What Are The Different Types Of Modern Slavery

Australian law recognises eight types of modern slavery. Each one is a separate criminal offence under the Criminal Code Act 1995, in Division 270 covering slavery and slavery-like conditions and Division 271 covering trafficking in persons and debt bondage.

• Human trafficking is moving someone across or within borders through coercion, threats or lies so they can be exploited.
• Slavery is treating a person as property that can be used, bought, sold or traded.
• Forced labour is coercion that leaves a person feeling they cannot stop working or leave their workplace.
• Servitude is forced labour with a significant deprivation of personal freedom on top of it.
• Forced marriage is a marriage entered without free and full consent.
• Debt bondage is work extracted to repay a debt, real or invented, that may never be repayable.
• Deceptive recruiting for labour services is using lies to recruit someone into exploitative work.
• The worst forms of child labour covers children in slavery-like conditions, hazardous work, sexual exploitation for profit or illegal activities.

Reading that as a menu is the common mistake. The types are not ranked from mild to severe and a real situation rarely fits one box. A worker recruited on false promises about pay, charged a placement fee they cannot clear, and then told they cannot leave until it is paid, has experienced deceptive recruiting, debt bondage and forced labour in sequence. Investigators treat those as separate offences, which is why a workplace assessment that stops at the first label it finds tends to understate what happened.

The full text sits in the Criminal Code Act 1995 on the Federal Register of Legislation. Posts tagged here work through what these types look like in an Australian workplace, alongside the wider modern slavery archive and child safety and protection, since child labour sits inside the statutory list. Definitions and obligations change over time, so treat this as general information rather than legal advice.

Sentrient’s modern slavery course covers these types in a workplace context, within the wider compliance training courses.