Three anti-trafficking experts explore what funding cuts reveal about the politics of survival in the sector

To mark our 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 Sophie Otiende, Chris Ash and Dr Allen Kiconco.

Sophie defines herself an African feminist, educator, and care practitioner. She is the founder of Azadi Community, co-founder of Collective Threads, and former CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery. Chris is co-founder of Collective Threads, former manager of the National Survivor Network USA, and a Biden appointee to the United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking. Allen is an academic and consultant with expertise around violence against women and girls in conflict and post-conflict settings in Africa. She has co-led projects on survivor leadership in anti-trafficking for the Modern Slavery Policy & Evidence Centre.

Our conversation focused on troubling power dynamics, funding structures, and the politics of lived experience in the anti-trafficking space. We also considered the transformative potential of alternative approaches to tackle violence and exploitation across the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Ella Cockbain (BTS): Anti-trafficking is taking a lot of hits these days. Trump has announced funding cuts of over $500m for international programmes on child labour, forced labour and human trafficking. Trans people's rights are being attacked; diversity, equity and inclusion is under fire; research is being defunded. How does all this affect responses to trafficking and exploitation internationally?

Sophie Otiende: Most of the work in our sector is not community-led or movement-led. It is driven by funders, so the impact is significant.

The US government is one of the biggest funders of anti-trafficking projects globally. For the longest time, the sector has occupied an apolitical space because of this. Many believed the money would stop flowing if we stopped saying that human trafficking is a bipartisan issue.

Now organisations have lost major funding, and people are afraid to speak openly about how this is affecting them. Everyone is waiting, hoping the government will be nice to us at some point and send the funding back. As an activist, this is a frustrating place to be in. Funding for essential work should never be treated as a favour. It is just the right thing to do.

The cuts have hugely impacted survivors and communities. There’s been no imagination whatsoever about how to support these communities without this funding. If we were a movement, we could form a collective response. But that's not what I'm seeing.

Survivors are getting hurt the most by this fragmentation. It doesn't matter how qualified you are in this space, most survivors aren't hired as employees. They’re hired as consultants, so most of them have now lost their jobs. They’ve been affected just as much as survivors receiving direct services.

And there won’t be any consequences. We’re not a movement, so people will just stay in this vegetative state until the US government responds. We could come up with other solutions if we bothered to try. But I am not optimistic that will happen.

Ella: Do you think this situation might force people to question the myth that trafficking is apolitical?

Sophie: People know trafficking is not apolitical. Organisations just make it seem apolitical so they can get more funding. They don't speak up because they’re trying to protect their projects. We're also not honest about how this affects people's livelihoods. I'm not talking about survivors here, but about all the other people paid by these funds. It’s not just about doing good work. Many people could end up losing their jobs. All of this is at stake.

Chris Ash: I mentor people with lived experience and support them to work within the movement. Many of them have now been laid off and lost livelihoods as well. Some had worked for years to gain the same respect in the same positions as people without lived experience.

I grieve for everyone who has lost their livelihood. But I especially grieve for mentees, friends and colleagues who lost their first professional job after working towards that for years. None of this is helping us invest in survivors' long-term stability. It’s been devastating for the wellbeing of survivors working in the movement.

Ella: Did this happen overnight, or were people warned about their contracts?

Sophie: It was sudden. People were told, “today you have funding, tomorrow you don’t.” There wasn't even a transition period.

This also raises major questions about transparency from funders. In some cases, it wasn’t clear to employees, contractors, or even entire organisations that they were actually on a US government grant, because there was a donor in the middle channelling the funds. Some survivor-led organisations discovered overnight that they'd lost the majority of their funding this way.

Funders have so much power to shift. We’re already talking a lot about this, but we’re not talking about how it shows up in places like our funding contracts. If contracts allowed for transition periods and showed clearly where the money is being distributed from, then some of these things wouldn’t happen.

Ella: What does the devastation these cuts have wrought say about the lessons learnt – or not learnt – by anti-trafficking over the last decade?

Allen Kiconco: Researchers, practitioners and academics have been talking about these eventualities for years. Now we’re seeing them manifested.

Without survivors as the main actors in our work, we are headed for trouble

Historically, survivors have worked from the margins alongside other practitioners. In many cases, those in power had used the experiences of survivors to advance their own agendas. We were beginning to make some progress in moving away from this. But these funding cuts have shown that this progress can be dismantled in just one night.

This change will drive us backwards by ten years. Even the survivors who do participate in policymaking and decision making are powerless. Their voices don’t matter. It has been revealed that, without survivors as the main actors in our work, we are headed for trouble. Otherwise, there will always be somebody else who holds more power. And they can decide to take us backwards or to continue to progress.

Sophie: The US model of survivor leadership has had a big impact on the rest of the world. We stopped doing things our own way and started doing it their way. That’s now making us feel the impact of these changes even more.

I'm happy that survivors are now on advisory boards and work as consultants. But it takes forever for a survivor to actually be embedded in the system. It’s a system that excludes them by design, and that’s yet to change.

We've made progress with how we use language, and some aesthetics have changed. But there's still resistance to breaking the system and rebuilding one that centres survivors. Now most survivors have lost their jobs as contractors. Obviously we haven’t come very far.

Ella: Is anti-trafficking really a movement, or are we talking about a collection of different organisations and individuals working loosely around interconnecting issues?

Chris: It’s both. There are movements working on anti-trafficking, and there’s an infrastructure of jobs, organisations and government agencies working to end trafficking. But they're not aligned with each other.

Other sectors have integrated survivors from the very start. The first US director of the Office on Violence Against Women, for example, was a survivor of violence against women. We don’t have the same trajectory in this sector.

Typically, movements also address one issue. Different movements can work together to fight oppression more broadly, but alone they usually work under the umbrella of one major issue. That also can’t really happen in our sector.

Definitions of trafficking seem to have everything but the kitchen sink in it. Depending on where you are and what definition you're using, you could be talking about someone who was tricked into a job then exploited. Or you could be talking about someone who was more explicitly forced to do a job. Or, in the US, it could be a child who was sexually abused and filmed. Or it could be a child exploited for commercial gain. It could even include a teenager who ran away one night and traded sex on a dare.

These are such varying experiences. You can’t galvanise solidarity around that and the system isn’t set up for it. The result is that people inevitably feel like their experiences are ignored. The dialogue and the definitions are so broad that everyone ends up left out in some way.

A friend of mine ended up trading sex because they were kicked out by their family who were homophobic. They wouldn’t call themselves a victim of human trafficking. They’d say they’re a victim of homophobia. I have another friend who was forced into criminality because their parents had to work three jobs and were gone all the time. They don’t identify as a victim of human trafficking. They identify as a victim of an economic system that produces poverty.

A lot of people don't want to identify as a survivor of human trafficking because they believe it takes attention away from the violence they actually experienced. But they are still often best placed to understand the root causes of what gets called human trafficking – whether it’s racism, extractive capitalism, lack of labour protections or lack of safe migration routes – and their inclusion would likely benefit the sector.

But getting that lived experience engagement is so rarely a top priority for organisations. They’re far too busy trying to make sure our form of violence is addressed and funded – that’s what comes first. We also struggle to foster solidarity because survivors didn’t build this sector. It was built from the outside.

Finally, at least in the US, the slavery abolitionist movement and the anti-trafficking movement are on completely different trajectories. The abolitionist movement that ended chattel slavery has moved on to opposing mass incarceration and forced labour in prisons. The US anti-trafficking movement, meanwhile, is rooted in fears of white slavery and has inherited a legacy of racist laws and ideas. This has created an enormous lost opportunity for solidarity.

Ella: Do you think shifting the frame from ‘survivor’ to ‘lived experience’ could have an impact?

Chris: It means something to me because language is important. But do I think it's going to change anything? No, because the people running the sector will bastardise any word to forward their agenda.

Sophie: The language of human trafficking also allows people to ignore root causes. When talking about trafficking, I can sit at the table with a racist and never have to bring up racism or racist migration policies. I can sit with a misogynist and not talk about the patriarchy or anti-sex work policies. We might be meeting with the aim of ending ‘modern slavery', but we don't have to talk about these issues because apparently they’re not connected.

We all know that ending trafficking is not achievable unless we deal with the root causes. But instead of making them the main conversation, we are forced to overcomplicate things. We talk about supply chains without talking about people. We adapt our language for companies. But the practice never changes.

We sang about trauma-informed care for ten years, but are organisations more trauma-informed? No, we're not. Because, most of the time, we’re adapting language in pursuit of funding. If this was a movement, we would be fighting for our shared ethics.

Chris: We’re seeing this with the Trafficking Survivors Relief Act, which is currently being proposed in the US. It would allow for people to have their records expunged of criminal convictions that resulted from their trafficking. One of the biggest supporters of the bill is the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is the largest right-wing political committee in the US.

Why are we letting someone who wants to end workplace safety regulations have anything to do with human trafficking?

CPAC wants to make sure that victims of trafficking aren't criminalised. But this bill allows us to ignore how people get criminalised in the first place. At a hearing on Capitol Hill in February, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona was speaking as if he's a huge advocate for ending trafficking. And yet, he's the same representative who introduced a bill to end the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the US agency that governs safety in the workplace.

Why are we letting someone who wants to end workplace safety regulations have anything to do with human trafficking? And how can those anti-trafficking advocates, who sat with him at the table, take themselves seriously?

Ella: Presumably CPAC wouldn't support drug policy reform or sex work policy reform?

Chris: No! They would yell and cry. And now we wonder why people with lived experience don't want to partner with us. I guarantee you that every person who has been subject to disparate policing and racially-based criminalisation knows that they're not the survivors for whom these people are fighting.

Ella: What do you do about that? Do you keep challenging the dodgy allegiances? Do you leave those spaces?

Sophie: I have left spaces. I know what my values are and what I represent. But I recognise that some people didn't sign up for a movement, they signed up for a job. So the expectation to stand up and to leave spaces might be too much for them.

Sometimes I’m the only person who speaks up. Or sometimes I feel unable to speak up, because even I am scared of what it could mean for me and my work. In those cases, I might just not accept the invitations. I’ve lost opportunities because of it. But I don't want to be in rooms like that.

Allen: Many people do choose silence, because they know speaking out could result in a backlash. Theirs might be a voice we desperately need. What they would say might also get their organisation in trouble. And if they don’t speak up, their silence could discourage others from speaking out too.

Silence is also dangerous though. If you choose not to speak up, what does that mean for the people who rely on you to speak, because they themselves are unable to speak?

Ella: How can conversations about root causes and structural issues be encouraged within the anti-trafficking sector? Or if not, how can conversations about extreme exploitation be brought to other relevant sectors?

Sophie: We need to be more creative. We don't create enough spaces for learning, cross-movement collaboration and discussion. We all already know each other. We need a new audience, new speakers and new teachers. There’s too much at stake for those already involved.

We could invite someone from the anti-racism movement into our space, for example. Or we could bring feminists in. They're equipped to talk about these issues. Real collaboration doesn't happen in a conference with a panel. And we don't need another piece of research. We need relationship building.

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Ella: What different models have you encountered for survivor engagement, and what’s been effective?

Sophie: When you introduce survivor engagement without talking about why survivors are not already in these spaces, you cause harm. Generally, our understanding of survivor engagement comes from the US context.

This means asking, how visible is the survivor? How loud are they? What trauma story are they telling? The US model has significantly impacted the survivor movement in the global majority, where they’re doing things differently.

Allen: When Sophie, Chris and I did some research with Alex Balch at the University of Liverpool, we asked people in different parts of the world what survivor engagement means to them. Some people had never heard of the concept before. Some had only heard about it because the funder had introduced it. Some were aware of it, but they weren’t using it because it could cause backlash in their own countries. Some were using the idea but changing the language.

Survivor engagement is so loud in the field of human trafficking. But it’s causing harm, because it’s confusing people. Often, the concept is completely irrelevant to the people we work with, and it tries to be a container for too many different groups of people. It’s from a different part of the world.

But we need to engage with it to get funding, so we have to consider how to work with it. That might mean that we use it when communicating with international partners and funders, but then use different terms on the ground, so our communities can understand us and don’t feel alienated.

Sophie: Most organisations working on human trafficking and exploitation in Asia and Africa already have ‘survivors’ in their organisation. Many of them were set up by survivors. So when a donor comes with money that’s ringfenced for survivor leadership or survivor engagement, it’s confusing. Because these organisations are already doing that work.

The microaggressions don’t stop just because you have the title and a seat at the table

Chris and I wrote a framework on meaningful engagement for the National Survivor Network, where we explained that engagement is a spectrum. It differs depending on context and needs. It starts with informing people, then asks for reviews and feedback, then moves on to involvement, then collaboration, and finally empowerment – which means getting survivors into leadership.

But even when you reach the highest level, there's still a structural exclusion of this particular group. I was CEO of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery, and I was treated differently to previous CEOs in that position. The main reason for this was that I was a survivor, Black and a woman. The microaggressions don’t stop just because you have the title and a seat at the table. The rules at the table have to change for that seat and title to mean anything.

There are all sorts of intersecting issues. A white survivor will be treated differently to a Black survivor, and the same again for queer survivors. ‘Survivor engagement’ is a very uncomfortable container for all of us. It almost feels like it was designed not to work. And out of everything, survivor engagement was not something the US needed to teach us.

Ella: Do you think this neo-colonial export of the survivor engagement model takes a more individualistic approach, by allowing certain people to become headline survivors rather than platforming impacted communities?

Sophie: Yes. The development space loves tokens. And it breeds competition. People will step on other survivors just to get into the limelight. I was once asked to help respond to a fight within a survivor collective, which had broken out because someone was travelling for a conference. Another survivor felt like they should’ve been attending instead, because they're more well known.

This kind of competition didn't exist before. All of a sudden, we’ve got ‘superstar’ survivors. But we’re setting them up for failure, and we’re causing harm. If you take someone out of their community and put them in an unfamiliar environment with no support, of course they're going to spiral at some point. Especially if they’ve experienced trauma. And when they do spiral, it's used as evidence to show that survivors can't be trusted, or can't cope. So we create a self-fulfilling prophecy by setting people up to fail.

This also makes accountability difficult. For example, if a survivor from Kenya goes to an event in the US, and for some reason they cause harm, it’s unlikely they’ll be held accountable. Instead, everyone will be walking on eggshells because of their race, gender, or experience. If they were in Kenya and they did something wrong, someone would just call it out.

People package this as ‘listening to survivors’. As a survivor, I don’t agree. We shouldn’t accept everything that survivors say as authority. That's not what it means – but we've made survivors believe that. They enter rooms believing that what they say is law, but then that expectation is not met.

Being a survivor is not an identity. It’s just describing someone who’s had a specific experience. It doesn't say anything about their values or their expertise. If we can move away from this understanding of survivorhood as an identity, we can change a lot of things.

Ella: A lot of thought goes into life after exploitation, but we rarely think about what comes after that. What does life look like after being in the public eye as a survivor?

Allen: Many people tell us that, even after they leave exploitation, there's no room to breathe. Often, they experience exploitation again in the anti-trafficking space.

The real healing starts only after a person steps out of the limelight. They can finally reflect on their life, connect with their community and start to move forward.

The survivor identity comes with a lot of expectations. As soon as people know you’re a survivor, they’ll ask, “survivor of what?” You have to answer that question to access funding and to open doors. Suddenly you’re not just surviving exploitation, you’re also surviving this attention. You’re forced to think about how you can capitalise on your experience.

It takes years before many people can properly reflect on their journeys. By then, they've had a chance to breathe, to challenge themselves, to get to know their own limitations. They move from a state of victimhood to leadership.

The sector can’t engage with this process at all if it’s only focused on the first year or two after exploitation.

Sophie: Long-term support and community resilience-building is so often missing. Anti-trafficking work focuses on the individual survivor, rather seeing them in community. But they were not trafficked in a vacuum.

Actual prevention is about building community resilience. We don't invest enough in that. Partly because it’s expensive. I worked in service provision, and we came across all kinds of things that would help build resilience for survivors in community. For example, someone might need a hearing aid – but that costs around $1,000.

Rescue is more tangible. You can say, ‘we trained a thousand policemen in Uganda.’ With that same money, you might only be able to support 10 survivors.

Funders are obsessed with numbers, and it’s affecting long-term support. That’s why I founded Azadi Kenya, so we could take care of ourselves, whether it's funded or not.

Ella: Where have you found solidarity and hope? And how have your own expectations and boundaries changed over time?

Sophie: I've found solidarity in people more than in organisations. There are some amazing activists trying to be the single voice of resistance in a whole machine. Many of them have effected change. Some organisations have done work on themselves, and that's great. But there’s still a long way to go before we have movement-led organisations in this space.

Allen: I totally agree. After reflecting critically on my own work, I realised I’d been too quick to ask myself, ‘how is this person different from me?’ I realised that we can relate to each other’s experiences of living in oppressive societies, even if we’ve had different journeys.

Forget about your qualifications. Forget about how fluent in languages you are, or how professional you are. You're dealing with this system on a daily basis too. So make that the starting point for engaging with your fellow human being in this space. Unfortunately, the institutions are not there yet, so we will just have to do it from the ground up. Hopefully it will eventually trickle up and create change there as well.

This conversation was also informed by a small symposium on the politics of survival in Autumn 2025, in which the people interviewed here played a central role. Joel Quirk and Ella Cockbain gratefully acknowledge the seed funding they jointly received for that from UCL (University College London) and the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.