The National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is the primary instrument established by the government of the United Kingdom for identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking. It has been in operation for over a decade now, and a great deal of energy has been expended trying to improve its design and operation. Despite these ongoing efforts various problems continue to be documented, including repeated failures to refer potential victims and a lack of effective support for victims who have been identified.
One of the main indicators used by the NRM to identify victims of trafficking is exploitation, which is coded by type, for example, ‘sexual exploitation’. In this piece I am chiefly interested in cases where the type of exploitation is coded as ‘unknown’, or as ‘unknown exploitation’. These cases comprised 10% of the 35,077 referrals to the NRM between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2019, which makes this the third most common recorded type of exploitation found in official statistics after ‘sexual exploitation’ and ‘labour exploitation’. During the first nine months of 2020 around 13% of all NRM referrals were recorded as ‘not recorded or unknown’.
There has been little acknowledgement of the scale of these referrals or attempts to explain them.
