services online, making enough money to buy a property. When Amanda tried to exact revenge on Grace by notifying the couple who had exploited her as a domestic worker, Grace became fearful she would be deported. To protect herself, she entered a marriage to a man 20 years her senior who paid £4000 to the Irish couple to retrieve her passport. Though Grace established a “legitimate business … a hair and beauty salon”, the brothel work proved too lucrative to close. She saved half a million pounds distributed between five different bank accounts before she was arrested for tax evasion, “lost everything” and was prosecuted for profiting from the sexual exploitation of others. At first, she was acquitted “because all the girls said they worked for themselves.” However, a re-trial secured her conviction when a woman who had worked at the brothel “for a few days” claimed Grace had forced her to have “sex for money.”

Discussion

We began this article by highlighting how Conservative discourse about modern slavery has shifted from a rescue narrative addressed to “ideal” victims – those who are “innocent” of any wrongdoing who become trapped by modern slavers – to one that demonizes fraudulent claimants in the modern slavery system who are trying to avoid deportation despite having committed serious crimes. We explained that there is little evidence of such abuse of the modern slavery system in the UK, which, in any case, provides few rights to survivors and is slow to recognize their claims. We also explained how the statutory defense against criminal culpability enshrined in section 45 of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act offers only the slimmest protections against criminalization for those victims of modern slavery who are charged with various forms of criminality, including immigration offenses that were previously treated as civil infractions.

While the anti-slavery sector has become increasingly critical of the British government for reneging on its commitments to survivors, we argue that it is no less important to recognize that many victims become involved in offending. This is because much trafficking for the purposes of exploitation involves implicating victims in immigration-related or criminal law violations that render them highly reluctant to seek protection from the police. The entrapment that constitutes modern slavery typically arises because victims believe they have no recourse to law and that contacting the police will compound their plights in some ways (Schwarz & Williams-Woods, 2022). This was self-evident in the cases of both Grace and Vicky, which were described above. Though Vicky’s involvement in county lines drug dealing began when she was still a child, struggling with grief, and groomed by an uncle who exploited her financial precarity, she was prosecuted as an adult. The section 45 defense was not mounted in her case, though it should have been considered not only because she was a minor when she began offending but also because she secured no educational qualifications and should have been considered legally within the state’s care until she was 21.

Grace, by contrast, escaped being trapped in domestic servitude by going to work in a brothel, later overcoming her exploitation, setting up her own sex work business and repurchasing her passport – though this also involved entering a marriage of convenience. Though now an adult, her journey into exploitation began when her parents abandoned her, leaving her to raise her younger siblings in Kenya. Sociologically, the connections between her exploitation and offending appeared self-evident, though Grace would have no defense in law because it would be impossible to demonstrate that she was “compelled” to open a brothel four years after being held in domestic servitude. The nexus between her victimization and offending was not immediate and straightforward. Likewise, Alessandro’s involvement in smuggling, though fleeting, could be traced back to his traumatization as a teenage soldier, the guilt he felt for those left behind after the Balkans war, and the role this played in him accruing a debt to a man who who lent him money for his brother’s operation back in Albania. Alessandro would have had no defense under section 45 – he was not compelled to collect the passengers from the lorry, and he both denied and rationalized doing so. But it was not difficult to appreciate why he felt obligated to help those he regarded as fellow “refugees,” nor how this sense of obligation rendered him persuadable to returning a favor to the man who had paid for the life-saving surgery his brother needed. Arguably, in all three cases there was reason to consider if the the non-punishment principles should have prevailed and to ask whether justice was actually served by processing people who had been multiply victimized and exploited predominantly as ‘modern slavery offenders’.

Conclusion

Anticipating such contingencies in criminal law is perhaps an impossible challenge. There are no easy amendments that can be made to the section 45 defense that can anticipate how, over the process of decades, exploited, vulnerable and traumatized people – from the UK as well as from the many crunch points of globalization – will become involved in supporting others to make illegal journeys, sell their own and other’s bodies, or trade in illicit substances to escape their destitution or come to terms with terrible and terrifying pasts. Indeed, the UK Government is seeking, through the Illegal Immigration Act 2023, to further diminish the protections afforded to victims of modern slavery who have entered the UK through irregular routes. What we must, therefore, do as academics and activists in the field of modern slavery is be much more vocal in public debate about how few victims fit the stereotypes of either dangerous foreign national offenders or ideal and helpless victims (Burland, 2019). We can also ask whether it is genuinely in the public interest to subject those who have been abused and exploited much more than they have been abusive and exploitative to very long prison sentences that further estrange them from family members worldwide who are typically economically dependent on them. This will entail being far clearer in public debate about the complex nexus of relationships – spread across generations and continents – that global counts of modern slavery victims allude to. It will also mean countering the narrative that the UK alone can somehow lead the world in beating modern slavery while simultaneously closing its eyes and ears to the acute inequalities and insecurities that generate so much of the immigration its political leaders are keen to deem “illegal”.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/R004471/1) in funding the study for which the interview material presented in this article was collected. They are also grateful to Sarah Devaney, Stephen Knight, Rudolph Spurling and Phillipa Roberts for their critical feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Notes

¹ The Modern Slavery Act (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted) applied only to the jurisdiction of England and Wales, which is our focus in this article. The Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015 did not include a statutory defense.

² The policy was deemed unlawful by the UK’s Supreme on 15th November 2023, which noted that there were ‘substantial grounds for believing that asylum seekers would face a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement to their country of origin if they were removed to Rwanda’. (R (AAA (Syria) and others) v Secretary of State for the Home Department (UNHCR intervening) [2023] UKSC 42). This prompted Braverman’s successor, James Cleverly, to bring forward the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in January 2024 to require ‘every decision-maker’ in the UK to ‘conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country’.

³ The U.K. Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) held that the non-punishment provision section 45 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 placed the evidential burden on the defendant who is claiming that their experience of modern slavery victimization compelled them to break the law. It stated that “it is for a defendant to raise the evidential burden that she has been subjected to trafficking, slavery or servitude.” However, once raised the “burden of proof” falls to the prosecution to disprove such a claim to the criminal standard,” i.e., “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It requires objective evidence of compulsion that is directly and causally related to the trafficking (Heys, 2023, p. 462).

⁴ Court of Appeal Judgments

[2020] EWCA Crim 1408.

⁵ [2020] EWCA Crim 1408 [69].

⁶ [2022] EWCA Crim 1326.

⁷ [2022] EWCA Crim 1326 [48].

⁸ [2022] EWCA Crim 1326 [55].

⁹ [2022] EWCA Crim 1326 [51].

¹⁰ [2021] EWCA Crim 731.

¹¹ [2021] EWCA Crim 731 [54].

¹² [2021] EWCA Crim 731 [74].

¹³ [2021] EWCA Crim 731 [64].

European Court of Human Rights Judgments.

¹⁴ [ECtHR] 16^th February 2021, V.C.L. AND A.N. v. THE UNITED KINGDOM, Applications nos. 77587/12 and 74,603/12