Chris Ash is the Survivor Leadership Program Manager at the National Survivor Network, where they are developing programming to empower people with lived experience to engage meaningfully as the anti-trafficking movement’s organisational, strategy, and thought leaders. Beyond Trafficking and Slavery caught up with Chris as part of our series on the politics of survivor leadership to discuss the role of survivors in anti-trafficking work today, what must change to create a survivor-led movement, and why it so often seems that survivors are deployed more than they are engaged. An explanation of how we produced this interview can be found at the end.
Joel Quirk (BTS): Could we start with learning about your own history in the anti-trafficking movement?
Chris Ash: I came to the National Survivor Network (NSN) in December 2021. Before that I worked 12 years in the anti-rape movement. I'm a survivor myself, although I didn't go through any formal anti-trafficking programmes.
