Introduction

Sexual exploitation is a highly gendered crime which intersects with modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT). Women and girls are disproportionately the victims of sexual exploitation. In addition, the ways in which exploitation is defined and addressed reflects gendered assumptions and perpetuates rigid gender roles that position women at a disadvantage with regards to the substantial exercise of their rights, such as freedom to act and to be recognised as autonomous (EIGE, 2021). There is a continuum of exploitation, and the harm women experience is represented and framed within UK legislation in multiple ways (for example, child sexual exploitation, prostitution, modern slavery and human trafficking) (Coy, 2016b). Women are vulnerable to exploitation because of their intersecting experiences of oppression. Exploitation is thus interwoven with multiple forms of complex disadvantage and cannot be understood in isolation.

This chapter brings attention to the lived experiences of sexually exploited women and the challenges they face in accessing support. Currently, women receive very different responses depending on how the exploitation they have experienced is framed. Helping services need to shift to a new understanding of how to best address women’s intersecting experiences of disadvantage. How women ‘are met’ in services also needs to be re-evaluated, as illustrated in the Complex Experience Care Model (CECM; Hodges and Burch, 2019), which is considered in conjunction with the importance of culture competency. Culture competency and responsiveness are discussed as crucial elements that need to be embedded in support services helping women from various ethnicities and nationalities. The chapter seeks to investigate various aspects of helping services that may hinder support and that have an impact on women’s help seeking experiences, and through the exploration of quotes provides recommendations on how support for women can be improved.

Throughout this chapter we draw on secondary data to include the voices of women heard in a number of previous research and service evaluations which focused on women’s experience of seeking help and support (Hodges, 2018; Murphy et al, 2018; Murphy and Goldsmith, 2019). Given the limited avenues for exploited women to express their voices, service evaluations have been useful to enable these marginalised groups to speak up and shape services that are meaningful to them.