Members of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) have long worked with survivors to shape their work. Some were even surprised when we asked them if they involve people with lived experience – for them it was self-obvious. Others explained that engaging with survivors is a risky business, and that the countries they operate in have even deported non-nationals for speaking up against harmful policies.
Since August, we have been interviewing our members about their histories, programmes, target groups, successes, challenges, and more. We particularly wanted to know about the role of survivors in project implementation and decision making. The results so far – from around 30 NGOs – showed a diverse range of practices and contexts. We’ve summarised some of the responses here, in an early look at our findings.
Looking the part
At least seven groups have survivors of trafficking, migrants, or sex workers in their staff and on their boards. They are not always there because of what their lived experience brings to policy or programme development. At times it has more to do with ensuring a culturally sensitive environment for their clients. As Anita Teekah from Safe Horizon’s anti-trafficking programme said, “I want to make sure that our workers look like the clients we’re serving.”
Teekah explained that her team intentionally has social workers of different genders, migrant backgrounds, and sexual orientations because clients feel more comfortable disclosing their experiences to counsellors who are like them. Isabella Chen from LEFÖ in Austria made a similar point. “In Europe, a lot of the organisations are very white and may only work with migrant women when they need a translator,” she said. “We have many colleagues working here from different backgrounds who often have experience of migration themselves.”
Cultivating leadership
Some groups have empowered survivors to be leaders within their organisations. Only Safe Horizon mentioned having a “survivor leadership group”, whose members meet every month and discuss “what needs they have that we haven’t met yet”. An example of one such need was support for tuition fees. In response to this feedback, the group secured funding to pay for survivors’ education and that of their dependants in origin countries. “The hope is that if they have a strong academic foundation and become more competitive in the job market domestically, they won’t need to migrate for work if they don't want to,” Teekah said.
The claim that non-nationals can speak up and influence policymaking is often empty rhetoric, or worse.
Other groups have supported the self-organisation of their constituencies into separate entities. For example, Platform for Labour Action, with support from GAATW, set up the Domestic Workers’ Association in Uganda. As a result, “the ministry now doesn’t call PLA to consult on issues affecting domestic workers – they engage domestic workers directly.”
In Singapore, migrants are not allowed to run organisations, so our Singaporean member organisation Transient Workers Count Too set up sub-entities for Indonesian domestic workers, Filipino domestic workers, and South Asian male workers. It’s an umbrella structure that, when necessary, doubles as a shield. As the group’s vice-president, Alex Au, explained, the criminalisation and deportation of non-nationals who speak up is largely ignored in the international discourse on survivor participation. But the danger is real.
“The idea that the migrant worker should be at the forefront of campaigns is one of those framed from a western context where the migrant can speak up,” Au said. “But in places like Singapore, which are very quick to deport, encouraging migrants to speak up is self-defeating. It happened recently when someone was deported for criticising the Covid policy for migrants.”
Unfortunately, Au’s high estimation of western contexts isn’t justified; I’ve heard similar concerns from GAATW members in Germany, the UK, and Canada. The claim that survivors who are non-nationals can speak up and influence policymaking is often empty rhetoric, or worse.
Open ears
Many members listen to their constituents’ views and concerns through research, focus groups discussions, or community meetings. They then incorporate them in their prevention, assistance, and policy advocacy. In Turkey, for example, the Human Resource Development Foundation identifies refugees’ challenges and priorities via participatory discussions in their offices. Others conduct focus groups with survivors to get feedback on prevention materials, trainings, and direct assistance, or to gather testimonials.
At times the feedback is oriented around an organisation’s output. For example, ASTRA (Serbia) involved survivors in the preparation of a national report on human trafficking, and La Strada (Moldova) surveyed survivors about the National Anti-Trafficking Strategy. Elsewhere, CHS Alternativo from Peru took part in a research project that GAATW led in 2013 with 17 members from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. They interviewed 121 survivors who had used their services to find out about their experience of assistance interventions and their recovery process after trafficking.
In the UK, Focus on Labour Exploitation said it always involves community members as researchers. “Every stage of this process is to make sure that we ask the right questions and use the right methods to reach people,” FLEX’s chief executive, Lucila Granada, said. “We also involve the workers in understanding the findings and analysing the findings within the wider context of their experiences.”
Telling a painful story just to make other people feel sorry doesn’t contribute anything.
The most common way of incorporating learnings from survivors is through direct service provision. As Lelia Hunziker from our Swiss member FIZ – Advocacy and Support for Migrant Women and Victims of Trafficking said, “our advocacy work finds solutions to the problems and structural hurdles we identify in our daily counselling.” Be it through outreach work, hotline consultations, shelter provisions, or counselling sessions, all groups providing direct assistance reported learning about their constituents’ needs from these interactions.
Most members described listening to survivors and other impacted groups, and adjusting advocacy and assistance interventions in line with their views and experiences, as integral to their work. They didn’t see it as a separate or extraordinary activity. Some seemed almost taken aback by the question, as if it was so self-obvious that it didn’t merit a discussion. To be honest, that had long been my assumption as well, until #ListenToSurvivors and calls for ‘victims’ voices to lead the way’ showed me that it’s not as normal as I had thought.
The many faces of survivors
Within all of this involvement, however, we must always be cautious not to exploit survivors as a means to an end. They should never become the collateral damage of anti-trafficking work. As Luz Stella Cárdenas from Fundación Renacer in Colombia said, convincing a survivor “to tell a painful story just to make other people feel sorry doesn’t contribute anything. It only re-victimises them.”
We must also remember that survivors are not one-dimensional beings. They are as complex as anyone else. Beyond anti-trafficking, survivors have experience with and views on, for example, immigration, racism, police and prison reform, healthcare, and social welfare, to name a few. They are rarely asked to comment on these issues. This is a mistake, and when they are hesitant to contribute they should be offered help to do so. Meera Raghavendra from Women’s Initiatives and Purabi Paul from Sramajeevi Mahila Samity in India, for example, both said that they actively mentor and build leadership among the women they work with this goal in mind.
As our International Coordinator Bandana Pattanaik once noted, many survivors find the survivor identity “a problematic appendage and a barrier to community reintegration”. While they appreciate the assistance they received, they would’ve preferred to receive “just normal help, without the terms ‘trafficking’ or ‘victim’ being used.”
With millions of people excluded from rights and political participation due to their immigration status, gender, race, caste, occupation, sexual orientation, and so on, it may be a fantasy to demand the inclusion of those who have experienced trafficking. Instead, we should demand that all voices and experiences are heard and included in policy, so that people do not become victims of trafficking in the first place.
