These norms limit the collective imagination about what people with lived experience have to offer. They make it difficult for even those survivors with professional experience to be seen as professionals, and keep survivors seeking to develop further from being taken seriously. “A lot of survivors are put down,” one anti-trafficking professional with lived experience said. “They're not able to grow, or people just want to keep them small.”
This theme was brought up repeatedly in my interviews. It resonated with my own experiences as well. Survivors benefit from positive support, from choosing their roles within the movement and setting their own goals for ‘success’, and from having other professionals invest in their success. “It's more than just bringing in people and hiring them to talk to us,” one interviewee clarified. “It is building people so we can decentre ourselves and … expand the platform to survivors.”
Second, the belief that survivors cannot be professional limits what roles they are allowed to do, and the work they are offered often comes with an expectation of storytelling. This falls into three main categories:
● Peer support, in which they share their stories with other survivors to give them hope while the case manager or clinician manages the logistics of the client’s support.
● Policy work, in which they share their stories to influence anti-trafficking policy while policy advocates manage the details and complexities of the legislation.
● Public speaking, in which they share their stories at events to raise funds or awareness, sometimes co-presenting with a non-survivor who re-frames the details into professional recommendations and educational takeaways.
At first, it can be exciting for survivors to share their stories and be heard and believed. For many this is a new experience. “You're not really aware of the ways that this can kind of become harmful after a while,” one interviewee said. “But for the first time ever, I was someone's success story, right? Like, someone's inspiration porn. It was like, ‘you’re so resilient, you're so incredible...’ And I never had anybody tell me that before.”
Unfortunately, receiving this much intense validation for being resilient and incredible also carries an expectation to always be an appropriate ‘after picture’. “We're all supposed to be so strong because everyone's supposed to be healed enough,” this interviewee shared. “We’re not allowed to be human.” This puts professionals with lived experience under the microscope in their professional spaces in ways their co-workers are not.
A crisis responder getting overwhelmed by an upsetting hotline call and needing to debrief afterwards with their supervisor is seeking trauma-informed supervision; a co-worker with lived experience who does the same may find their readiness to work in the field questioned. An employee getting frustrated during a team meeting and snapping at a colleague may be seen as having a bad day and receive a follow-up discussion about ways to navigate workplace trauma in the future. A co-worker with lived experience who does the same may find their legitimate concerns entirely dismissed as the trauma responses of a person who is ‘hard to work with’. Alternatively, they may be coddled or overly accommodated in ways that create tension and lead to an unsustainable working environment.
Whether the survivor is dismissed as too traumatised or infantilised by not being held to the same standards, survivors receive the same message: they are not seen as full professionals. It’s true that survivors’ experience of exploitation impacts their relationships and gives them unique insights. But they are not exceptions and should not be ‘othered’ in limiting ways. Like all workers, survivors deserve:
- supportive mentoring and development
- redirection when they are struggling in their work
- routine opportunities to provide feedback about workplace dynamics
- the freedom to bring their whole selves into the workplace without their personal experiences becoming the focus of how they are treated.
Power dynamics amplify disparities
The interviews I conducted with anti-trafficking professionals in the US made clear that these confusing and harmful experiences and biases are often amplified for survivors working in the sector who are Black, Indigenous, migrants, two-spirit or LGBTQ+, do not have formal education, or otherwise carry the weight of societal and structural oppression. When these survivors share their insights or experience, they are likely to experience microaggressions if not outright harassment. As one interviewee said:
People would come up to me and say things like, ‘Oh my God, you are SO articulate.’ … People think that if you speak in African American vernacular or if you have words in Spanish that you might throw in there from time ... this doesn't take away from my intelligence or capability or the story that I'm telling unless you're projecting that onto me.
Furthermore, these survivors reported being told to refrain from speaking about the connections between structural and cultural oppression and human trafficking in order to better suit narratives that receive funding and media approval. “When we talk about the -isms, those are things that kind of get kicked out – racism, sexism, capitalism,” one interviewee explained, “because when we start to talk about those things, we're talking more on a macro level of change versus the micro level of change.”
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