As an embattled Labour government faces growing pressure to deliver on its promises in the wake of last week’s elections, victims and survivors of modern slavery are urging MPs to act on a long-standing injustice: the barriers that prevent trafficking survivors from rebuilding their lives.
MPs are being asked to sign a pledge to introduce law changes to protect survivors’ rights to mental health, legal, housing and other forms of support, as part of a campaign backed by anti-slavery and migrant rights organisations, including After Exploitation, Anti-Slavery International, and International Justice Mission.
The campaign comes in the same week the Home Office made it harder for survivors to access support by updating government guidance in a manner that could penalise those who do not disclose their exploitation quickly enough.
Data obtained by anti-trafficking NGO After Exploitation, and shared exclusively with openDemocracy, reveals that just 4% of adult trafficking victims were able to access ring-fenced mental health support in 2024, the most recent year for which data is available.
In theory, a survivor should be able to access a range of support after receiving a “reasonable grounds” decision recognising that they are a “potential victim” of modern slavery under the National Referral Mechanism, the UK’s official system for identifying victims of modern slavery.
But the After Exploitation data shows that only 515 adult survivors were able to access the mental health support following an experience of exploitation. In the same time period, there were 23,411 referrals to the NRM, including children.
Sian Norris
Thousands have struggled to get the help they need since the Conservative government raised the evidential threshold for victims to prove their exploitation.
Almost 4,600 survivors were deemed “ineligible” for any support, including safe housing, between July 2024 and June 2025, according to the accounts of the Home Office’s main contractor for modern slavery services, which were obtained by After Exploitation.
Paris* was exploited in domestic servitude for more than a decade and urgently needed mental health support after coming forward. Such support, she said, “is the most important thing.”
“Every survivor needs someone to talk to because, often, your mind is not stable,” she explained. “Traffickers coerce and manipulate, but professional mental health help allows survivors to understand how their mind has been polluted by the trafficker.
“With the right help, survivors finally have a space to know who they are as a person, and avoid falling into patterns of repeat exploitation or other kinds of abusive relationships.”
Yet for Paris, and thousands more like her, this much-needed support simply was not there.
“The Home Office initially claimed I ‘did not meet the definition’ of human trafficking,” Paris said. “After years trying to be believed, countless appeals and documents, mental health assessments and questioning, I was finally recognised as a victim of modern slavery.”
For Paris, winning this recognition “would have been impossible” without a lawyer. Yet, she said, “survivors do not get a lawyer automatically. Even now, when I talk to friends from the safehouse, we can’t exactly understand how I qualified for legal advice, and they didn’t.”
A 2023 survey found that 90% of caseworkers struggled to secure legal support for survivors who need it.
The campaign is calling for the reversal of legislative changes in the Nationalities and Borders Act, including the introduction of a higher evidence bar, which results in more survivors facing disbelief.
Other restrictions on support in the Nationalities and Borders Act include the ‘Public Order Disqualification’, in which survivors who have been sentenced to more than 12 months in prison can be refused recognition and help, even if their imprisonment was for an offence linked to their exploitation and trafficking, such as being forced to carry drugs.
Now, charities such as the Helen Bamber Foundation have expressed concern about the latest updates to government guidance, which suggest survivors will now be penalised for the “late” disclosure of their exploitation. . Such a rule fails to account for how victims can struggle to identify or talk about the harms committed against them due to trauma.
Migrant survivors of modern slavery face additional barriers, often fearing coming forward due to immigration rules that leave them vulnerable to immigration detention and deportation.
The campaign is therefore calling for a firewall to protect migrant survivors, with Kate Roberts, the head of policy at Focus on Labour Exploitation, stating: “It’s vital that survivors are able to securely report exploitation, knowing they will be treated as a victim, and supported to access their entitlements, whatever their immigration status.”
The campaign comes after months of headlines over the government’s decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as US ambassador despite his links to the American billionaire paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked and abused thousands of women and girls over decades.
While the news has focused on Westminster politics and flawed decision-making in Whitehall, little has been said about the rights of current and historic trafficking victims, and how the current system fails to recognise and protect people who have endured criminal, sexual and labour exploitation here in the UK.
Campaigners believe this must change.
