Policy Library

Summary:

Human trafficking is the recruitment and movement of people by means such as violent force, fraud, coercion or deception, or abuse of their vulnerability with the aim of exploiting them. It is modern slavery. Despite Wilberforce’s campaign in the UK a little over 200 years ago, we face the reality that there are still slaves in our sophisticated society today. The abolitionist, Ralph Waldo Emerson said: ‘If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own’. The chains may no longer be visible, but psychological ones still hold many in slavery in the UK today.