During National Anti-trafficking Week in October 2016, the UK’s anti-trafficking commissioner reported that “more victims [are] being identified, referred for appropriate support and restored of their freedom”. In the same week, an ‘anti-trafficking’ operation in Leeds resulted in 11 migrant street sex workers forcibly detained in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre or deported to their country of origin, in the name of protecting ‘vulnerable’ women. How such ‘rescue’ initiatives operate as cover for social control is well known in critical anti-trafficking research, but this has wider relevance for social policy.

Welfare has always been bound up with the social control of marginalised groups. Conditional social security benefits and interventions with ‘troubled families’ are prominent contemporary examples of this symbiosis. In recent decades there has been a closer relationship between care and control, for some populations more than others. Scholars have referred to these developments as ‘coercive welfare’ or ‘authoritarian therapeutism’. Failures to protect vulnerable people are now a permanent feature of the political landscape. In a climate of austerity politics and diffuse social anxiety, debates about these failings give rise to powerful political projects and radical forms of social intervention. It is against this backdrop that ideas about vulnerability have taken root in social policy.

Other recently published blogs include: