Resource

Survivors of human trafficking are victims of serious crime and grave human rights abuses. Yet in the United Kingdom many survivors - particularly non-British nationals - are instead treated as offenders. Rather than receiving protection, they are frequently arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, detained under immigration powers and excluded from support because of offences that are directly linked to their trafficking and exploitation. Helen Bamber Foundation and Asylum Aid’s new report, ‘When the law changes sides’, sets out how this happens, why it keeps happening, and what needs to change.

Punished for their own exploitation

Trafficking takes many forms, including sexual exploitation, forced labour, domestic servitude and being forced into criminal activities such as growing cannabis. In 2025, the National Referral Mechanism, the UK framework to identify and support survivors of human trafficking, received over 23,000 referrals of potential victims. A significant proportion of these cases involved people exploited through criminal activity, particularly among men and boys.

For many survivors of human trafficking, exploitation does not end when they are identified. Too often, they are arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for offences they were forced or coerced into committing as part of their exploitation. This can include cultivating cannabis under death threat, carrying false documents to escape an exploiter or carrying out minor theft or fraud to survive or escape.

International law recognises that people who have been trafficked should not be punished for acts they had little or no choice but to commit. The "non-punishment principle", set out in Article 26 of the Council of Europe's Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, and reflected in the UK's own section 45 defence in the Modern Slavery Act 2015, acknowledges that survivors often act in desperation with no real choice over their actions.

In practice, that protection frequently fails. Many survivors are never recognised as having been trafficked before they enter the criminal justice system. Police, prosecutors and lawyers are often not trained to recognise the signs of trafficking, and as a result many survivors plead guilty before their exploitation is ever identified. Survivors themselves may be too frightened, ashamed or traumatised to disclose what has happened to them, particularly when an exploiter has exercised prolonged control or manipulation. The section 45 defence itself sets a high bar and excludes a long list of offences, and no data is even collected on how often it's actually used.

Our report tells the stories of survivors we have supported who have lived through these systemic failures. It includes a woman imprisoned for using a false passport to escape sexual exploitation, whose conviction was only quashed years later and a woman held in immigration detention for over two years after being convicted for crimes committed under coercion, among others. Time and again, it took exceptional legal representation to secure justice, support that is beyond the reach of many survivors.

Laws that worsen systemic failures

Rather than fixing these failures, recent legislation has worsened them. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 created new offences around irregular arrival, and the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 went further, criminalising conduct that can capture people who were forced into crossing borders by their traffickers.

Most concerning is the Public Order Disqualification (POD), a power that can deny  confirmed or potential trafficking survivors of all  vital support through the National Referral Mechanism, including safe accommodation, financial help, recovery services and leave to remain in the UK, on "public order" grounds, including for convictions that were themselves a result of their trafficking. Between January 2023 and December 2025, 763 PODs were issued, and well over half involved some element of criminal exploitation. The High Court has already found the Home Office's approach to these decisions unlawful. Despite this, the Illegal Migration Act 2023 and the government's new Immigration and Asylum Bill would go further still. Instead of considering each case individually, many more survivors could be automatically excluded from support, regardless of how long their sentence was, with almost no chance of being exempted.

What needs to change

Survivors’ recovery and the fight against human trafficking depend on  ensuring that victims  are identified and protected as early as possible. Criminalising survivors discourages people from coming forward, weakens prosecutions against the traffickers who are actually responsible, and pushes survivors back into the exact conditions of poverty and insecurity that made them vulnerable in the first place.

Among other recommendations to improve support for survivors, we are calling on the government to:

• Repeal section 63 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and section 29 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and drop the public order disqualification measures from the Immigration and Asylum Bill.
• Publish data on how the section 45 defence is actually used.
• Improve training for police, prosecutors and judges on recognising trafficking indicators.

Read the full report, including all case studies and recommendations, by clicking the arrow below.