People from Britain exploited by slavery and trafficking are being failed by a national support scheme even though they now outnumber foreign victims, a charity said.
Victims of modern slavery offences from the UK say they have been stigmatised, “labelled as troublemakers” and ignored, a report from the Human Trafficking Foundation warns.
British survivors have outnumbered foreign citizens for the past three years, driven largely by cases of young people trafficked internally by drugs gangs. They have overtaken Albanian and Vietnamese victims.
In a report based on a consultation with victims, frontline workers and experts in the field, the foundation found that there was “far less advocacy for British survivors” who entered into the government’s national referral scheme — the support system for victims of trafficking and slavery. One told the report there was “a huge stigma that slavery doesn’t happen to British survivors or that British cases are not on the same level as non-British cases”.
She said she and others had found: “If we speak out, we can be labelled as troublemakers or ungrateful.”
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She added that she had seen foreign survivors who joined the system at the same time who had received more support and progressed further through the process.
In some cases British victims have also been incorrectly told they cannot receive legal aid because they are not seeking asylum.
The report said: “There are few systems in place to make British survivors safe; whereas in contrast, in asylum accommodation, they are able to move people more quickly into a safer region, but currently there is nothing like this for example in local authority housing for British survivors.”
