Human Trafficking: Prosecutions

(asked on 30th October 2020) - View Source

Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, how many prosecutions for offences against children there have been for human trafficking under the Modern Slavery Act 2015 in each year since its enactment.


Answered by
Michael Ellis Portrait
Michael Ellis
This question was answered on 4th November 2020

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) maintains a central record of the number of offences in which a prosecution commenced, including offences charged by way of the Modern Slavery Act 2015. This data may be further disaggregated by the child abuse case monitoring flag. The CPS definition of child abuse covers any case where the victim was under 18 years of age at the time of the offence and includes allegations or crimes perpetrated by both adults and under 18s.

Since the Act came into force and up to the end of March 2020, the number of Modern Slavery Act offences flagged as child abuse is as follows:

2015-2016

2016-2017

2017-2018

2018-2019

2019-2020

Modern Slavery Act 2015 { 1 }

0

0

0

3

0

Modern Slavery Act 2015 { 2 }

1

21

26

5

30

Data Source: CPS Management Information System

There is no indication of the number of individual defendants prosecuted for these offences or the final outcome of the prosecution proceeding or if the charged offence was the substantive charge at the time of finalisation. It is often the case that defendants will be prosecuted for more than one offence in the same set of proceedings.

It is not possible to separately report the nature of, or type of exploitation carried out on victims of modern slavery or trafficking offences other than by manually examining case files at disproportionate cost.

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