By Laura Durán and Leah Davison

Definitions matter. They shape how problems are understood, which responses are triggered, and who is recognised as needing protection. In the context of the exploitation of children, however, definitions are far from settled. The legal and policy landscape surrounding child trafficking and exploitation is shaped by a complex interplay between international, regional, and domestic standards. Definitions serve multiple purposes: they not only establish the legal parameters needed to prosecute offences but also function as tools for identifying victims and determining their eligibility for support and protection.

Whilst the terms “human trafficking”, “slavery,” and “forced labour” are defined in international law and have been incorporated into UK legislation, other key terms such as “modern slavery”, “labour exploitation” and “criminal exploitation” remain undefined in law, leading to inconsistent interpretations.

These inconsistencies are not just technical or academic, they have real world consequences. They influence not only how a child is viewed, but also what support they receive by determining their access to entitlements, the services triggered, and which system is involved. Definitional instability also undermines efforts to collect reliable data and assess prevalence. Without a shared conceptual foundation, prevalence estimates vary, interventions may be misdirected, and child victims risk being misidentified or overlooked. Language choices are shaped by institutional mandates and political priorities, not just descriptive accuracy.

Formal identification as a “victim of human trafficking” should trigger specific support under international law such as protection, counselling, legal advice, safe accommodation, interpretation services, health care, special measures in court, access to education, compensation, presumption of age, provide for the possibility of not imposing penalties on victims for their involvement in unlawful activities, residence permit and a legal guardian for unaccompanied child victims.

This report explores how definitional inconsistencies across legal, policy, and practice frameworks in the UK shape the identification and protection of children who are subject to child trafficking. 

Key findings

1. Inconsistent definitions, gaps and overlaps in terminology, and varying thresholds for recognition, are undermining the identification and protection of children, leading to fractured responses and silos.

2. Preconceptions about exploitation along race, nationality and gender lines affects both identification and the determination of child NRM referrals. The proportion of child referrals refused on the basis of not meeting the definition has remained consistently high, with significant disparities by nationality.

3. An emphasis on movement in the definition of trafficking in domestic legislation in England and Wales and Northern Ireland overlooks other elements in the act of child trafficking such as recruitment and harbouring and continues to shape professional understandings of when a case constitutes child trafficking in both identification and prosecutions, particularly affecting children exploited locally to where they live, or those exploited online.

4. Age is a factor which determines the application of terminology, and perceived maturity is often interpreted as a proxy for consent, responsibility and perceived agency, affecting identification and criminalisation.

5. Child trafficking is primarily understood as abuse occurring outside of the family, obscuring the complexities of harm and affecting identification.

Key recommendations

1. Develop a Cross-Government UK wide Child Exploitation Strategy – the UK Government, Welsh Government, Scottish Government and Northern Ireland Executive should develop and implement a cross-government child exploitation strategy that recognises and responds to the overlapping nature of exploitation types. This strategy should be underpinned by integrated policy and operational frameworks across relevant departments to promote consistency in identification, protection, and support for children. Responsibility should be shared across key departments, including but not limited to the Home Office, Department for Education, and devolved administrations.

2. Align legal definitions with international standards – the UK Government and Northern Ireland Executive should reform primary legislation language in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland to reflect the international definition of child trafficking, removing the over-emphasis on movement and recognising actions such as recruitment and harbouring.

3. Establish a statutory definition of child exploitation – the Home Office should introduce a statutory definition of child exploitation that encompasses all exploitation types, allowing sufficient elasticity to evolve with emerging forms whilst clarifying current definitional inconsistencies to ensure child exploitation is always identified. This definition should be developed through meaningful engagement with children and young people, including those with lived experience, to ensure it reflects the realities of exploitation and supports effective identification and response.

4. Clarify the ‘Means’ element for children – the Home Office should review the Slavery and Human Trafficking (Definition of Victim) Regulations 2022 and the Modern Slavery Statutory Guidance to identify and amend language which indicates a means element for children is necessary such as coercion, deception, force or other terms which requires consideration of informed consent.

5. Independent review mechanisms to scrutinise NRM decision-making – the Home Office should introduce independent review mechanisms to scrutinise NRM decision-making where significant disparities exist in definition-based refusals by nationality, to assess whether children from certain nationalities are being systematically refused and to guard against unconscious bias.

Oxford, UK: Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre (PEC) at the University of Oxford, 2025. 165p.

By Martina Prpic

Trafficking in human beings is a serious crime and a violation of human rights. When it happens to children, it disrupts their childhood and exposes them to horrific exploitation and abuse, and a precarious future. Even though the true number of victims of human trafficking is not known, recent data reveal that the number of child victims has been on the increase. Awareness of children as victims of human trafficking has increased as well. Just like adult victims, child victims can be trafficked for sexual exploitation, forced labour, forced criminality or organ removal. Recently, the EU has officially recognised new forms of exploitation, including surrogacy, forced marriage and illegal adoption. There are geographical differences in the recruitment of victims, with the vast majority of child victims originating from northern, southern and western Europe being girls (82.9 %) and 55.1 % of child victims from Africa and 77.6 % of child victims from southern Asia being boys. Female child victims are more likely to report sexual exploitation, while male child victims are more likely to be exploited through child labour. Forced criminality in the EU, although comparatively lower as a share of the total number of victims, is steadily increasing, with boys of migration background being the main targets. The EU's anti-trafficking legislation was amended last year, resulting in legislation that identifies children as especially vulnerable to trafficking. The amendments also expanded the list of forms of exploitation to include those that particularly affect children and emphasised the importance of a victim-centred approach and prevention. Member States are therefore asked, inter alia, to promote and provide regular and specialised training for professionals who are likely to come into contact with such children. Another relevant directive, on victims' rights, is currently being revised to provide even more rights to victims, including child victims. The existing directive already prioritises the best interests of children when applying its provisions

Brussels: EPRS | European Parliamentary Research Service , 2025. 8p.

By Kate van Doore

This publication seeks to shed light on the role of OSCE participating States in combating orphanage trafficking—a pressing yet overlooked form of child trafficking. It highlights the pathways through which children are trafficked into institutions, analyses both the demand and supply side that fuels orphanage trafficking, examines the policies that perpetuate the institutionalization of children, and showcases best practices for reducing the exploitation and abuse fuelled by the orphanage industry.

Prague: The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), 2025. 61p.

By International Organization for Migration and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University.

Despite efforts, large numbers of children continue to fall victim to traffickers worldwide, due to inequitable social, economic, environmental and political factors that engender exploitative and discriminatory practices. A critical component of countering trafficking is reliable and up-to-date data, to empirically ground interventions, though actionable data are limited, and child victims are typically hard to reach. This report, based on analysis of extensive, globally sourced data, is the first of its kind and analyses primary data from more than 69,000 victims of trafficking of 156 nationalities, trafficked in 186 countries, who registered with IOM in its 113 countries of operation, using the IOM Victims of Trafficking Database (VoTD) - the largest available international database of individual victims of trafficking.

International Organization for Migration and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University. 2023. 88p.

By  Christopher Horwood

Just as the world’s governments have, for some decades, waged war on international drug trafficking, there are increasing signals that global authorities have embarked on a major offensive against the growing phenomenon of migrant smuggling in addition to their existing fight against human trafficking.1 One of the most unambiguous of these signals came in April 2015, when Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European Union’s top official for migration,2 told a news conference: “we will take action now. Europe is declaring war on [migrant] smugglers. Europe is united in this effort. We will do this together with our partners outside Europe. We will work together because smuggling is not a European problem — it is a global one.”3 Largely because of its clandestine nature, there is insufficient data available to gauge the global extent of migrant smuggling. Still, existing research offers some hints: according to one recent estimate, some 2.5 million migrants across the world used smugglers in 2016, generating an economic return of at least $5.5 billion dollars.4 ‘Since the migration crisis in 2015 the migrant smuggling business has established itself as a large, lucrative and sophisticated criminal market.’5 This paper, like others before it, argues that the main motivation behind the new offensive against migrant smugglers is not only the much-vaunted concern for the safety and protection of migrants and refugees6 (Avramopoulos prefaced his declaration with the words ‘one more life lost [at sea] is one too many’) but also the fact that migrant smugglers are the main vector and means for irregular migration. Rightly or wrongly, irregular migration is portrayed, even if disingenuously, by governments and many electorates as undesirable from a socio-political, security and economic perspective, and as a potential cause of future social unrest and political disruption.   

Geneva: Mixed Migration Centre, 2019. 78p.

By Stijn Aerts  

It is estimated that over the past few years, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors went missing in the European Union. This is a problem on many different levels: fundamental rights, child protection, managing of migration flows and asylum. From the crime prevention perspective, the fact that children are unaccompanied and the fact that they are off the authorities’ radar are major risk factors. Unaccompanied minors run a significantly increased risk of being trafficked for sexual exploitation, labour exploitation, or criminal exploitation. Chapter one of this report describes the phenomena of child trafficking and unaccompanied minors going missing and how they relate to migration and migrant smuggling, without disregarding intra-EU trafficking. The report goes on to outline the most important international conventions, protocols and declarations for the fight against child trafficking in the EU (chapter two) and the most important EU-wide, cross-border actions to prevent child trafficking and to safeguard UAMs from going missing (chapter three). Chapter four offers the reader an overview of existing resources of the past few years, including research reports, handbooks, and recommendations. The fifth and final chapter highlights and explains some of the most pressing recommendations regarding the prevention of child trafficking, covering the following five categories, from determining the child’s best interest and child-friendly approaches, over cross-border and interagency cooperation, right through to addressing the offender and demand side.

Brussels; European Crime Prevention Network, 44p.

By Wendy S. Hesfor.

Violent Exceptions turns to the humanitarian figure of the child-in-peril in twenty-first-century political discourse to better understand how this figure is appropriated by political constituencies for purposes rarely to do with the needs of children at risk. Wendy S. Hesford shows how the figure of the child-in-peril is predicated on racial division, which, she argues, is central to both conservative and liberal logics, especially at times of crisis when politicians leverage humanitarian storytelling as a political weapon. Through iconic images and stories of child migrants, child refugees, undocumented children, child soldiers, and children who are victims of war, terrorism, and state violence, Violent Exceptions illustrates how humanitarian rhetoric turns public attention away from systemic violations against children’s human rights and reframes this violence as exceptional—erasing more gradual forms of violence and minimizing human rights potential to counteract these violations and the precarious conditions from which they arise.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2021. 282p.

By Ernest A. Bell.

Or War on the White Slave Trade. “ A complete and detailed account of the shameless traffic in young girls, the methods by -which the procurers and panders lure innocent young girls away from home and sell them to keepers of dives. The magnitude of the organization and its workings. How to combat this hideous monster. How to save YOUR GIRL. How to save YOUR BOY. What you can do to help -wipe out this curse of humanity. A book designed to awaken the sleeping and protect the innocent.”

Chicago: G.S. Ball, 1910. 482p.