Preventing sexual exploitation: evidence summary

Footnotes

1 ‘Prevention of human trafficking and exploitation: evidence review’; ‘Preventing criminal exploitation: evidence summary’; ‘Preventing labour exploitation: evidence summary’

2 Grey literature is any information that is not produced by commercial publishers. This includes publications such as policy documents, working papers, reports produced by government departments and NGOs and research reports.

3 Critical appraisal is the process of carefully and systematically examining research to judge its trustworthiness, and its value and relevance in a particular context (CASP - Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (casp-uk.net)).

4 In this paper various terms including sexual exploitation, child sexual exploitation, commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking are used when reporting on specific evidence depending on how they were represented in the original sources.

5 The review focused on Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation (CSAE) including online abuse, excluding trafficking and child criminal exploitation.

6 It was out with the scope of this review to systematically consider or compare the effectiveness of the various legal frameworks for prostitution on preventing human trafficking and exploitation.

7 Sweden, Iceland, Norway, Canada, Northern Ireland, France, Republic of Ireland, and Israel

8 China, Most US states

9 Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Uruguay

10 New Zealand, Belgium

11 The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) is a pan-European security body. The UK is a member.

12 30 of the 57 OSCE participating States were reported as having at least one criminal law pertaining to demand, the most common of which is criminalisation of the “knowing use” of services of a trafficking victim/survivor

13 Running a brothel; trading in the prostitution of others and procuring for the purposes of prostitution; soliciting or loitering in a public place for the purpose of purchasing sex; soliciting or loitering in a public place for the purpose of selling sex; procuring or attempting to procure any woman or girl into prostitution, and trafficking persons for the purpose of sexual exploitation.

14 2024

15 ASWs that allow user-to-user sharing of content and have UK links are likely to be in scope of the UK’s Online Safety Act (2023). Following Ofcom's publication of their Illegal Harms Statement in December 2024, in-scope providers have a duty to assess the risk of illegal harms to their users by March 2025. This includes priority illegal harms relating to the sexual exploitation of adults and human trafficking. In-scope services will need to have systems and processes in place to ensure illegal content relating to the sexual exploitation of adults or human trafficking is removed, once content has been reported or identified. Please see see Ofcom Register of Risks or Illegal Content Judgements Guidance (ICJG) for more information on ASWs and the Online Safety Act.

16 Included eight peer-reviewed articles (one empirical study, one service evaluation, four literature reviews and two discussion or exploratory papers), two organisational research reports and an inquiry report.

17 ‘Preventing Human Trafficking and Exploitation: Evidence Review’ (published on same day as this paper on the Scottish Government website)