Critical feedback helped our organisation transform its approach to lived experience. Here’s what we did

The anti-trafficking movement has long been divided into factions. All groups agree that no one should endure trafficking, but they break apart over the strategies to get there. For decades this has held us back.

The best-known split is between those wanting to abolish sex work and those pushing to decriminalise it. But alongside this, there are also actors advocating for a criminal justice approach, a public health approach, a human rights approach, and a moral approach. Some spend resources upstream on societal issues and primary prevention. Others work downstream to hold people accountable and provide direct services and support. Some think global, others local. These divisions have led people to focus on different areas and to prioritise different solutions, even though they say they have the same ultimate goal.

In a sense that’s a good thing. An issue this large requires a multi-prong approach, just as it requires trying, failing, and then trying something different. The anti-trafficking movement has benefited greatly from the broad support it receives and the diverse efforts to combat it. But often it feels like we spend more energy and resources fighting over areas of disagreement than working together in areas of widespread consensus. This is to the detriment of each other, our movement, and the individuals we serve.

I’ve now spent two decades in this sector, and during that time I’ve returned again and again to the same question. How do we hold space for complexity, for disagreement, for growth – and still move forward together?

I’ve come to believe that our relationships with other groups are conditioned by our own, internal humility. When we are willing to acknowledge out loud that we do not have all of the answers, that we make mistakes, and that we sometimes cause harm, we become more inclined to learn, grow and, yes, change our minds. We only become team players when we admit that we fail too.

At Love146, a US-based NGO working to prevent and provide care for those who experience child trafficking, I strive to do this.

Learning to Love146

I have now spent over a decade working at Love146. I’ve stayed not because of its mission or vision, which are similar to many other anti-trafficking groups, but because of Love146’s willingness to critique and the posture it strives to take within and outside of the movement.

Love146 has worked to combat child trafficking for over 20 years. In that time, we’ve created amazing programmes and helped a lot of children. We’ve also made mistakes. The first big one I encountered was in something as fundamental as how we told our own story.

An external trainer told us our framing was obviously not trauma-informed

I will never forget the day, early on in my tenure, when an external trainer, who was an expert in the field and also had lived experience, stood up and told us all the problems they saw with how we presented our origin story. Among these, they said our framing was obviously not trauma-informed.

This terrified me. Our story was the personal story of our co-founder, Rob Morris. He’d told it to thousands of people over the past ten years. It was as much a part of him as his left arm. On top of that, I was the one who had brought in the training and technical assistance provider whose trainer was now raising these critiques. All I could think about was that I was about to lose my job.

But that’s not what happened. Rob sat there; he listened to the feedback. And when he came to talk to me about it the next day, he asked a question rather than handing me my notice: “how can we make it better?”

For the next two years, Rob, our communications team, and that same training and technical assistance provider worked together to solicit feedback from people with lived experience on how we could improve. In 2022, we released a new video that reintroduced our origin story and explicitly acknowledged that we had made mistakes in our early years as an organisation. Rob then presented this process at two conferences in order to share our lessons learned with the larger anti-trafficking movement.

As a leader, Rob has set the tone and foundation for Love146 to be a learning organisation. One that does not purport to know all the answers, but one committed to continuous improvement. That mindset is what has permitted us to publicly acknowledge that, in the past, we have perpetuated the use of bad statistics and reinforced the false narrative that there is increased trafficking during the Super Bowl.

We believe in progress not perfection, and in that there is a freedom to always strive towards learning with the specific goal of improving our efforts in the future.

Talk to people you disagree with

Learning requires us to engage with people who have different perspectives. But that’s quickly becoming a lost art.

I was recently at a conference where facilitators asked us to stand up and move to one side of the room or the other depending on how we answered various questions. In one of the final questions, they asked “What is more important in choosing who you partner with, shared values or shared goals?” I was shocked to see that I was one of only a few people standing on the side of shared goals.

Again, I attribute this posture to Love146. We work hard to create safe spaces for people who share the common goal of ending human trafficking, but otherwise have diverse values and perspectives. We are also one of the few organisations in the US that regularly attend conferences hosted by different corners of the movement – rather than just those where we feel most at home.

After years of putting ourselves out there like this, I can tell you that the different corners do have shared goals and well-founded motivations. What we lack is safe spaces to find common ground and move forward collectively. To be clear, this is not to say that we should expect people to always find common ground or work with everyone they encounter. Nor is this to suggest that people are not able to establish certain red lines regarding who they choose to partner with. It is saying that as a field, and I would suggest also within our greater society, we need to do a better job of proactively seeking out the places and partners where we could work together, even if we have other areas of strong disagreement.

No single entity or faction is solely responsible for this deficit. We all hold culpability, just as we all hold responsibility for doing something about it. I’ll say it again: by not fixing this problem, we do a disservice to each other, our movement, and the individuals we serve.

Talk to people with lived experience

As someone who does not come to this movement with lived experience of trafficking, I have also spent a lot of time learning from my peers who do have this experience.

This personal growth has been part of a larger, organisation-wide effort. We are the first to admit that we have made many mistakes when trying to integrate lived experience into our programmes and services. We did all the things we now know not to do: we pressured people to share their stories, we tokenised, and we didn’t compensate appropriately.

We made an organisation that did not compel disclosure of lived experience, create a hierarchy of lived experience, or offer differentiated benefits based on such experience

But instead of letting these mistakes undermine our commitment to being survivor-informed, and maybe even someday survivor-led, we sought out additional advice and technical assistance to help us do it better the next time around.

We learned through this process that many people drawn to this movement and working within our organisation have personal reasons for being here. And we learned that the movement benefits from both the voices of people with lived experience of trafficking and the voices with other forms of lived experience.

As a result, we decided to create an organisation that did not compel disclosure of lived experience, create a hierarchy of lived experience, or offer differentiated benefits based on such experience.

In practice, this has meant creating policies and procedures that assume our staff has lived experience. We’re no longer creating positions specifically related to having lived experience – like Survivor Care Consultants (with Lived Experience) – and no longer ask staff to work outside of their job responsibilities.

Despite all this, we still know that we have people with lived experience on our board and staff. We seek out this information through anonymous surveys, to confirm that lived experience is still influencing our daily work. But no one is asked to share information about this in their bio, use their lived experience in their work, or speak about their lived experience publicly.

When we need people to explicitly leverage their lived experience to inform our programmes, policies, etc., we bring in outside experts with the relevant experience and compensate them appropriately for their time. Sometimes we work through a training and technical assistance centre to do this, specifically stating that we would like the consultant to consider their lived experience of trafficking alongside their other expertise.

These policies may not work for all organisations and programmes, especially those directly providing peer support. But this is how we have chosen to respond to internal and external feedback, and how we have attempted to mitigate the harms we know are being caused in the movement.

I see in Love146 what I wish we had more of in the movement: humility, and a willingness to acknowledge that we do not have all the answers, that we make mistakes, and that at times we cause harm. I have stayed all these years because, alongside this, we have an inclination to receive feedback, learn something new, and change our minds so we can do better in the future.