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').

Defenders of the sensationalist approach to story-telling maintain that these spectacles of suffering serve the ‘greater good’ because they raise awareness in ways that other kinds of stories do not, and thereby create an invaluable platform for combatting human trafficking and ‘abolishing’ modern slavery. There is no doubt that stories can generate strong emotions. But these emotions are not always channelled in productive directions. They can just as easily be misdirected or squandered.

Take, for example, the tens of thousands of people who took to the streets in 2020 to #SaveTheChildren. Qanon mobilised them, mixing real stories of child sexual exploitation with home-grown embellishments to demand that trafficked children be saved from the ‘deep state cabal’ and Hollywood celebrities. This was not the first time this had happened. ‘Pizzagate’ and ‘Wayfair’ followed the same playbook. Despite all of this activity no children were saved. No child-friendly policies were made. These strong emotions were built on sensationalism, misdirected by Qanon, and squandered by everybody else.

Qanon is easy to make fun of, or at least it was prior to the storming of the Capitol building. But these issues are not confined to people inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As Carol Vance argued in “Twelve Ways to Do Nothing about Trafficking While Pretending To”, most of the energy created by all forms of ‘raising awareness’ campaigns gets put to unproductive uses. This includes circulating grossly exaggerated ‘statistics’; depicting human trafficking victims as overwhelmingly female; talking about human rights while relying upon police and prosecutors; reducing trafficking to criminal conspiracies, mafias, and rings; and narrowly focusing upon the personal motivations of evil traffickers (rather than the malignant effects of labour markets and migration systems).

As Vance observes, the way a problem is defined shapes the corrective measures which get adopted in response. Simplistic and sensationalised stories pave the way for ineffective or harmful ‘solutions’. Rescue fantasies are also not just the preserve of Qanon. Self-appointed saviours like Kristof regularly invoke disempowering language and images to justify paternalistic, militaristic and carceral solutions. Sex workers have been on the receiving end of these kinds of harmful interventions for decades now.

The question of who speaks for whom is central to these dynamics. Survivors of human trafficking don’t always control their own stories, and sometimes find it very difficult to object when their experiences are used to advance larger political agendas, or even commercial interests. This often happens when campaigners and other actors take on the mantle of ‘speaking for’ individuals, and then end up prioritising selling stories over safeguarding issues. Journalists select the most evocative quotes. Commercial publishers want to see a return on investment. Researchers write with an eye on journal impact factors, promotions, and future funding bids.

There are two main issues at stake here: how stories get told and by whom, and the extent to which survivors are only valued for their stories. Survivor engagement is designed to address both.

Survivor engagement in anti-trafficking work

The core idea behind survivor engagement is that people with lived experience of trafficking should be central to activism, policy and service provision. It’s an old idea encapsulated in the now famous slogan of disability rights campaigners, ‘nothing about us without us’.

This form of engagement comes with an expanded job description. It recognises that survivors have unique forms of expertise: they know what trafficking looks like, how it is experienced, and the effects of specific policies and interventions . It can’t just be about stories of suffering, but these stories still matter as well. Having survivors speak in their own words and on their own terms is widely argued as crucial for moderating the worst effects of sensationalism and manipulation.

Numerous anti-trafficking organisations have signalled, at least on the surface, that they support this overall approach. Recent examples include the Freedom Network, the Global Freedom from Slavery Forum, Polaris, GAATW, CATW, Freedom Fund, Walk Free, the US State Department, and the UN Deputy Secretary-General. Other prominent initiatives include the establishment of survivor advisory councils to help guide organisational responses, as well as new organisations/alliances specifically designed for survivors.

The sticking point is implementation. This starts with the label. Plenty of people with lived experience of exploitation resist being called ‘survivors’ since it means being defined by the worst moments of their lives. It also makes it unlikely, as many survivor leaders will tell you, that one will ever be considered an anti-trafficking professional. The perceived distinction between these two categories can be very strong, so if you want to be treated as an authority and not as a story it can be wise to keep your experiences to yourself. Survivors with ambition may have a choice to make.

Second, survivors of trafficking do not always agree. That’s not surprising – humans rarely agree on much. But in this case it can lead to distressing situations in which survivors line up against each other in policy disagreements, such as on the status of commercial sex, with each side of the divide calling upon ‘their’ survivors to help advance their cause.

Third, not all survivors want to be storybooks. Meaningful survivor engagement requires a supportive environment where individuals can also decide to not talk about their experiences without fear of losing support. This can be a very difficult proposition. Being classified a trafficking survivor is often a pre-condition for securing a visa or gaining access to resources, so vulnerable individuals experience intense pressure from many directions to share – and share again – their intimate stories. Despite efforts to change things survivors still struggle with scripts which say how they must behave.

Fourth, not all organisations are as committed to change as they would like to think. Meaningful survivor engagement means being open to changing course, and not all organisations have the strength to abandon dearly held positions which survivors are critical of. They are instead likely to go looking for new survivors who validate the things their organisation already ‘knows’ to be true.

Finally, there are times when survivor engagement has been invoked by anti-trafficking organisations to deflect potential criticism. The ‘right’ survivors can be used as shields for organisations to hide behind, thereby pushing back difficult conversations about where and how change might be required.

A good example of these politics in action involves the indefinite detention of migrant sex workers in India. Detention has been hugely controversial for decades, yet the organisations involved continue to defend their conduct by selectively promoting the experiences of sex workers who are prepared to speak in support of their preferred ‘solution’. Having someone with lived experience publicly endorse their own detention makes it much easier to ignore the scores of others who regularly report being revictimised and abused by their ‘rescuers’.

Anti-trafficking organisations have a long history of dodging responsibility for specific problems because they fear open acknowledgment would undercut the credibility of their cause. Survivor engagement is supposed to change this by grappling with how stories of suffering and survivors of trafficking have been (ab)used by anti-trafficking campaigners. But it can also be called upon by these very same campaigners to hold back the tide.

The politics of survival

This does not mean, however, that survivors of human trafficking have not been directly challenged. One of the most distressing aspects of the #metoo movement has been the speed and ease with which commitments to #believesurvivors have been discarded in favour of absolutely vicious personal attacks against many survivors of sexual harassment and assault. Numerous people continue to direct their sympathy towards perpetrators of sexual assault, and to undercut and attack their victims. We should not be surprised that Andrew Tate, currently detained on charges of rape and human trafficking, continues to command strong support.

Some survivors of human trafficking have had similar experiences. Take the recent fervour over Muslim and Asian ‘grooming gangs’ in the United Kingdom. Parts of the British government and far-right extremists have tried to selectively blame Muslims for trafficking and child sexual abuse. White Britons who speak out against this risk being targeted as ‘race traitors’ and frequently take political and personal fire. This includes survivors of human trafficking, who have been regularly subject to right wing attacks.

There are also recent examples of survivors of human trafficking being treated poorly by anti-trafficking organisations. In a 2022 piece entitled How I Survived the Anti-Trafficking Movement, Rose Kalemba describes being used, exploited and then discarded by anti-trafficking lobbyists and advocates. She concludes with these thoughts on deeds done in the name of the ‘greater good’:

In a more recent post on her personal blog, Kalemba reflected on the challenges of being publicly known as a trafficking survivor. The full piece is worth reading from start to finish, but this passage is especially relevant:

These examples demonstrate that survivors can be swept up in political and ideological currents which can easily escape their control. Once stories and images of suffering enter into the public domain they can be quickly repackaged and placed in the service of any number of agendas. No amount of ethical safeguards can prevent this. At best they affect how stories are produced and presented. But they cannot control how they end up being consumed or co-opted.

When is a survivor not a survivor?

Not everyone who has experienced trauma and lived to tell the tale will be recognised as a survivor. There are no hard and fast rules for determining who is ‘in’ or ‘out’, but it is clear that some forms of exploitation and abuse are much more likely to be recognised and respected as examples of survival than others. Many people who work on this topic have pointed to the figure of the ‘innocent victim’, which has its origins in the ‘white slavery’ panics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and which created a set of cultural expectations regarding how ‘true’ victims should look and behave.

Systematic abuses perpetrated by governments further complicate this equation. Survivor engagement initiatives are not confined to anti-trafficking organisations. They have also been championed and funded by Western governments. It is also clear, however, that these anti-trafficking commitments routinely run up against much better funded initiatives to deter migration by making life as hard as possible for migrants. Notable examples include child separation programmes in the United States; EU-funded private prisons ‘warehousing’ migrants in Libya; the UK’s plan to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda; and ‘pushbacks’ in Greece.

Anti-migrant policies produce catastrophic levels of trauma and abuse, but the countless individuals who have endured them are unlikely to be recognised as survivors. Being a survivor of trafficking packs a different political punch to being a survivor of immigration detention, family separation, or a sinking boat. Plenty of people could testify to the cruelty of anti-immigration policies, but they are not the survivors governments are inclined to listen to.

This is an enormous constraint on the practical potential of survivor engagement initiatives. Human trafficking is inextricably tied up with government policies on migration, drugs, incarceration, and labour, amongst others. It’s unlikely that any real progress will be made on the former without changing the latter. Many survivors know this, but they also know that governments become selectively deaf whenever contentious political topics such as immigration policy are placed on the table.

Survivors are most likely to receive a respectful hearing when they say things that are politically ‘safe’ or useful. Even top-notch survivor engagement is unlikely to bring about an across-the-board transformation. Anti-trafficking interventions have been consistently throttled by anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-worker interests. Survivors who propose better treatment for vulnerable migrants and precarious workers are unlikely to be welcomed by governments who talk about listening to survivors.

Time to slow down

Human trafficking campaigners are always in a hurry. This is sometimes because a person is in distress, but it’s mainly because they have spent decades constructing an image of trafficking as an acute emergency that requires immediate action.

This sense of panic has been incredibly useful for the anti-trafficking cause. It has pushed human trafficking remarkably high up on the political and social agenda. Campaigners working on other problems would love to have this level of global exposure. But it comes with a long-term cost.

Emergencies are no time for careful and deliberate action. They create permission to act fast and go beyond the usual limits, enabling organisations and individuals to consistently cut corners to get things done. Anti-trafficking campaigners have become notorious for making up statistics. Campaigns are juiced with sensationalist and simplistic images and stories. ‘Rescue’ as a tactic has been discredited for decades, yet continues to be favoured by numerous organisations and officials. What other course of action can be realistically contemplated when action is needed now? The political architecture of trafficking has been almost entirely built upon spectacles of suffering, and these spectacles have pushed many people in the field in towards various forms of emergency thinking.

Some organisations and individuals have been trying their best change this state of affairs. But they continually run up against the logic of emergency. Many of their peers continue to favour ‘greater good’ arguments, and maintain that there is strategic value in continuing to deploy stories of suffering. There also remains a widespread reluctance to admit one’s mistakes, or to call out the mistakes of others, for fear of undermining the cause. When you are faced with an emergency do you navel gaze or close ranks? Over the last decade numerous papers have been published seeking to identify ‘what works’ in anti-trafficking. It is much harder for organisations to have a frank and open conversation about what hasn’t been working.

Survivor engagement cannot take place in the panic room. It requires a long-term conversation about what has not been working within anti-trafficking circles. It requires grappling with the ways in which survivor stories and experiences have been commodified, and with how ‘greater good’ thinking has resulted in the anti-trafficking cause being prioritised over the physical, professional, and psychological needs of survivors. And it requires being genuinely open to changing organisational positions, practices and priorities.

For the last decade anti-trafficking campaigners have been proclaiming that they are committed to ending human trafficking by 2030. This has never been a realistic goal, but it creates an artificial sense of urgency which has further contributed to a continual search for the ‘next big thing’ which will solve the problem of ‘modern slavery’ and trafficking once and for all. This is not going to happen. The problems associated with human trafficking are always going to be with us. It is much better to think of these issues as a persistent and structural problem, rather than as an emergency scenario.

It is time to take a deep breath and stop barrelling forward. There needs to be an open-ended and ethically-driven conversation which places lived experiences of survival at the centre. This cannot be rushed. And it won’t be a silver bullet. It is extraordinarily difficult to change how governments and other key actors engage with anti-trafficking whenever anti-migrant policies enter into the equation. Further survivor engagement will not change this anytime soon. What it can do, however, is ensure that anti-trafficking campaigners can finally get their own house in order.

This is one of those cases where the journey needs to be more important than the destination. There is no way of undertaking ethical and meaningful survivor engagement if you are always in a hurry.

So let’s all slow down.

Explore the series

• What does real healing look like for survivors? – Aubrey Lloyd
• Rescuing the rescuers: how survivors are re-making anti-trafficking – Chris Ash
• Forgotten survivor initiatives: the zombie projects of anti-trafficking – Ayushman Bhagat
• The anti-trafficking movement is pitting survivors against each other – Kate D'Adamo
• How big tech and AI are putting trafficking survivors at risk – Sabra Boyd
• The far right tried to profit off my story, says Telford sex ring survivor – Holly Archer
• How to speak to trafficking survivors without hurting them (a journalist’s guide) – Katia Krastanova
• Trafficking survivor says she was told to blame Muslims in Lords speech – Caitlin Spencer
• It's time for anti-trafficking to move beyond the 'victim' label – Borislav Gerasimov