To mark Anti-Slavery Week 2025, we hosted a webinar to raise awareness among professionals of the overlap between Modern Slavery and Trafficking and HBA.
Savera UK was joined by Bethany Hodnett, Northwest Outreach Services Manager, and Li Boglo, Modern Slavery Advocate, both from Causeway, a leading modern slavery and crime reduction charity.
The session began with Nadia’s story, a survivor of Modern Slavery who had been helped by both Causeway and Savera UK, after reporting her abuse to the police.
Modern Slavery, Causeway explained, is when an individual (or group of people) controls another for profit by exploiting a vulnerability. Usually, the victim is forced to work or is sexually exploited and the trafficker keeps all or nearly all of the money. That control can be physical, financial or psychological.
They explained that there are 136,000 people living in exploitation in the UK today, and that it happens in every country in the UK, with more than 19,000 recognised as potential victims in 2024.
After highlighting types of Modern Slavery, including labour, sexual and criminal, exploitation, domestic servitude and organ harvesting, Causeway explained how it is often assumed that survivors are physically forced into these situations, but how more subtle control tactics are often used, like debt bondage, where there is an imaginary debt that individuals believe they have to work to pay back, and creating a fear of authorities, and other ways where they believe there is “no other option”, therefore creating a dependence on perpetrators.
Causeway shared key indicators that professionals should be aware of, highlighted their self-assessment tool that has been developed with people with lived experience and shared information on the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) (click here for an upcoming event taking a detailed look at this) and the support that can be accessed through it, as well as highlighting a host of their holistic support services.
Modern Slavery overlaps with HBA
In the second part of the session, Savera UK’s Training and Development Manager, Ayesha Alam, explained the charity’s services and how modern slavery and trafficking often overlap with ‘honour’-based abuse through shared patterns of control, coercion, and exploitation – all justified under the guise of protecting or maintaining ‘honour’. These forms of abuse commonly involve isolation, surveillance, and monitoring, often with multiple perpetrators and intersecting forms of harm. Victims and survivors experience deep internalised fear and shame, creating emotional and economic dependency on perpetrators that traps them in cycles of abuse.
Ayesha highlighted professionals’ responsibility to be aware of these issues and respond to the risk appropriately, taking a multi-agency approach and working collaboratively with specialist services like Savera UK and Causeway to protect survivors.
The event also saw the launch of Savera UK’s new Modern Slavery and Trafficking factsheet, which contains much of the information provided in the session and is a useful resource for professionals, which can be downloaded here.
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