Academic and policy responses to the problem of human trafficking and modern slavery have largely failed to help frontline professionals in identifying potential victims. This is due to flawed assumptions about the people that are targeted, the perpetrators and the processes of the exploitation. Consequently, understanding of the problem to date has been reductive, and current interventions to prevent exploitation, pursue traffickers and the beneficiaries of modern slavery and support victims towards safety and recovery, are limited (Barlow, 2022; Murphy et al, 2022). Much of the available literature in the field has focused on the trafficking of women and girls. Existing research has also tended to focus upon characteristics of victims and the impact of trafficking and exploitation upon the physical and mental health of victims. This victim-centred attention in the research has contributed little other than to describe the nature and scope of this form of abuse.

Most attention has been paid to the characteristics of those targeted for exploitation and where they have come from, so that knowledge of traffickers and exploiters is often cited as a gap in our understanding of these problems (Rudd, 2017). In fact, the gap is not so much a lack of knowledge or understanding of traffickers, but rather the aetiology and dynamics of trafficking and exploitation as a result of the interactions between targeted victim, perpetrator and their shared environments.

Relevance of this model and research

Current responses to the problem of human trafficking and modern slavery are predicated upon identification, investigation and prosecution, and so appear to be rooted in criminal justice approaches to the abuse and exploitation of vulnerable groups (Moore, 1995). The criminal justice approach emphasises the identification of a crime, it views the motivations of the criminal as an important cause of the crime and responds to this through the imposition of sanctions. As such it is a largely reactive approach.

By contrast, safeguarding models in health and social care tend to situate the problem with the victim and their family, and adopt an alternative approach that emphasises prevention through the identification and reduction of ‘risk factors’, such as vulnerability and adversity, a target-hardening approach that emphasises building a protective environment and strengthening resilience.