More than 23,000 potential victims of modern slavery were referred to the National Referral Mechanism in 2025. That’s a 22% increase on the year before, and the highest annual total since the NRM was created in 2009. Those numbers alone would be cause for concern. What makes this moment different is where the exploitation is beginning, not in far-flung supply chains or at international borders, but in online gaming platforms, encrypted messaging apps and social media feeds, often targeting children already known to local services. The Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner's new report, Anticipating Exploitation: A Futures Analysis, makes clear that the methods traffickers use are evolving faster than the systems designed to stop them.
For years, modern slavery was understood — imperfectly but persistently — as something that happened elsewhere and arrived here. That framing no longer holds. In 2025, British nationals made up the largest single victim group in NRM referrals, accounting for 22% of the total. A decade ago, UK nationals represented just 9% of referrals — the shift is not marginal; it is structural.
The Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner, Eleanor Lyons, described the situation plainly on BBC Radio 4: it is "predominantly British boys and girls who are being exploited by criminals." She noted that exploitation of this kind is no longer concentrated in particular communities or regions — it is happening across the UK, in towns and cities that have never previously featured in serious organised crime intelligence around trafficking. If the mental model still defaults to foreign nationals as the primary victim group, identification will lag behind reality, and it already is.
The IASC report identifies artificial intelligence and digital platforms as a "force multiplier" for criminal trafficking networks. Traffickers are now using these tools to recruit, groom and control victims at a scale that was not previously achievable without significant organisational infrastructure.
The specific vector identified in the report — and named by Lyons in interview — is online gaming. Children are being targeted through in-game chat functions, with perpetrators building trust over weeks or months, buying the child in-game currency, normalising contact and exploiting whatever vulnerability already exists. That might be loneliness, family breakdown, school exclusion, or time spent unsupervised online.
Lyons described the dynamic clearly: "That is the beginning of a journey of grooming and blackmail." By the time exploitation begins, the child has been conditioned to keep the relationship secret, and fear of getting into trouble becomes a barrier to disclosure that is extremely difficult to break down.
Social media, encrypted messaging services and commercial platforms are also being used to facilitate pop-up brothels and sexual exploitation of adult women. The report notes that digital infrastructure allows criminal networks to operate with less physical exposure — reducing the opportunities for traditional surveillance and disruption.
The pattern of how children are exploited maps closely onto gender, and understanding that split is operationally significant.
Boys are disproportionately exploited through county lines — coerced into transporting and selling drugs across the country, often facing violence, debt bondage and threats against their families. In 2025, 2,545 boys aged 17 and under were referred to the NRM for criminal exploitation, a 22% increase on the previous year.
Girls face a different but equally serious picture. Sexual exploitation of girls in Britain has risen 54% over the last five years, according to the IASC report, and it is presenting in younger age groups. In Q2 2025, the NRM recorded its highest-ever number of referrals for UK nationals in a single quarter — and the majority of those were children.
Key characteristics of how children are drawn in include:
Both boys and girls are, in Lyons' words, "terrified of telling people" — often because they have been made to feel complicit, or because they fear criminalisation. This is not incidental; traffickers deliberately engineer that silence.
Exploitation does not happen in a vacuum. The IASC report points to three structural drivers that are currently expanding the pool of vulnerable people:
These drivers are not temporary. The IASC's report is a ten-year foresight document, and it concludes that without intervention, exploitation will become more widespread and significantly harder to detect.
Lyons was direct in her assessment: the UK's response is "not keeping with the scale and complexity of the threat." The report calls for dedicated funding for specialist policing units focused on modern slavery and exploitation, financial penalties for businesses found to have breached anti-exploitation rules, and cross-departmental action spanning the Foreign Office, Home Office, Ministry of Justice, HMRC and other public bodies.
There is a tension worth acknowledging. The Home Office has stated its commitment to reviewing the modern slavery system, and the NRM backlog — once a serious problem — has been reduced by 80% since its peak in 2022. But the IASC's office has simultaneously seen its budget cut by 5% annually, and the Commissioner has faced structural barriers to recruiting permanent staff. Oversight is being scaled back at precisely the moment the threat is scaling up.
For those working in neighbourhood, public protection, schools liaison and online investigation roles, the practical upshot is this: modern slavery and child exploitation are not specialist problems that only land on specialist desks. The early stages of exploitation — particularly gaming-based grooming — look like ordinary safeguarding concerns, and they will come through the same referral routes as any other child protection matter.
Awareness of the digital grooming pathway, and specifically the role of in-game communication as a first point of contact, should now be embedded in any safeguarding training that touches on child criminal exploitation or child sexual exploitation. The two are not as separate as they once appeared — and increasingly, they begin in the same place.
The IASC's report is explicit: exploitation is evolving faster than the response. That is not a comfortable position for any public protection system to be in, but it is an honest one. The 23,411 referrals recorded in 2025 represent only the visible portion of the problem — the NRM captures potential victims who come to the attention of first responders and consent to referral. The actual scale of exploitation in the UK is considerably larger.
The Modern Slavery Act has been in force for a decade. The legislative framework exists. What is needed now is the operational capacity, the training infrastructure and the cross-agency coordination to use it effectively against a threat that has learned to hide in plain sight — in a child's Xbox chat, in a nail salon on a high street, in a job offer shared through an encrypted app. Exploitation that starts online will not be stopped by responses built for a different era, and the evidence now makes it impossible to argue otherwise.
Understanding how exploitation is identified and missed is explored further across our Modern Slavery Training.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1j2gd8yr6go
https://www.antislaverycommissioner.co.uk/reports-publications/
https://www.wearecauseway.org.uk/modern-slavery/modern-slavery-referrals-rise-by-22-as-23411-potential-victims-identified-in-2025/ https://hopeforjustice.org/news/number-of-modern-slavery-victims-in-the-uk-reaches-record-high/
https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/threats-2025/nsa-msht-2025
https://www.gbnews.com/news/cost-of-living-crisis-record-slavery