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Why do anti-trafficking donors fund their critics? [1]
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Date: 2025-06
To mark Beyond Trafficking and Slavery's tenth anniversary, we are releasing a new feature which reflects on how the anti-trafficking field has evolved, and where it might be – or should be – going in the future. As part of this project we sat down with Ryan Heman, the head of the global supply chains team at Humanity United (and our principal funder for many years). The conversation focused upon two main themes: learning and adaption, and funding and its effects.
Funding is the essential lubricant that drives anti-trafficking forward. It both constrains and enables organisations and individuals in ways that are often hard to see from the outside. The quest for cash creates powerful incentives to mimic the priorities and languages of funders, and in this way the preferences and perspectives of states, donors, corporations and foundations from the Global North have shaped the anti-trafficking field in profound ways. Civil society organisations have been obliged to both respond to and reinforce funders’ views about the world.
This is particularly true in the case of anti-trafficking, since many organisations who work on related issues have strategically migrated into anti-trafficking circles in the hope of securing more resources. By talking to Ryan we hope to make some of these dynamics more visible, to better understand how the field looks from a funder standpoint, and to critically reflect upon the position of BTS within this funding ecosystem.
We greatly appreciate Ryan sharing his thoughts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joel Quirk (BTS): How did you come to be working for a philanthropic foundation with a specific focus on human trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour?
Ryan Heman (Humanity United): My career in philanthropy started at The Philanthropy Workshop. It was an educational firm trying to move high net worth individuals from passive cheque-writing to active engagement.
At the time, Humanity United (HU) was funding The Philanthropy Workshop to run an immersion programme on human rights philanthropy, which aligned with my hope of establishing a career in human rights. Shortly thereafter I began to work for HU directly – and have held a number of roles over the past decade. Since 2018, my body of work for HU has focused on exploitation in global supply chains.
Joel: How would you describe your relationship to the anti-trafficking field?
Ryan: A lot of my commitment stems from trying to bring my own queer experience and lens to the human trafficking field. The anti-trafficking sector has harmed queer populations in many ways, but I stayed in the field because I felt it needed to be critiqued. Ten years on, I would say that the anti-trafficking field has developed significantly. Harmful narratives have, to a certain degree, now been unpacked.
Joel: Many people come into anti-trafficking with optimism and enthusiasm, and then get increasingly world weary over time. Have you done the opposite?
Ryan: I definitely entered philanthropy and anti-trafficking as a critic, and I remain a critic. But my views have become more nuanced as I’ve gotten older and the ways I lean into my values have changed. I’ve become more pragmatic about the world.
I also think there is much more variation within the field than some appreciate. From the inside, I’m well-positioned to articulate how things are more complex than they appear from the outside.
Joel: One of the key issues here is whether or not people and organisations working on anti-trafficking issues have been able to evolve and learn from past mistakes. How much learning do you think has actually taken place over the last decade or so?
Ryan: One example of learning might be the renewed emphasis on survivor leadership. It has been a real journey for foundations, nonprofits, and organisations to understand that, if we’re here to support survivors, we actually need to centre survivors’ ideas – and ownership of the solutions which are implemented. We’re not where we need to be yet, but that is one of the big steps that I hope we will continue to lean into.
Joel: The field was in an ideological fight over sex work in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but this seems to have died down over the last decade, at least in some circles. Is there less friction now than there was in the past? Or perhaps some new players who are less invested in this polarised debate?
Ryan: It’s true that, during the early days of the movement, organisations fought over where they stood on sex work vs. sex trafficking. HU’s perspective at the time was that the preponderance of trafficking was actually labour trafficking, so we tried to stay out of the debate.
Today there is more emphasis on labour trafficking across the movement. There are a few pockets where sex work/sex trafficking remains a contentious issue. But it is no longer disrupting the field and stealing momentum from us.
Joel: This also comes down to how the field is imagined. I hear lots of people talking about an anti-trafficking movement, but so many things have been thrown into the mixing bowl. Can we credibly talk about an anti-trafficking movement? Or is it more useful to think in terms of a bunch of loosely related issues – sex work, criminal justice, governance, regulation, labour rights, and more – that have been lumped together under a single label?
Ryan: The ‘anti-trafficking movement’ has become a misnomer. When it was smaller there were those two main camps we just talked about. But it has splintered as it has grown. There are now more people trying to prevent trafficking and/or exploitation than ever before. But not everybody identifies their work as anti-trafficking, and we’re working in pockets rather than as a cohesive movement. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s just how we’ve evolved.
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https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/why-do-anti-trafficking-donors-fund-their-critics/
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