Inside the world of anti-trafficking, the calls are everywhere to centre survivors, create victim-centred work, and undertake survivor-led initiatives. And there are glimpses of what looks like change. From panel discussions to law enforcement initiatives, there is now more representation of individuals with lived experience than ever before. Some rare examples could now even be described as ‘faces’ of the anti-trafficking movement.

Yet, on the whole, these calls for inclusion have stalled shortly after take-off. The result has been tokenisation rather than meaningful inclusion of survivors. Tokenisation is antithetical to healing, so instead of building a survivor- or community-led movement, this has ironically fostered an atmosphere that inhibits repair, closes conversation, and impedes real progress in anti-trafficking efforts.

There are specific harms that need to be named. Above all, we need to call out efforts that ‘centre survivors’ in ways that directly benefit others while putting those in the spotlight, once again, in harm’s way.

Staying on the surface

Tokenisation occurs when people from a marginalised group are included in something without power being redistributed to them. It’s symbolic effort that changes the optics while preserving the status quo.

Popularised in the late 1950s by racial justice advocates, the concept of tokenisation was developed in response to the limited inclusion of people of colour and offered a damning critique of how far racial equity had not come.

In anti-trafficking discourse it relates specifically to the experience of exploitation, but it can and often does overlap with tokenisation along racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and other identity-based or experiential lines. The existence of tokenisation in anti-trafficking is a result of how shallow the initial call was. ‘Centring survivors’ was never meant to address power imbalances.

If it had been, space would have been made to invest in communities targeted by exploitation to prevent trafficking from occurring.

If it had been, space would have been made for marginalised people to enter leadership positions as whole people. They would not be expected to identify primarily and continuously as a victim/survivor to maintain their role, and their individual story would not be seen as the source of their value.

If it had been, space would have been made for people who want to challenge the movement. For people who want to hold up a mirror and force self-reflection.

Instead, space was made for specific individuals to enter prominent roles so that they could serve the existing movement without creating problems.

Having this conversation respectfully, though, requires transparency of my own positionality. As someone who has worked in sex workers’ rights and anti-trafficking for close to 15 years, I have spent 15 years struggling to navigate, obscure, and set boundaries around disclosure of my own experiences in the sex trades.

I am used to being asked if I am a survivor or an expert, knowing that I can only be one and each side would invalidate the other. I have been a part of collaboratives which had only one role for a survivor, which was never invested in. I have known plenty of people for whom their story was their only way into a decision-making space, and who had the choice to disclose taken away from them again and again.

My decision has overwhelmingly been to not disclose personal experiences in sex work, including experiences of violence or exploitation in relation to that work. Below are some thoughts on what I have seen and experienced, and some of the reasons why I have the boundaries that I do.

Loss of community and solidarity

Tokenisation is inherently isolating. Instead of integrating multiple perspectives from a community or shared experience, it makes space for only one voice. As Malcolm X noted, “Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses, and the masses are the ones who have the problem, not the few.”

Tokenising survivors with one particular story and centring it as the only meaningful narrative destroys bonds and inhibits community. It creates competition and peers become threats. This is especially true when survivors are dependent on their positions for their economic survival. Advocacy that pits survivors against each other decimates any chance of solidarity. Instead of participating in each other’s healing and resilience, peers are incentivised to invalidate each other and even to encourage more acts of harm.

When we ask who benefits, it is the organisations and actors already doing well out of the current power structures. They have the power to pick and choose who joins them. Why wouldn’t they select someone who supports their existing understanding of the problem and intervention? They have every reason to do so. And when survivors are asked to tear each other down to get in the door instead of holding each other in solidarity, those who are most able to critique existing structures and services become isolated, individual voices.

Just as white supremacy pits non-white racial and ethnic groups against each other to break solidarity, advocacy groups are best served by fractured and inconsistent critique. Tokenising survivors is a mode of manipulation and control that protects advocates who are more bothered by nuance than inspired by it. And it silences the voices that would topple existing power dynamics if solidarity had ever been on the table.

Hierarchies of violence

Another disturbing trend is that survivors are thought to be more effective advocates when they are willing to disclose higher levels of harm. And when two people who have experienced harm are pitted against each other, score is too often kept by counting the details of violence.

Pain equals power in anti-trafficking. The more gruesome a story, the more someone falls into the “perfect victim narrative”. The better the victim, the more sympathy they will receive and the more others will be inspired to act. The call to centre ‘the most marginalised’ – as if marginalisation is a clear linear scale – has led to stories being increasingly tailored to shock audiences into pity, rather than to provide them with context or nuance. It’s an extractive process that can be experienced as coercion, as it rewards graphic disclosure rather than respecting the privacy of the healing process.

This game of one-upmanship also desensitises us to most of the harm and exploitation that constitute trafficking. It raises expectations, framing trafficking as only the most extreme and violent experiences possible and situating interpersonal, sexual violence by specific perpetrators at the very top. It creates a hierarchy of violence in which many forms of abuse are treated as mundane.

This can be seen across the world of work. In comparison to trafficking for sexual exploitation, it is much, much harder for both anti-trafficking professionals and the general public to take stories of labour exploitation seriously because we have normalised labour exploitation as part of our society. From donors to juries to service providers, this desensitisation affects how people show up – and what they require from people in need before deciding to offer help. Even more egregious, this jading of society equally affects people experiencing harm. Those in labour exploitation often play down their own pain because they are certain someone else has it worse – is more deserving.

When survivors are led down a path of demeaning their own violence, we replace the potential for support and healing with minimisation and self-erasure.

It doesn’t have to be this way

We do a disservice to progress when we reduce survivors of harm to public faces for serious on-going debates. The policies we are left with are insufficient at best and harmful at worst, and the damage done to potential healing is unforgivable. When we reduce a survivor to these singular moments, we chain someone to their violence, their trauma and their trafficker.

If we invested in the many and not the few, we would allow survivors to become whole people who had full lives before their experiences and will again (if they don’t already). We would build an advocacy movement that healed trauma rather than dredged it.

To see people with lived experience of trafficking as whole people would be a sea change. To invest in their talents and capacities would fundamentally alter the way we understand service provision and people who have been victimised. To nuance and expand the narratives of people who have been victimised, and to fully acknowledge the range of actors doing the victimising, would destabilise all the structures benefiting from the current system of tokenisation.

Committing to that would broadside the systems that create and defend violence against people, including trafficking, and dismantle power structures in a way almost no movement focused on victim services is ready for.

Simply put, moving beyond tokenisation and investing in community leadership is the only way forward.