That is according to Emily Kenway, author of The Truth About Modern Slavery, published in January.

Drawing on professional experience, plus conversations with senior police officers, campaigners and victims, Kenway takes a closer look at the reality behind the headlines and government rhetoric on this issue. She presents a troubling picture.

Kenway served as an advisor to the first Independent Anti-slavery Commissioner, Kevin Hyland, a role created by the 2015 Modern Slavery Act. Shes worked specifically on modern slavery, but, she stresses, shes also been involved with issues which relate and feed into it.

This is one of the main things Kenway hopes her readers take to tackle the issue of modern slavery, we have to see it in a societal context and understand what makes it possible.

The main drivers behind this are poverty, insecure immigration status, a context where labour rights have been gradually eroded, Kenway told JPI Media. All these things create opportunities for people to be exploited.

Kenway had begun work on the book when, in October 2019, news broke that a number of people had been found dead in the back of a lorry in Essex.

The reaction from some politicians, she says, perfectly illustrated one of her core criticisms of how modern slavery is understood.

The local MP and Priti Patel were referring to this as related to trafficking. But I knew they couldn't possibly know that because it was only a few hours after they'd been discovered, she said.

This is how trafficking as a part of modern slavery is used to make the public misunderstand what's actually going on. They are doing so because the public immediately then thinks of the traffickers as the perpetrators, we think of these individual deviants who have caused these horrific deaths.

When the case did eventually go to trial it was as a case of migrant smuggling, which is a different issue to human trafficking, explains Kenway.

If instead we understand it as a case of migrant smuggling, we have to ask why people are risking losing their lives in order to get to other countries and that becomes a question of borders and governance, she said.

Kenway argues that these same hypocrises exist in other aspects of the Governments approach to modern slavery. She highlights numerous cases where senior police figures announced raids on sex workers under the banner of human trafficking operations.

After looking in depth at these operations and the outcomes, Kenway discovered that women were often arrested, but very few if any referrals were made to the the modern slavery pathway, the National Referral Mechanism.

Kenway also points to some of the requirements of the Modern Slavery Act as being wholly inadequate, such as the stipulation that large firms publish statements about their supply chains.

A company could write a statement which says We have done nothing about modern slavery, and effectively, that would comply with the law, she says.

This means firms which go the extra mile to make sure their supply chains are not party to exploitation such as stone-firm Marshalls, cited throughout the book as an example of a firm getting it right are at a disadvantage to those which pay no heed to the issue.

Kenway is not optimistic about the future of modern slavery. Indeed, she says, we may actually be headed for a perfect storm.

A migration crisis driven by climate breakdown, the post-Covid economic shock and Brexit - which will create another group of people who are undocumented, and may likely lead to a reduction in labour rights - mean this is only going to get worse, she says.

Unless we change the way we think about and approach these issues, there are going to be millions of people suffering these kinds of exploitation.

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How the UK is headed for a perfect storm on human trafficking, according to author of The Truth About Modern Slavery - St Helens Reporter