How big is slavery in the UK?

Slavery in the UK: it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Surely not in the developed world, in the 21st Century!

Let’s look at some of the facts:

• UNICEF estimates that there are currently around 5,000 children being exploited commercially as sex workers in the UK, most of them trafficked into the UK, of whom 75% are girls.
• A 2004 study of the sex industry in London by the Poppy Project found that 85% of women working off-streets had been trafficked into prostitution in the UK – ten years earlier, the figure had been nearer 10%.
• The International Labour Organization estimates that the worldwide traffic in human beings is worth at least US$32 billion annually, with just under half of that (around US$15.5 billion) obtained from the traffic of people to industrialised countries (which includes the UK).
• There are no reliable estimates for the number of trafficked people in the UK. This is a problem acknowledged by both the police and the Home Office.

Thanks to Joseph Rowntree Foundation for their report Contemporary Slavery in the UK, in which many of the facts here are discussed in detail.

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