The Government recognises that online platforms are significant enablers of sexual exploitation. They must be responsible and held accountable for content on their sites, including taking proactive steps to prevent their sites being used by criminals. Victims of sexual exploitation make up a notable proportion of referrals to the National Referral Mechanism. The most recent annual statistics show that in 2025, sexual exploitation (either partly or wholly) accounted for 15% (3,607) of all referrals.

In December 2025, the Government committed within the “Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls”, to address many aspects of prostitution and sexual exploitation within England and Wales. Commitments include reviewing legislation, raising awareness among frontline agencies of what constitutes adult sexual exploitation, and strengthening police disruption of sexual exploitation. Further details on each of these commitments will be announced in due course.

The Government is also working closely with law enforcement to tackle the drivers of trafficking for sexual exploitation, including through operational activity aimed at tackling modern slavery threats, ensuring they have the tools they need to disrupt sexual exploitation facilitated online and targeting prolific perpetrators.

This financial year (2026/2027) the Home Office is providing over £10.7m to the Tackling Organised Exploitation (TOEX) Programme to improve the law enforcement response across a number of threat areas, including modern slavery and human trafficking, organised immigration crime, county lines, adult and child sexual abuse and exploitation. This funding is used to deliver a range of specialist intelligence and analytical capabilities across threats, including supporting law enforcement partners with an adult service website referral pilot, where adverts are referred to TOEX to support operational activity.

The Online Enablers Working Group, previously the Adult Services Website Working Group, is a multi-agency working group. The working group comprises of law enforcement, policing, policy officials and regulators, including the National Crime Agency, Home Office officials, police officers, TOEX and Ofcom. The Home Office does not intend to publish information or documents from meetings, as this could undermine future policy development.

The Home Office has provided dedicated funding to support law enforcement agencies to purchase software licenses to identify and tackle sexual exploitation as part of routine work and project work in the following financial years:

• In 2021/2022- £100,000 was made available to police forces in England and Wales
• Between 2022 and 2026, the Modern Slavery Fund supported the provision of software licences to international law enforcement partners in Romania and Brazil, with a total of £98,608 (mostly Official Development Assistance) allocated over this period. This activity aimed to strengthen the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct more effective and timely investigations, improving the identification and safeguarding of victims of sexual exploitation trafficked across routes linking Brazil, Romania and the UK.
• In 2025/2026 – £356,000 was given to Bedfordshire police to pilot a national law enforcement hub for tackling sexual exploitation. Approximately £7,000 of this was made available to spend on licenses.

The Government is committed to tackling the gangs who are luring children into violence and crime. That is why we have legislated for a new offence of child criminal exploitation in the Crime and Policing Act. The Act also provides for new civil orders (child criminal exploitation prevention orders) which will disrupt and prevent child criminal exploitation from occurring or re-occurring.

The Home Office has worked closely with the Ministry of Justice on the delivery of the new child criminal exploitation offence, which will criminalise adults who exploit children by intentionally using them to commit criminal activity.

To support effective implementation of the new offence and prevention orders, the Government is developing statutory guidance for law enforcement about their role in detecting, investigating and preventing child criminal exploitation, as well as their functions relating to child criminal exploitation prevention orders. The guidance will include advice on how these measures complement existing legislation, including the Modern Slavery Act 2015.