Rethinking support service outcomes with children affected by modern slavery
Anna Skeels’ research with refugee children investigates their experiences of forced displacement and the services designed to protect them.
Dr Anna Skeels’ research investigates how to put children affected by forced displacement and modern slavery, their rights, and their experiences, at the centre of the services that are there to support them.
She is a Research Fellow at Cardiff University’s Social Science Research Park (or ‘SPARK’), and holder of the first Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre Research Fellowship, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Since 2010, as both a practitioner and a researcher, Anna has been engaging meaningfully with refugee children – often those who are unaccompanied or separated from their primary caregivers – to explore their experiences of forced displacement and protection.
Anna works to ensure that these children’s voices are heard by the professionals and organisations who impact them and their lives.
Her PhD used a range of creative and participatory methods to investigate children’s pathways through the refugee protection process.
She explored children’s perspectives on their experiences in the Kyaka II refugee camp in Uganda, using their responses to inform a more child-friendly approach.
Anna’s practice and research fundamentally ask: “How are things done? And is this the best way to do them for children?”
“There are a range of theoretical approaches to research on modern slavery,” Anna explains.
“It’s a multidisciplinary field – it embraces child rights, business and supply chain management, criminal justice, public health, migration studies, and much more.
“Collaboration with public, private, and Third sector partners is also essential as is putting the lived experiences of those affected by modern slavery, including children, at the centre of our research.”
Anna’s research into children’s rights, protection, and participation, has focused more recently on children and ‘modern slavery’.
“They might be unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the UK, or children who have been trafficked to the UK from another country,” Anna says, “and so they are at risk of – or have been affected by – modern slavery.”
Research in this area, Anna explains, has importantly focused on the risks and harms to children who have experienced forced migration and human trafficking, and on their journeys and experiences of trauma. But, Anna believes, research needs to focus on much more than their past:
“It needs to explore children’s hopes and goals, capture positive outcomes and future possibilities, not define them solely by their histories of exploitation,” she says.
“Without considering their futures, without aiming for positive outcomes, we cannot consider them in all their complexity, and we cannot fully enable their rights.”
Anna co-founded and co-chairs Cardiff University’s Modern Slavery and Social Sustainability Research Group with Dr Maryam Lotfi from Cardiff Business School.
The Group brings together academics from across disciplines and continents, along with business, policy makers, practitioners, and NGOs, to tackle the societal and global challenge of modern slavery.
Anna co-authored The Human Trafficking of Children and Young People with Professor Patricia Hynes and Laura Durán.
In it, Anna explores in detail the different lenses through which children affected by human trafficking, exploitation, and modern slavery are seen, and how this impacts upon them.
“How we talk and think about children affected by modern slavery has very real implications for their wellbeing, protection, and lives,” she explains.
“By putting children and their rights first, we aren’t just viewing them through the lens of immigration or criminal justice systems, or what’s happened to them in the past. We are engaging fully with who they are, their views, ideas, perspectives, and experiences, what they want for their lives and future, and what they have to say.”
Anna collaborated with Hannah Stott at Safe to Grow, a consultancy that focuses on transforming the policy and assistance landscape for people who have been trafficked or forced to migrate, and Dr Katy Huxley, also from SPARK at Cardiff University, on the first child-centred evaluation of the Independent Child Trafficking Guardianship (ICTG) service.
The service is mandated by the Modern Slavery Act (2015) and is currently delivered across England and Wales by Barnardo’s.
The research project ran for 12 months and used ‘Q methodology’ to engage 25 children who were being or who had been supported by the ICTG service. Focus groups were also used to engage Independent Child Trafficking Guardians in the research.
Q-methodology is a participatory method with a ‘Q-sort’ activity at the centre of data collection.
Q-methodology is known for being effective where more ‘traditional’ research methods – for example, interviews – might not work. Anna explained why she chose Q for research with young people affected by exploitation and who have experienced trauma:
“It’s not an interview – there’s less sense of a power imbalance (‘I ask questions and you listen/respond!’) or of being put on the spot. The young person has more control of the activity, where cards are placed and what they want to comment on or discuss – they do the analysis.
“Children took part individually in a Q-sort exercise, which required each of them to review, prioritise, and rank a set of 28 statements relating to different possible outcomes from the ICTG service for them and their lives on a grid from most to least agree.
“Statement cards included, for example, because of support from the Barnardo’s ICTG service ‘I feel safe’, ‘I have people I can trust’, ‘I feel positive about my future’. Each child placed the statement cards onto the grid according their own experiences and views.”
A number of young people were not able to, or chose not to, participate in the Q-sort exercise in English.
Other languages used included Vietnamese, Kurdish Sorani, Arabic, Albanian and French.
“We work with a lot of these young people through interpreters,” Anna explains. “That can add its own complexity, and we need to ensure that children’s views are fully and accurately conveyed. But it’s important for children to use the language of their choice to reflect critically on the systems that affect them.”
This research was published by the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre in 2024 as ‘Outcomes for children and young people affected by modern slavery: An analysis of Independent Child Trafficking Guardianship service support in England and Wales’.
Following on from this, Anna secured Harmonised Impact Acceleration Award (HIAA) funding to work again with Hannah Stott and Barnardo’s to build on the research.
“Hannah and I collaborated again through the Impact Acceleration Award-funded activity to develop a new case study training resource for Independent Child Trafficking Guardians (ICTGs) and other professionals working with or for children affected by modern slavery,” Anna explains.
“The case study is designed to raise awareness amongst practitioners on supporting positive outcomes for children affected by modern slavery and to drive a broader narrative on this by engaging with policy.”
The IAA project enabled Anna to draw on children’s feedback from the initial research on positive outcomes as a result of ICTG service support.
Anna and her collaborators drew on young people’s experiences and views from the research to develop a follow-up to a well-known Barnardo’s training resource called In Their Shoes.
“Since its launch eight years ago, hundreds of professionals have benefited from using In Their Shoes,” says Anna. In Their Shoes is used to train professionals in how to support children affected by human trafficking. It puts participants in the position of a child from Vietnam who was trafficked to the UK.
"Training participants watch an animation while the child’s story is narrated to them,” Anna explains. “They are asked to put themselves in the ‘shoes’ of the child and to answer different questions at key points during the story.
“Evidence has shown that this increases professionals’ understanding of children’s experiences, which helps them to embed their learning into practice, for the benefit of the children they work with and support.”
Anna’s project developed In Their Shoes – UK, taking a similar approach by highlighting a single case study of a UK-born child with lived experience of human trafficking.
In Their Shoes – UK is both evidence-based and experiential. The story focuses on enabling positive outcomes and futures rather than the journey of exploitation itself.
“We chose to focus on a girl – called ‘Alicia’ – and on child criminal and child sexual exploitation,” Anna says.
“Practitioners engaged in our research told us that the reality of exploitation is far more complex than portrayed. While boys are often associated with child criminal exploitation and girls with child sexual exploitation, there is often intersection between different forms of exploitation and harm,” Anna explains.
“We wanted our resource to reflect some of this complexity. For example, Alicia is Black British, which helps us to address important issues relating to the ‘adultification’ of Black children who have been affected by exploitation.”
By encouraging the training participants to put themselves in Alicia’s shoes, Anna and her collaborators hope this will allow them to better understand her experiences and needs as well as how to enable and support positive outcomes for her and her life.
“Anecdotal feedback given during the training suggests participants felt the immersive experience provided an opportunity for them to learn in a different way than they had experienced previously,” Anna says. “This helped them consider missed opportunities to intervene in Alicia’s life, ways to keep her safe, and the importance of building relationships and focusing on strengths and positive outcomes.”
“The slow ‘drip, drip’ process that occurred around her being exploited was very thorough and interesting to see. As practitioners we need to ensure we look at the whole picture and cover all aspects of the young person's life… Being mindful that each young person is an individual and requires a bespoke response.”
— independent child trafficking guardian
“The evidence base for the development of the case study was drawn from my past research with 25 young people affected by human trafficking,” Anna explains.
“One young person who participated in a co-creation activity around the case study offered a great insight that the activity helped them to consider their own story and what had happened to them.”
The In Their Shoes – UK case study resources and training were developed and piloted through a roadshow of workshops. 75 practitioners and professionals took part in the roadshow workshops during March 2025.
“The feedback from the roadshow workshops, along with the Independent Child Trafficking Guardians and young person’s activity, provided depth and breadth of insight to aid us in updating and finalising the training resource,” Anna says.
While shaped by professionals’ expertise, the case study remains rooted in the experiences of children. Reflecting their voices is embedded in every aspect of the project, from the content of Alicia’s story to the designs of the training materials.
“The bright design and colours are about conveying the positive, futures focus,” Anna says, “rather than the darker images and colours often used in other resources focused on child exploitation.”
The final In Their Shoes – UK training resource includes a booklet for the experiential case study, which is designed for participants to work through on their own in the training. It also includes a trainer guide, designed to aid the facilitator in telling Alicia’s story, as well as presentation slides, a group worksheet, and a resource handbook.
Of the professionals who completed a feedback form
- 73% agreed that the workshop helped them learn how to support positive outcomes for children who are exploited and are UK citizens
- 87% of participants stated the workshop increased their awareness of research on positive outcomes for children
- 60% were more able to identify opportunities or solutions for their professional practice working with these children
“From the outset of the IAA project, we hoped to create a strong external-facing policy message,” Anna says.
“It is important to enable positive outcomes and futures for children and young people impacted by human trafficking. We have deliberately focused on their strengths to reframe the ‘dark’, ‘victim’-focused narratives that surround them.”
In July 2025, Anna met with the Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, who funded their outcomes research. They will be promoting Anna’s work by raising awareness of the new training resource including with the UK Government.
“The Independent Child Trafficking Guardianship Service will work with us, and with Barnardo’s policy team, to develop a clear policy message,” Anna says. “That will be key to getting our evidence into new policy.”
In the future, Barnardo’s hopes to expand the training to develop additional In Their Shoes stories to focus on children and young people from diverse backgrounds. In particular, Barnardo’s says, there is a need for resources that focus on children affected by labour exploitation, domestic servitude, and organ harvesting.
“The potential is there to further roll out this kind of training to target sectors such as the police and social work Anna says, “to bring about a shared focus on positive outcomes for child survivors of modern slavery.”
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Further reading
Burton, Linda, ‘Childhood Adultification in Economically Disadvantaged Families: A Conceptual Model’, in Family Relations, vol. 56, no. 4, 2007, pp. 329–45. Archived at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4541675
Modern Slavery and Human Rights Policy and Evidence Centre, 2024, ‘Outcomes for children and young people affected by modern slavery’: https://www.modernslaverypec.org/resources/guardianship-service-outcomes
Skeels, Anna, ‘A long road to get to the beginning’, Elrha, 2012: https://www.elrha.org/news-blogs/long-road-get-beginning
Skeels, Anna, ‘Refugee children's participation in protection: a case study from Uganda’, UNHCR, 2012: https://www.unhcr.org/africa/media/refugee-childrens-participation-protection-case-study-uganda-anna-skeels
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as anyone under the age of 18 – unless, under the law applicable to the child, they have attained their majority younger than 18.
The Convention has 54 articles including the right to life, play, education, protection and participation and “applies to every child without discrimination”, regardless of their background. These Articles are universal, indivisible, inalienable and interdependent: they relate to each other and are meant for all children, everywhere, all of the time.
The UK is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UN requires the UK and its devolved governments to pass laws that protect children’s rights and privacy, and, of particular relevance to modern slavery, to protect children from exploitation.
The Convention has 54 Articles in total. These include:
Article 3: The best interests of the child must be a top priority in all decisions and actions that affect children.
Article 4: Governments must do all they can to make sure every child can enjoy their rights by creating systems and passing laws that promote and protect children’s rights.
Article 12: Every child has the right to express their views, feelings and wishes in all matters affecting them, and to have their views considered and taken seriously.
Article 20: If a child cannot be looked after by their immediate family, the government must give them special protection and assistance. This includes making sure the child is provided with alternative care that is continuous and respects the child’s culture, language and religion.
Article 39: Children who have experienced neglect, abuse, exploitation, torture, or who are victims of war, must receive special support to help them recover their health, dignity, self-respect, and social life.
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