Anti-Slavery Day 2024

Anti-Slavery Day occurs every year on 18 October 2024. It is a day to remember all those whose lives have been affected by slavery, and re-affirm our commitment to removing it from Derbyshire. Slavery is a cruel and impactuful crime. Victims have their liberty and independence taken away by criminals who seek to use them as commodities. Victims can be used for their labour, for sexual exploitation, or to carry out criminal activity through threats of violence or coercion. It affects children, adults and people of all backgrounds.

We are committed to combatting modern slavery for residents and ensuring that our internal operations do not facilitate exploitation of any kind either.

Below we have a short summary of what modern slavery looks like in Derbyshire, our work over the past 12 months, and links to our modern slavery webinar, practice guidance document and modern slavery transparency statement.

Modern slavery in Derbyshire

The county has a richly varied geographical make-up, ranging from remote rural villages in the High Peak to busy urban towns such as Chesterfield and Ilkeston and of course Derby City. Because of this variety, the county experiences a range of types of exploitation: criminal exploitation of children and adults in built-up areas, and harder-to-identify labour exploitation out in rural settings such as farms.

A few headlines from Derbyshire in 2023:

• 162 potential victims of modern slavery were referred into the National Referral Mechanism (NRM)
• 49% of potential victims were adults, 44% were children. 6% were of an unknown age
• adults were most likely to be victim of labour exploitation
• children were most likely to be victim of criminal exploitation (such as county lines drug dealing)

Are you a professional working in Derbyshire? You can find our latest practice guidance at the bottom of the modern slavery homepage Modern slavery and organised crime.

If you would like to learn more about slavery in Derbyshire, sign up for our free modern slavery awareness webinar on Derbyshire Learning Online.

Our work to combat modern slavery in 2023 to 2024 includes:

• training and awareness raising - In the 12 months from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024, we have delivered the awareness raising training to 901 delegates.
• we have worked across departments to refresh our Modern slavery transparency statement which can also be found on the government statement registry portal.
• we have jointly-commissioned Rebuild East Midlands to deliver our pre-NRM support for potential victims. Rebuild work with potential victims at a very sensitive time after rescue, explaining their options and providing a source of advice. More recently this has been expanded to an "initial support project" that supports potential victims for longer into their journey through the NRM or other services.
• we have established multi-disciplinary team meetings to investigate allegations of exploitation within the care sector. A summary of findings is in our modern slavery transparency statement.
• we have worked with our partners to develop an emergency reception centre plan for supporting multiple potential victims who are identified together.