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Human trafficking and the politics of survivor engagement [1]
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Date: 2023-06
Stories of survival in the face of extreme adversity have always been prized by the anti-trafficking movement. They give a human face to complex issues and are extraordinarily effective at propelling audiences into action.
Such stories are even more compelling when told live, in the first person. For decades now, campaigners have asked survivors to speak about their worst moments in public or before television cameras.
Stories drive attention. Attention triggers interest and investment. The anti-trafficking cause advances.
Rinse and repeat…
Survivors are crucial to this formula, but not all have been equally welcome. There are more survivors than microphones, so anti-trafficking organisations have historically been able to pick and choose whom they platform.
This means that a lot of strategic calculation takes place behind the scenes. Which stories best support the interests of the organisation, how will they be presented, and who will tell them? Do the owners of those stories have engaging personalities? ‘Appropriate’ appearances? Will they effectively advance the overall cause?
Survivors with stories which cannot be effectively ‘sold’ are regularly left out in the cold. Survivors with ‘useful’ stories are welcomed, but for the most part only if they are willing to become professional storytellers of suffering. It’s a position that enjoys a platform but little internal power. Messengers aren’t on the same level as managers; mouthpieces don’t receive the same respect as experts. This is what many ‘survivor leaders’ have discovered after joining the movement. Inside the organisation they are judged as people with valuable lived experience, but without the necessary training and experience to lead.
This is not a new issue. The problems associated with spectacles of suffering have been called out many times before. Survivors of trafficking have more to offer than their stories and sensationalising their suffering to raise awareness hurts at least as much as it helps. So what needs to change?
Our new feature on survivor engagement
Anti-trafficking organisations have responded to their critics by signalling their support for a new model of survivor engagement. One which places survivors at the centre of political activism, service provision, and organisational leadership. This has the potential to be the most important innovation within anti-trafficking in decades, but turning rhetoric into practice will be challenging. Survivor engagement is easy to talk about but difficult to implement effectively and ethically. And there are many interests standing in the way.
Over the next month Beyond Trafficking and Slavery will take a long overdue dive into the politics of survivor engagement. Our new feature includes specifically commissioned pieces from survivors of human trafficking who reflect about their own experiences with anti-trafficking initiatives. It also includes a series of applied examples of survivor engagement in practice, such as the Kinshasa declaration on reparations.
One of the core themes tying many of these contributions together is the need to understand survivor engagement as a long-term, ethically-driven process that grapples with past mistakes and genuinely opens space to alternatives. Not everyone is prepared to do this kind of challenging work. Some organisations have strategically embraced the language of survivor engagement but not its substance. These organisations are not hard to spot: they are the ones who have attached a new ‘survivor engagement’ portfolio onto an established organisational structure, without changing any other aspects of their organisation, its processes, or overall priorities.
It also important to be clear where and how survivor engagement has the most potential to bring about change. There is no doubt that engagement has the potential to transform the internal practices and ethical foundations of anti-trafficking organisations. But it is too much to expect survivor engagement to transform how societies relate to lived experience of exploitation and abuse more broadly. There will always be a market for stories of suffering. And we live in a world where markets are very hard to escape.
The commodification of suffering
Some stories have more popular and political appeal than others. Suffering has always been a particularly valuable commodity for journalists, campaigners, politicians and publishers.
The journalist Edward Behr titled his memoir Anyone Here Been Raped and Speak English? after a question he overheard while reporting in the Congo in the 1960s. Decades later, the influential New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a piece with the same title in which he said, “although most of us don’t put it so crassly, that’s in a sense what we’re after: A victim with a wrenching tale and an ability to recount it in a way that will move readers or viewers.”
Both Behr and Kristof point to how stories of suffering are selected and presented according to the preferences of the audiences consuming them. Many different factors get considered. Race, gender, youth and location all influence market value. Sex always sells. Messy life stories complicate things. The appearance of innocence is especially prized.
Simplistic and sensationalist stories regarding human trafficking are so common that campaigners have drafted detailed guidelines to curb the persistent use of “disempowering language and images”. There is a fine line between witnessing and voyeurism, and between empathy and more troubling responses (hence the concern around 'trauma porn').
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/trafficking-survivors-arent-just-stories-to-be-sold/
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