This volume has been a multifaceted and four-dimensional exploration of the journey of the victim/survivor of modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT). The reader, we hope, should now be able to ‘connect the dots’ making up this tragic journey, from recruitment through to representation and (re)integration, from the macro perspective of organised crime and large business, to the micro-physics of the processes of self-and sense-making of assisted survivors; from how legal cases are conducted in the UK, to how the demand from the UK impacts the online sexual exploitation of children on the other side of the world; and including the intersection of MSHT with other discourses, in media, films, and services. This volume has had the ambition of drawing a comprehensive picture of the MSHT victim/survivor trajectory. The main aim has been to offer a critical, yet ‘down-toearth’, overview of the victim/survivor journey, intended both in actual and metaphorical terms. To try to achieve this, we have put together contributors from different fields and views, from practitioners to consultants (who may have an ‘activist’ vision, or an approach which is removed from any positivist or constructivist model of knowledge production). Different approaches are also present across the chapters coming from academics, or mixed authorship (academic-and-practitioner or academic-with-practitioners). While some draw from critical theories (in power, race, migration, gender, epistemology), others are more descriptive of a specific phenomenon of investigation.

Taken together, the effort of all contributions is directed at bridging a few apparent disconnections, in order to start laying the foundations for a more integrated terrain in critical modern slavery studies, where survivors/victims will ultimately have more power. One key disconnection is the one between ideologies/representations and practices: several authors show how MSHT sit at the intersections of discourses (race, the nation, gender, biomedicine) which impact practices in all four Ps of prevention, protection, prosecution and partnership. Another key disconnection this volume tends to glue together is the one between the structural injustice allowing ‘cultures of exploitation’ to flourish, and the after-trafficking apparatus of assistance, in other words the recruitment and the recovery moment.