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How can anti-trafficking help survivors to truly heal? [1]

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Date: 2023-06

Survivorship as currently practiced in the anti-trafficking movement also spends far too much time dwelling on the past. If you’re a survivor active in the movement, your assumed contribution is likely to be recounting what happened to you – rather than what you will do. Survivorship in healthcare does a much better job of focusing on what you will become.

As a survivor, how many times was I seen in a future context? Was I ever seen as someone who was capable of change? Who could heal? Someone who could forgive and allow themselves to be loved? Who could own their own home with a graduate degree? We miss these aspects when we limit how we see people. When we consign how they are to ‘good enough’.

Part of that means respecting feelings. Professionals who were helping me at the beginning of my journey of healing told me I needed to “better control my anger.” I should have instead been supported to identify my right to be so damn angry. Only then could I really choose how I wanted it to steer my life. Should I continue to experience my anger as a crushing and explosive truth? Or draw passion and direction from it to reassert my own power? That is a continual choice that I must make daily.

To help survivors, help communities

There are segments of the anti-trafficking world that drive me through the roof. Expertise on human trafficking too often comes from Google searches and what one managed to digest from a book or documentary, rather than from leaning into the root causes of the exploitation one claims to be fighting against.

Too many agencies, even long-standing and well-regarded ones, fail to understand their own power dynamics. Sometimes this means that they fail to use their influence to leverage conversations around housing insecurities, liveable wages, or medical access. When the focus is on ‘rescuing’ a person, we fail to confront the drivers of exploitation and a lot of potential change is thereby never even acknowledged. In other cases, organisations fail to see that using their power to profit off the storytelling of survivors is not the same as effecting change. It’s pimping trauma.

When agencies say they want to improve their survivor engagement, I often ask about the above dynamics. Survivor engagement is not bringing in someone after a policy was drafted to give it a stamp of approval. Survivor leadership is not giving a person the microphone at a banquet. It is about a commitment to survivorship and the vulnerabilities that lead to exploitation. It is about providing options for survivors that do not require any further connection to the movement. It is developing programmes and policies that address all the things that make it harder to heal in communities.

For example, to stand with survivors, we must challenge the practice of arresting survivors, as jail does not make one safe. Doing so would also demonstrate the importance of historical and generational trauma and its effects on those with lived experience. Healing is not just for the individual, but for their ancestors behind them and children before them. It would expose the lie of the ‘easy fix’, identify communal connections and disconnections, and work collectively to ease the hardships of our fellow neighbours.

There are alternatives to the often harmful and inconsistent approaches to survivorship that exist in the anti-trafficking world today. These initiatives encourage curiosity, and a desire to hear from a diversity of survivor perspectives. We all hurt and heal differently. We should see survivors as more than the bedrock of fundraising appeals. We should normalise healing, because we all have survived something. Using these approaches would make this field less about competition and more about cooperation. Less about the trafficking and more about the human.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/real-healing-survivors-of-trafficking-engagement/

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