Modern Slavery Facts And Figures

Modern slavery facts and figures for Australia come from one national source, the Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery National Minimum Dataset, established in 2022 and reported by the Australian Institute of Criminology. In 2024-25 the Australian Federal Police received 371 reports of alleged modern slavery.

Of those, 132 reports were accepted for investigation and not later withdrawn, and 160 separate offences were identified within them. Exit trafficking accounted for 32% of offences and forced marriage 29%. Suspected victim-survivors were mostly female at 87%, identified perpetrators mostly male at 88%, and around seven in ten of both groups were born overseas.

Read those numbers carefully, because they measure detection rather than prevalence. Using multiple systems estimation, the Institute has put the number of trafficking and slavery victims in Australia at between 1,300 and 1,900 across 2015-16 and 2016-17, which works out at roughly four undetected victims for every one detected. Criminal reporting also sits in a different place from supply chain risk. The offences counted here happened in Australia, while most of the exposure a reporting entity carries under the Modern Slavery Act sits offshore in its suppliers.

For a board or a risk committee that means:

• treat national counts as a floor, not an estimate of scale
• record supplier and workforce risk in a risk register rather than relying on published figures
• give workers and suppliers a route to raise concerns through incident management, since detection depends on someone speaking up

Figures are dated and definitions change, so check the current release before quoting anything in a statement or board paper, and treat this as general information rather than legal advice. The Australian Institute of Criminology publishes the national data. Sentrient’s modern slavery course and compliance training courses cover what the numbers mean for your people.