Anti-trafficking has always been the handmaiden of Global North power, never its rebellious daughter. Let’s change that

Several months back, the two of us took part in a group discussion with anti-trafficking professionals about the ways anti-trafficking must course-correct to meet the present moment. We found ourselves once again beating the “cross-movement partnership” drum. We said we do not work in any one movement – our work to end exploitation must partner with related movements like those focusing on feminism, labour rights, migration, child rights, and anti-colonial systems. This is a core principle of the Collective Threads Initiative, a project dedicated to fostering movements for social change that we co-founded in 2024.

As we spoke, another attendee nodded in agreement. “Yes,” she said. “They still have money.”

It was a short sentence, spoken off the cuff and maybe later made that person cringe. Yet it exposed something about the way the anti-trafficking sector operates. It is largely dependent on development funding, struggles to see the intertwined nature of oppression, and struggles to practice the intertwined path to liberation. Anti-trafficking engages with other movements in transactional, self-serving ways. It seeks to train them rather than partner with them, and to attach itself to funding streams wherever they are found.

For at least two decades the sector has been paid to behave this way. While other movements engaged in rigorous debates about the risks of accepting government funding for survivors and their work, the Western anti-trafficking sector has consistently viewed federal partnerships as easy and ideal sources of funding and support. While other movements grappled with the ways development funding exerts control over what solutions are expected, anti-trafficking has always embraced the way charity opens up space for controlling others’ behaviour. How did the anti-trafficking sector end up with this apparent predilection for the taste of boot leather?

Simple. Anti-trafficking is the child of colonial legacies, development aid and philanthropy, and it is an obedient child at that. Like its parents, it reinforces the same hierarchies of power and knowledge without question. Its own legacy will be the depoliticisation of a raft of social movements that were fighting different types of oppression long before human trafficking became a popular term.

What now falls under ‘human trafficking’ is addressed by the women’s rights, migrants’ rights, labour rights, and sex workers’ rights movements, all of which are more radical than the sector created under the banner of “fighting human trafficking.” The exceptionalism that we see in this sector – in which human trafficking is seen as something new, more extreme and entirely different from other forms of violence – completely erases the work that other movements had done in the past. It literally creates a silo for anti-trafficking to sit in, and those inside show little interest in what goes on beyond its walls.

How to build a silo

Silos exist because funding is often conditioned not only on doing specific activities, but also on working with specific people. To break them would require a different funding model, one which better accounts for how oppression occurs in communities and incentivises collaboration. The current funding structure does the opposite of this – it reinforces competition.

As a result, the anti-trafficking sector treats collaboration more like conquest. It enters into it intending to take control over the narrative, the programming, and ultimately the impacted communities.

During their time as a technical assistance provider for rape crisis and domestic violence centres, Chris was regularly contacted by centres who had been approached by human trafficking organisations with offers of training for providing services to survivors of trafficking. More often than not, these trainings discouraged centres from honouring the autonomy of sex workers, advocated for permitting trafficking survivors less choice over the services they received than other victims, and entirely elided the role of intimate violence in trafficking in non-sexual forms of labour.

We have both seen anti-trafficking organisations host roundtable discussions with partners from other movements, either inviting only the partners who agreed with the mainstream human trafficking framework or inviting diverse partners but discouraging discussions that challenged the appropriateness of existing anti-trafficking solutions. Ultimately, most collaborations are designed to get other people to understand and adopt the human trafficking framework. They’re not about anti-trafficking interrogating its own blind spots.

Many newer activists have not experienced the harsh realities of activism before now. That’s becoming a liability

This intellectual insularity and presumed superiority keeps anti-trafficking from learning from other fields’ grassroots philosophies and community-built strategies, preventing the mixing of ingredients to create something new and better. But genuine collaboration and solidarity require your core identity to soften, evolve, and change. In this context, it also requires relaxing the anti-trafficking identity to make space for embracing other, more grassroots movement identities.

People inside anti-trafficking find this very difficult to do. Even when we outwardly agree that we need everyone at the table, sector leaders often structure things so that it is their table controlled by their rules. This is a lost opportunity. Such interactions are a chance to learn and integrate time-tested organising and movement-building frameworks that could foster real solidarity. Instead, more often than not they merely provide cover for anti-trafficking to adopt time-tested organising and movement-building language.

Talking without walking

We have seen anti-trafficking actors integrate the language of other movements into anti-trafficking work without learning and honouring the accompanying frameworks – frameworks that developed out of long histories of community mobilisation in the face of violence and oppression.

Consider the true example of an anti-trafficking organisation that created a ‘harm reduction’ website. It mimicked the style of sex worker outreach websites, but instead directed users to services and support groups that were grounded in carceral or abolitionist approaches. Even if the website provided some helpful resources (like a running list of violent clients, or access points for free condoms), the underlying motive of eliminating sex workers made the site a trap. How can such a group collaborate or build trust with other movements doing outreach work with sex workers if that is how they behave?

We’ve seen language co-opted without integration of frameworks throughout the anti-trafficking sector. Organisations tackle ‘forced labour’ without addressing prison labour, which is recognised as exploitation by other movements and included in some global estimates of modern slavery. Organisations decry ‘exploitation’ without supporting unionisation or labour rights movements. Organisations talk of ‘resistance’, but just enough to keep up appearances and never consider what true liberation means; of ‘equity’, only as long as the current administration supports it; of ‘cross-movement’ to refer to the occasional roundtable; of ‘movement-building’ when they really mean networking.

We can’t get other movements to take us seriously like this.

Summer activists in an increasingly cold world

‘Community activist’ is not (and should not be) synonymous with ‘nonprofit worker’. There is overlap, but even when the same people fill both roles (as we do), the actions they take while wearing each hat are usually different.

Activism is also not easy. Many newer activists – particularly those whose only frame of reference for activism is nonprofit-controlled, ‘survivor leadership’ work – have not experienced the harsh realities of activism before now. That’s increasingly becoming a liability. We’re in a moment in which far-right authoritarianism is rising, and even sharing certain viewpoints can lead to danger.

In such conditions, survivor leaders need to be mentored by seasoned activists, people who understand the risks that can come from talking about and organising for human rights. Our sector needs to be supported to learn conflict resolution and accountability skills that allow for long-term movement sustainability in a more hostile world.

So how do we do effect all this change? How can we incentivise anti-trafficking to loosen its grip and learn – truly learn – from what other movements have developed through decades of grassroots sweat, struggle, and brilliance? We believe the answer lies in changing the funding model. And we can’t do that until we open up a serious conversation about how we define resources.

Deep, healthy and caring relationships are also resources, but they remain underestimated and overlooked

The sector’s current definition of ‘resources’ is above all else money. This creates, from the very start, a hierarchy where the Global North will always have more to give than the rest of the world. Redefining resources places value on everything that every partner brings to the table, including things like care, frameworks, relationships, and community historical knowledge.

Azadi Community, which Sophie founded, started as a support group for survivors during Covid when all the NGOs were still trying to figure out how to restructure their programmes. Initiatives like this are common across impacted communities – survivors have always been able to create, collaborate and develop solutions especially in extremely difficult situations.

Sophie has seen how this community has taken care of its members in ways that anti-trafficking projects do not value (in ways that do not fall within anti-trafficking’s definition of resources) and thus do not fund. This includes taking care of members who were managing terminal illnesses, going through grief of the loss of a loved one and much more. These deep, healthy and caring relationships are also resources, but when the question is always framed as how much money do we need to run a project and how many people will receive the services, they remain underestimated and overlooked. Ignoring non-monetary resources while centring power in funding maintains Global North dominance and prohibits mutual relationships.

Formal mutual aid groups allow members to ask for and receive the support they need. Sometimes the ask is material, like for money or food, but often enough it is for intangible help like a social connection or someone to process a challenge with. Those who have material resources provide the former, but those without funds can still show up for a walk in the park or provide accompaniment to a doctor's appointment. Availability is also a resource that can be used for the good of the community.

After school programmes are another example of essential programming for keeping mothers safe and resilient. Where the state does not provide them, informal childcare cooperatives fill the gap – with different parents taking shifts to help care for their own and others’ children. When Chris visited George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, the streets were lined with food gardens that had no ownership or designated plots for individuals. Hungry or tight on grocery money until payday? Fresh vegetables were available, without verification of financial need, without nonprofit gatekeeping, and without shame. Good luck getting a large anti-trafficking organisation or donor to see value in that.

Even work funded by development aid or philanthropy in the past can be reclaimed and repurposed in our attempt to build a new way of working together. Development aid and philanthropy have paid for frameworks to be developed and toolkits to be written. Knowledge from studies of impacted communities exists in these toolkits, yet many of them remain “core assets” of organisations and cannot be widely shared – forcing others to recreate the proverbial wheel.

This is wasteful when viewed at the sector level, yet for individual organisations with a competition mindset such internal assets provide a necessary leg up over their peers. In any new frame, these internal libraries should be opened up to not just others within the sector but other movements.

All of these examples show how redefining resources can level the playing field and make way for more equitable collaborations. When we honour all the resources that our partners bring to the table (and not just those we can exploit or extract to further ‘anti-trafficking’), we can learn from them. We can improve our own practices by aligning them more to the work of grassroots movements. And we can build real solidarities across silos.