Responding to exploitation involves raising awareness, preventing harm, disrupting perpetrators, and providing support to those experiencing or recovering from harm.

Effective responses to exploitation require careful attention to the complexities of a continually developing area of practice. Practical considerations around key areas of exploitation are provided. Select the quick links to explore key areas:

Reflective questions for each key area encourage readers to stimulate conversation and to consider opportunities to strengthen their own practice responses.

Key areas

Identifying exploitation

Identification of exploitation operates at several levels: 

• The adult experiencing or recovering from exploitation: Deception, manipulation, stigma, threats and/or shame may limit individuals’ ability to recognise or acknowledge their situation as exploitative. Supporting identification at the individual level is key to enabling recognition more widely.

• Practitioners providing support: Practitioners can improve identification by applying curiosity where there may be ambiguity around exploitation. Reflective supervision provides valuable opportunities for critical thinking and analysis.

• Partner services and departments: Knowledge and understanding about the nature of adult exploitation is continually developing. Reciprocal training between teams can enable partners in services such as housing, social care and community safety to better collaborate around potential indicators.

• Neighbourhoods and communities: Listening to communities’ concerns, sharing information about the signs of exploitation and providing accessible reporting mechanisms support better recognition of local issues. The Clewer Initiative provides useful information on identifying modern slavery and raising awareness locally.

Language and labelling

The language we use often reflects values held, consciously or unconsciously. Terminology used around exploitation can shape how people’s circumstances are understood and responded to.

It is essential that language and non-verbal communication are non-blaming of the individual. The words we use can locate responsibility for abuse with the victim, rather than the perpetrator. Blaming the individual misrepresents the reality of exploitation and could also influence any offers of care and support made.

Some practical examples are below:

• A person described as making ‘unwise choices’ may be experiencing unseen coercion.

• Somebody described as a ‘young offender’ may be being criminally exploited.

• A person described as ‘working illegally’ may be unable to escape forced labour due to debt bondage and hostile immigration policies.

• Someone described as ‘consenting’ to an exploitative situation may have very limited options and a need to manage other risks (such as destitution and threats of violence)

It is important to regularly review the language used by services, and ask people accessing those services what words they are most comfortable with. A person-centred and relational approach to language is essential.

Safeguarding

Analysis of Safeguarding Adults Reviews highlights the need for specific and systemic safeguarding responses for adults experiencing exploitation. Although adult exploitation is not covered in detail within current Care and Support Statutory Guidance, learning from research and practice can inform service responses. Principles of Making Safeguarding Personal, Transitional Safeguarding and Contextual Safeguarding may offer useful insights.

The statutory context:

• Services can be constrained where the legislative framework does not fully cover the ways in which exploitation is encountered. Where an individual’s apparent level of need does not meet the standard threshold for statutory intervention, this can prevent ‘the in-depth review needed to uncover hidden exploitation’.
• It is important to acknowledge the potential for unidentified victims, especially those who do not meet stereotypical expectations of victimhood.
• Leaders can assist by recognising the limitations of current legislative and statutory provisions, and supporting the use of discretionary or alternative powers to facilitate care and support.
• Leaders might also consider ensuring support is available for those adults who do not meet the threshold for social care or statutory safeguarding, but who are still at risk of exploitation. This aligns with the safeguarding principle of prevention.
• Recent analysis of safeguarding adult reviews emphasizes the importance of ensuring that working environments and cultures are receptive to the development of best practice.

Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP):

MSP’s person-centred approach is well-suited to the nuanced practice required around exploitation. The successful implementation of MSP requires a whole system approach across and within organisations. It is essential for leaders to promote values and cultures which support this way of working.

Implementing MSP around exploitation might involve:

• Ensuring that practitioners have the time required to explore how risk and safety operate for each individual, recognising the context in which people’s decisions are made and collaborating with them in developing their safeguarding options.
• Ensuring that participation in safeguarding does not create unintended consequences for individuals (for example, concerns about being reported to other authorities such as the police, home office or housing). Being proactive in addressing this possibility.
• Recognising barriers which may deter people from accessing support (such as threats, misinformation and distrust. Proactively overcoming such barriers.
• Using reflective supervision to support practitioners’ learning and wellbeing when working with complex and high levels of risk.

Transitional Safeguarding:

Transitional safeguarding reminds us that the exploitation of young people often spans their journey from childhood to adulthood. Despite social and legal binaries around these life stages, adolescent experiences are related to an ongoing process of development and maturation.

Applying a transitional approach might include:

• Challenging siloed working and binary thinking/language to promote a lifecourse approach to safeguarding.
• Ensuring that young people’s views and expertise inform the development and implementation of safeguarding approaches to exploitation.
• Ensuring high quality learning and development opportunities are available, including shared learning between children’s and adults’ services.
• For leaders, ensuring transition to adulthood is a wider service priority, helping leadership peers to see their role in making the vision a reality.
• Highlighting the importance of boundary-spanning leadership in enabling system change.

Further reading

• • Bridging the Gap: Transitional Safeguarding and the role of social work with adults – Knowledge Briefing.
  • Transitional safeguarding - adolescence to adulthood: Strategic Briefing.
  • Tackling Child Exploitation: Multi-agency Practice Principles for responding to child exploitation and extra-familial harm.

Contextual Safeguarding:

Contextual Safeguarding is an approach to child exploitation developed by Professor Carlene Firmin and her team at Durham University. It offers a useful lens through which to consider adult exploitation. Contextual Safeguarding considers the wider social influences shaping an individual’s safety and risk, offering deeper insights around the social contexts and hierarchies through which exploitation occurs.

Contextual Safeguarding encourages us to think beyond individual ‘vulnerabilities’, to identify and understand the spaces in which harm is repeatedly caused. This creates opportunities to expand protection for a wider group. The approach may be applicable to adult exploitation and could help inform responses. For example:

• Identifying high risk locations (such as car washes, nail bars and takeaway shops). Ensuring information about exploitation is available in these areas, in a range of languages.
• Considering sites where people may be targeted due to their circumstances, such as food banks, homelessness services or drug and alcohol support services.
• Sharing multi-agency intelligence and facilitating engagement with local communities.
• Understanding and targeting the 'social conditions' of harm’, rather than simply focusing on the actions of an individual.
• Supporting professionals to identify and understand system challenges and structural issues that impact safeguarding, including opportunities to explore multi-agency relationships and differences in approaches.

Contextual safeguarding also thinks about contextual safety in people’s lives – and the role of communities in strengthening this.

Safety and trauma

Services which feel physically and psychologically safe are essential, particularly following the trauma of exploitation and potentially feeling blamed for these experiences. Some considerations for developing trauma-informed services and systems include:

• Recognising how accessing statutory services might be experienced as risky or retraumatising for people who have been exploited.
• Enabling trusting relationships with practitioners, through the allocation of time, flexibility and resources (such as suitably qualified interpreters) to respond to individuals’ needs.
• Creating safe physical environments, for example considering building locations and layouts, security measures and information available.
• Ensuring that organisational processes and procedures within and across services do not replicate harmful experiences or retraumatise people.
• Engaging protective structures within local communities, which complement the services offered by statutory agencies.
• Supporting practitioners with their exposure to trauma and risk, in order to protect and sustain their wellbeing and resilience.

Further reading

• • Tackling Child Exploitation: Recognise and respond to trauma.

Housing

The need for safe, secure and suitable housing is critical for both escaping and remaining free from exploitation. This might be supported by:

• Highlighting links between exploitation and homelessness, particularly in the context of multiple disadvantages or exclusions.
• Listening to survivors of exploitation about their individual needs and preferences around accommodation and supporting them to achieve this.
• Leaders may be able to initiate reciprocal agreements with other local authorities to create opportunities for survivors’ relocation in safe areas.
• Leaders can promote collaboration between housing, social care and criminal justice services to ensure systems are in place for transitions from custody - to reduce the likelihood of homelessness, re-exploitation or re-trafficking.
• Commissioners might consider models such as Housing First, which have been effective for people whose homelessness is compounded by trauma and interconnected difficulties. This includes many survivors of modern slavery.

Further reading

• • Radical safeguarding toolkit for homelessness.

Multi-agency working

Adult exploitation is a key area for partnership working, particularly around safeguarding. Adults experiencing exploitation may be eligible for support from several services, and Care Act 2014 responsibilities around partnership and cooperation are likely to be engaged.

For example, the Local Government Association (LGA) highlights that modern slavery intersects with numerous council services and that different officers might encounter it in their work. This provides potential opportunities for increased identification and collaboration.

Drawing upon a range of specialisms can help improve the support offered to individuals. It can also protect the remit of social care practitioners. Sharing responsibility around risk helps to ensure that no individual practitioner or service holds this unduly.

Practical steps might include:

• Identifying and collaborating with other statutory services which are supporting (or have a duty to support) individuals.
• Frameworks such as the Slavery Exploitation Risk Assessment Conference (SERAC) model could help formalise partnership working.
• Recognising where individuals may experience tension or risk around sharing information and multi-agency working, particularly if engagement around one issue might have consequences for another.
• Supporting practitioners around sharing information and partnership working.
• Building relationships with voluntary and community services which offer additional expertise, for example around culture and faith, mental health and peer support.
• Developing a community of practice to support collaborative local efforts and learning.
• Involving adults with experience of exploitation in the multi-agency context, to help inform cohesive and holistic local support.

Cultural humility and anti-racist practice

Structural racism and inequalities, for example around poverty and migration can exacerbate people’s exposure to exploitation and access to support. Research has also highlighted how discrimination and bias can impact social care and safeguarding services. For example, Black children and young adults at risk of exploitation have at times been over-represented yet under-supported and over-policed yet under-protected by services.

Anti-racist practice is required at all levels of responding to exploitation. Cultural humility is also necessary to develop respectful understandings of people’s unique experiences, cultural contexts and what they would like from support services.

Considerations to support this include:

• Understanding how global inequalities, national policies, systemic barriers and professional biases can expose people to increased risk whilst restricting their access to safety. Identifying and addressing where such inequalities manifest locally.
• Recognising and taking active steps to address instances where racism has been “built into systems, organisations and processes” of the public sector and reconstructs the “flawed foundations” of such systems.
• Exploring under- or over- representation of different demographic groups (both in terms of people drawing upon support and the workforce). Challenging biases which underpin this. Using data to inform local strategies to improve equity.
• Recognising and amplifying the voices of people with lived experience of exploitation and racism or marginalisation, in order to shape support services and systems.
• Drawing upon the expertise of relevant cultural groups to support learning and development.
• Enabling reflective supervision which actively considers discrimination and inequality in relation to exploitation and safeguarding.
• Recognising the potential impact of racism on Black and Global Majority staff members in this context.

Further reading

• • Tackling Child Exploitation: Recognise and challenge inequalities, exclusion and discrimination.
  • Anti-racist systems leadership to address systemic racism: Strategic Briefing