There were two sexual trafficking offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2017/18, compared with seven in 2016/17. This type of crime cateogry has been discontinued, with offences related to sexual trafficking now included with the "modern slavery" crime offence.

Context

Human trafficking is thought to be one of the fastest-growing activities of trans-national criminal organizations. It is defined as the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labour, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. Human trafficking is condemned as a violation of human rights by international conventions. (Source: Wikipedia)

The National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is a framework for identifying victims of human trafficking and ensuring they receive the appropriate protection and support. The NRM is also the mechanism through which the UKHTC collects data about victims. This information contributes to building a clearer picture about the scope of human trafficking in the UK.

The NRM was introduced in 2009 to meet the UK’s obligations under the Council of European Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. At the core of every country’s NRM is the process of locating and identifying potential victims of trafficking.

Content

For years 2013 to 2016, the following tables are available:

• YEAR_competent_authority.csv

• YEAR_country_of_referral.csv

• YEAR_exploitation_type.csv

• YEAR_referrals_adult.csv

• YEAR_referrals_all.csv

• YEAR_referrals_minor.csv

• YEAR_referring_agency.csv

For 2015 to 2016, there is an additional table:

• YEAR_decision_data.csv

Acknowledgements

Data obtained from UK National Crime Agency, National Referral Mechanism Statistics end of year summary reports (2013 - 2016). Human Trafficking data reports are provided under Publications section of the UK National Crime Agency website. Data tables were extracted from pdf reports with Tabula.

Licensed under Open Government License

Photo by Pedro Gabriel Miziara on Unsplash

The National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is a framework for identifying victims of human trafficking and ensuring they receive the appropriate protection and support. The NRM is also the mechanism through which the UKHTC collects data about victims. This information contributes to building a clearer picture about the scope of human trafficking in the UK. The NRM was introduced in 2009 to meet the UK’s obligations under the Council of European Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings. At the core of every country’s NRM is the process of locating and identifying “potential victims of trafficking” (PVoT). The NRM grants a minimum 45-day reflection and recovery period for victims of human trafficking. Trained case owners decide whether individuals referred to them should be considered to be victims of trafficking according to the definition in the Council of Europe Convention.

Modern slavery is less overt than historical state-sanctioned slavery because psychological abuse is typically used to recruit and then control victims. The recent UK Draft Modern Slavery Bill, and current UK government anti-slavery strategy relies heavily on a shared understanding and public cooperation to tackle this crime. Yet, UK research investigating public understanding of modern slavery is elusive. We report community survey data from 682 residents of the Midlands of England, where modern slavery is known to occur, concerning their understanding of nonphysical coercion and human trafficking (one particular form of modern slavery). Analysis of quantitative data and themed categorization of qualitative data revealed a mismatch between theoretical frameworks and understanding of psychological coercion, and misconceptions concerning the nature of human trafficking. Many respondents did not understand psychological coercion, believed that human trafficking did not affect them, and confused trafficking with immigration. The public are one of the most influential interest groups, but only if well informed and motivated towards positive action. Our findings suggest the need for strategically targeted public knowledge exchange concerning this crime.

Modern slavery is a term that includes any form of human trafficking, slavery, servitude or forced labour, as set out in the Modern Slavery Act 2015. Potential victims of modern slavery in the UK that come to the attention of authorised ‘First Responder’ organisations are referred to the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).

Adults (aged 18 or above) must consent to being referred to the NRM, whilst children under the age of 18 need not consent to being referred. As specified in section 52 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, public authorities in England and Wales have a statutory duty to notify the Home Office when they come across potential victims of modern slavery ('Duty to Notify' (DtN)). This duty is discharged by either referring a child or consenting adult potential victim into the NRM, or by notifying the Home Office via the DtN process if an adult victim does not consent to enter the NRM.

The Home Office publishes quarterly statistical bulletins and aggregated data breakdowns on the "https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-referral-mechanism-statistics" target="_blank"> National Referral Mechanism webpage on the GOV.UK website regarding the number of potential victims referred each quarter. To allow stakeholders and first responders more flexibility in analysing this data for their own strategic and operational planning, the disaggregated, pseudonymised dataset used to create the aggregated published data is also available from the UK Data Service as 'safeguarded' data. (The UKDS data are available in SPSS, Stata, tab-delimited text and CSV formats.)

Latest edition information

For the 18th edition (November 2025), the data file was amended to include Quarter 3 2025 cases, and the Data Notes documentation file was also updated.

This publication can be found in the Ad Hoc Surveys section of the Department of Justice website.

This is a mixed-methods collection.

The project collected representative data across Russian regions on attitudes to human trafficking. Since the collapse of the Soviet state, thousands of Russian citizens have been trafficked out of the country as exploited labour, sex slaves, domestic labour, and beggars. This project explored beliefs concerning the origins, nature and extent of human trafficking, and attitudes on what the Russian government should do to address the problem. It captured attitudes on how the state should aid the trafficked and the perceived efficacy of different institutions in dealing with trafficking. It also sought responses on how families should help or not help the trafficked; beliefs on the place of a woman in society, and attitudes towards prostitution.

The data were collected through questions included in a nationwide public opinion poll, and through two focus groups conducted in Moscow (n=12) and Vladimir (n=8). The focus group transcripts are in Russian. English translations of the questionnaire and focus group schedule are included in the user guide.

Percentage responses and means and SDs, in rank order for knowledge of psychologically coercive behaviours (N = 682).

Categories (and verbal sub-categories) with exemplar quotes for understanding of psychological coercion (N = 682).

Percentage responses and means and SDs in rank order for knowledge of drivers of human trafficking (N = 615).

The first set of data is secondary data on child exploitation in Zimbabwe that the project collected from the NGO partner, CLZ. The data was collected through a 24 hour helpline and is in the form of summaries of the conversations held with the individuals who called CLZ to report cases of child abuse and exploitation.

The second set of data is secondary data that we collected from our NGO partner organisation, LJI. This is based on the organisation’s human trafficking interception work in Zimbabwe, which involves placing monitors at strategic transit points to identify and stop trafficking as it occurs.

This is an exploratory project which involves analysis of secondary analysis of NGO data on human trafficking in order to map the human trafficking phenomenon in Zimbabwe. It is a collaboration with the Bindura University of Science Education and working in partnership with one local NGO, Childline; one International NGO, Love Justice International and one UN Migration Agency, The International Organization for Migration – Zimbabwe.

According to a survey conducted in October 2024 in the United Kingdom, women were more worried than men about online harms in relation to extremism, human trafficking, suicide, female genital mutilation, and hateful content than their male counterparts. Overall, extremism was the most concerning online harm according to women.

The data herein represent the raw interview data with over 100 sex workers in Rio interviewed between 2016 and 2018. Data collection took place in conjunction with the Prostitution Policy Watch [Observatório da Prostituição], an extension project of the Metropolitan Ethnographic Lab (LeMetro/IFCS) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro which draws together an (inter)national team comprised of allies in academia (e.g. the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Fluminense Federal University, the Gender Studies Centre at the State University of Campinas, the Mailman School of Public Health and Faculty of Law at Columbia University, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Williams College) and the broader public/activist sphere (Davida: Prostitution, Civil Rights, and Health, ABIA: Brazilian Interdisciplinary Association of AIDS, and the Brazilian Network of Prostitutes). The data allowed purchase on the manner in which the female sex worker adapted to the entrepreneurial essence of the Olympic event to capitalize on the influx of tourism in an otherwise bleak economic moment.

Research on Olympic cities and those hosting sport mega events has tended to address national identity-making, media representation (often with respect to the narratives of city/nation promoting tourism and investment), and associated landscapes of urban regeneration/gentrification. There has been less academic emphasis on the informal economies that coalesce around such events, with even less of a focus on the relationship between sporting events and urban sexual landscapes. Media speculation often points to heightened demand for sexual services around Sport Mega Events (SMEs), especially in relation to the global trafficking of sex workers. Indeed, these reports are often used to justify policing and other social control measures and rationalise city 'cleansing', displacing sex work from the spaces which become visible to international audiences in the context of a major sporting event. At the same time, event-related construction and road closure can also disrupt established spaces of sex work and street prostitution. In Brazil, and despite the Government actively supporting legalised prostitution, such challenges raise a number of concerns surrounding eviction, loss of community support, loss of worker rights, stigmatization, and the displacement of sexual commerce from the centre to the margins (raising concerns over safety, criminal control, and violence). However, there exists a dearth of relevant scientific data on the sexual landscapes associated with the Olympics or more widely on the impact of large-scale sporting events on vulnerable sex working populations (an omission noted by Deering et al., 2012; Matheson and Finkel, 2014). This project will provide this data by completing the first funded academic study on the impact of the Olympics on sex workers.

Commander is an endosome associated sixteen protein assembly that associates with the sorting nexin 17 (SNX17) cargo adaptor to regulate cell surface recycling of internalised integral membrane proteins including integrins and lipoprotein receptors. Mutations in Commander are causative for Ritscher-Schinzel syndrome (RSS), a multiorgan developmental disease associated with a core triad of cerebellar-cardiac-craniofacial malformation. Here, using unbiased proteomics and computational modelling, we identify leucine rich melanocyte differentiation associated (LRMDA) as a novel Commander binding protein. Using recombinant protein reconstitution, we show that LRMDA simultaneously associates with Commander and active RAB32, and, by revealing that LRMDA and SNX17 share a common mechanism of Commander association, establish the mutually exclusive nature of RAB32-LRMDA-Commander and SNX17-Commander assemblies. From functional analysis in human melanocytes, we establish an essential role for RAB32-LRMDA-Commander in melanosome biogenesis and pigmentation and reveal a distinct functional role for SNX17-Commander in this organelle biogenesis pathway. We reveal how LRMDA mutations, causative for oculocutaneous albinism type 7 (OCA7), a hypopigmentation disorder accompanied by poor visual acuity, uncouple RAB32 and Commander binding thereby establishing the mechanistic basis of this disease. Our discovery and characterisation of this alternative Commander assembly establishes an unrecognised plasticity of Commander function within a highly complex organelle biogenesis pathway. This extends Commander function beyond the confines of SNX17-mediated cell surface recycling into RAB32-family mediated biogenesis of lysosome-related organelles and, potentially, other RAB32 regulated pathways including host-pathogen defence mechanisms. Our work also extends the breath of Commander pathway dysfunction for human disease.

Since 2014, Eurostat and the UNODC have launched a joint annual data collection on crime and criminal justice statistics, using the UN crime trends questionnaire and complementary Eurostat requests

for specific areas of interest to the European Commission. The data and metadata are collected from National Statistical Institutes or other relevant authorities (mainly police and justice departments) in each EU Member State, EFTA country and EU potential members. On the Eurostat website, data are available for 41 jurisdictions since 2008 until 2018 data and for 38 jurisdictions since 2019 data (EU-27, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Turkey, Kosovo(1)), having drop the data for the United Kingdom separately owing to three separate jurisdictions England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland.

This joint data collection and other data collections carried out by Eurostat allows to gather information on:

• police-recorded offences by type of crime
• police-recorded offences by NUTS3 region
• intentional homicide and sexual violence victims and perpetrators (suspected, prosecuted, convicted) by sex
• intentional homicide victims by age, sex, and relationship to the offender
• intentional homicide victims and offences in largest cities
• offenders by justice legal status (suspected, prosecuted, convicted), age, sex, and citizenship
• persons brought before criminal courts by legal status (convicted persons/acquitted)
• personnel by institution (police, courts, and prisons) by sex
• legal cases in first instance courts by type and stage
• prisoners by age, sex, citizenship, and status of the trial process
• prison capacity and occupancy
• people involved in human trafficking by legal status (victims, suspected and convicted traffickers) and victims of human trafficking by all forms of exploitation and citizenship

Where available, data are broken down by sex, age groups (adults/juveniles), country of citizenship (foreigners or nationals) and other relevant variables. National data are available and for intentional homicide offences, city level data (largest cities) are available for some countries. Regional data at NUTS3 level are also available for some police-recorded offences.

Some historical series are available:

• Number of police-recorded crimes by type (intentional homicide, violence, robbery, home burglary, car thefts, and drug crimes) for the period 1993 – 2007
• Number of police-recorded homicide in cities for the period 1993 – 2007
• Number of police officers for the period 1993 – 2007
• Prison population for the period 1993 – 2007

Total number of police-recorded crimes for the period 1950 – 2000

(1) under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244/99

Unbiased phenotypic screens in patient-relevant disease models offer the potential to detect therapeutic targets for rare diseases. In this study, we developed a high-throughput screening assay to identify molecules that correct aberrant protein trafficking in adaptor protein complex 4 (AP-4) deficiency, a rare but prototypical form of childhood-onset hereditary spastic paraplegia, characterized by mislocalization of the autophagy protein ATG9A. Using high-content microscopy and an automated image analysis pipeline, we screened a diversity library of 28,864 small molecules and identified a lead compound, BCH-HSP-C01, that restored ATG9A pathology in multiple disease models, including patient-derived fibroblasts and induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neurons. We used multiparametric orthogonal strategies and integrated transcriptomic and proteomic approaches to delineate potential mechanisms of action of BCH-HSP-C01. Our results define molecular regulators of intracellular ATG9A trafficking and characterize a lead compound for the treatment of AP-4 deficiency, providing important proof-of-concept data for future studies.