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.

Sexual exploitation is a truly horrific crime. This Government has committed to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and we use all our levers to deliver this.

The advertising of sexual services has increasingly moved online, and we know that adult service websites are now the most significant enabler of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Online platforms need to be responsible and accountable for content on their sites and take proactive steps to prevent their sites being used by criminals. The Online Safety Act 2023 sets out priority offences, including sexual exploitation and human trafficking offences, and companies will need to adopt measures and put in place systems and processes to identify, assess and address these offences based on a risk assessment.

We must ensure law enforcement use every tool to pursue perpetrators and that victims are supported to recover from this horrendous abuse. The Government is working closely with policing and others to help tackle the drivers, including through operational intensifications to target perpetrators.

Prostitution more broadly is an extremely complex issue and there are a wide range of potential approaches. We are committed to making our streets safer by tackling the harm and exploitation which can be associated with it and ensuring that people who want to leave are given every opportunity to find routes out.

Home Office Ministers and officials have not had any meetings with Vivastreet since the General Election on 4^th July 2024. There are no plans to publish minutes or other written records of previous meetings with Vivastreet as these meetings were informal in nature and no minutes or records were taken.

This government will ensure adult sexual exploitation is part of our VAWG.

Sexual exploitation is a truly horrific crime. This Government has committed to halve violence against women and girls in a decade, and we use all our levers to deliver this.

The advertising of sexual services has increasingly moved online, and we know that adult service websites are now the most significant enabler of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Online platforms need to be responsible and accountable for content on their sites and take proactive steps to prevent their sites being used by criminals. The Online Safety Act 2023 sets out priority offences, including sexual exploitation and human trafficking offences, and companies will need to adopt measures and put in place systems and processes to identify, assess and address these offences based on a risk assessment.

We must ensure law enforcement use every tool to pursue perpetrators and that victims are supported to recover from this horrendous abuse. The Government is working closely with policing and others to help tackle the drivers, including through operational intensifications to target perpetrators.

Prostitution more broadly is an extremely complex issue and there are a wide range of potential approaches. We are committed to making our streets safer by tackling the harm and exploitation which can be associated with it and ensuring that people who want to leave are given every opportunity to find routes out.

Home Office Ministers and officials have not had any meetings with Vivastreet since the General Election on 4^th July 2024. There are no plans to publish minutes or other written records of previous meetings with Vivastreet as these meetings were informal in nature and no minutes or records were taken.

This government will ensure adult sexual exploitation is part of our VAWG.

Home Office officials and law enforcement partners maintain a collaborative working relationship with many online companies, including adult service websites, to identify and put in place initiatives to reduce harms on their sites.

Since 2023, Home Office officials have met with representatives of Vivastreet online, on the following occasions during each calendar year:

We committed to working with adult service websites to explore a set of voluntary principles to counter exploitation on their sites, in the Violence Against Woman and Girls Strategy published in July 2021. The principles will encourage adult service websites to take reasonable and practical steps to prevent modern slavery and exploitation on their platforms and work collaboratively with law enforcement.

The Home Office and law enforcement partners maintain a collaborative working relationship with online companies, including Vivastreet and Adultwork, to identify and put in place initiatives to remove content and prevent and disrupt sexual exploitation on websites. The Home Office does not intend to publish information from meetings with these online companies as this could undermine future policy development.

Further information about the Government’s work to tackle modern slavery, including with online companies can be found in the UK Modern Slavery Annual Reports between 2017 and 2021. The reports are available at Gov.uk.

2017 2017_uk_annual_report_on_modern_slavery.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)

2020 2020 UK annual report on modern slavery (publishing.service.gov.uk)

2021 2021 UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Since 2017, Home Office officials and law enforcement partners, including the National Crime Agency met with representatives of Adultwork, online, on the following occasions during each calendar year:

Home Office Ministers have not met with representatives from Adultwork.

The Home Office and law enforcement partners maintain a collaborative working relationship with online companies, including Vivastreet and Adultwork, to identify and put in place initiatives to remove content and prevent and disrupt sexual exploitation on websites. The Home Office does not intend to publish information from meetings with these online companies as this could undermine future policy development.

Further information about the Government’s work to tackle modern slavery, including with online companies can be found in the UK Modern Slavery Annual Reports between 2017 and 2021. The reports are available at Gov.uk.

2017 2017_uk_annual_report_on_modern_slavery.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)

2020 2020 UK annual report on modern slavery (publishing.service.gov.uk)

2021 2021 UK Annual Report on Modern Slavery (publishing.service.gov.uk)

Since 2017, Home Office officials and law enforcement partners, including the National Crime Agency met with representatives of Adultwork, online, on the following occasions during each calendar year:

Home Office Ministers have not met with representatives from Adultwork.

The Home Office has not made any payments to the company Vivastreet since 2017.

The Home Office and law enforcement partners, including the National Crime Agency maintains a close and collaborative working relationship with Vivastreet to identify and put in place initiatives to remove content and prevent and disrupt sexual exploitation on their website.

Since 2017, Home Office officials have met with representatives of Vivastreet, online and in person, on the following occasions during each calendar year:

Home Office Ministers have not met with representatives from Vivastreet.

Officials from the Home Office have met with the online classified advertisement company Vivastreet on several occasions to discuss initiatives to identify, prevent and disrupt sex-trafficking enabled via online platforms.