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Tainted victimhood and the impossibility of innocence in modern slavery

This paper explores the paradoxes of victimhood and innocence in the criminalisation of modern slavery in England and Wales, particularly the fraught criminal responsibility of victim-offenders. It unpacks the tensions between the section 45 defence (introduced by the 2015 Modern Slavery Act) and the abuse of process doctrine (an enactment of the non-punishment provision of the 2008 Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention). The courts have struggled to reconcile the logics of the two coexisting approaches. While section 45 affords a statutory defence at trial for those whose alleged conduct stems from compulsion attributable to being a ‘victim of slavery’, the abuse of process doctrine implies that such individuals should not have been prosecuted in the first place. This tension lays bare deeper, unstable ideals of innocence and guilt. As a unique field where contemporary humanitarian logics become uneasily applied through the criminal law, this paper brings these legal challenges in dialogue with anthropological analysis of the UK’s wider enterprise to ‘fight modern slavery’ to argue that both are predicated on an impossible attachment to the innocence and moral purity of its putative victims.