Chris Ash is the Survivor Leadership Program Manager at the National Survivor Network, where they are developing programming to empower people with lived experience to engage meaningfully as the anti-trafficking movement’s organisational, strategy, and thought leaders. Beyond Trafficking and Slavery caught up with Chris as part of our series on the politics of survivor leadership to discuss the role of survivors in anti-trafficking work today, what must change to create a survivor-led movement, and why it so often seems that survivors are deployed more than they are engaged. An explanation of how we produced this interview can be found at the end.

Joel Quirk (BTS): Could we start with learning about your own history in the anti-trafficking movement?

Chris Ash: I came to the National Survivor Network (NSN) in December 2021. Before that I worked 12 years in the anti-rape movement. I'm a survivor myself, although I didn't go through any formal anti-trafficking programmes.

My first time engaging specifically with the anti-trafficking movement was in 2018. It was disorienting; I felt like I was in a carnival funhouse. A lot of familiar words were being used – survivor-centred, trauma-informed, etc. – but not in the ways that I had always known them.

So I withdrew. I pulled back from formal anti-trafficking work, but kept speaking about my own experience informally. Three years later I tried again with the NSN. They had decided to transition from a general membership organisation to a values-based network, and they hired me to facilitate that restructuring process.

Joel: What does it mean to become a values-based network?

Chris: For us it means ensuring that survivors who don't feel welcome in other anti-trafficking spaces have somewhere to go. A place that offers them a safer, braver space for their advocacy. It’s easy to join a group if you see yourself as a good fit. But what about the people who don’t feel that way? My role is to help us build a welcoming space for both.

Joel: What do you mean by a good fit?

Chris: There are a lot of ways to think about fit. For example, a lot of anti-trafficking services in the US are faith-based. That's wonderful for someone who is already a believer, because it gives them access to healing that's relevant to their world and their values. But a service that is wonderful for someone with that world view can be actively harmful, exclusionary, or simply ineffective for someone without that world view.

The same goes for the anti-trafficking movement’s relationship with the carceral system. Some organisations don’t question their engagement with law enforcement or with immigration enforcement. For them it’s a reflex, and they advocate for things like mandatory reporting laws for instances of sex trafficking. These organisations are usually run by people who see law enforcement as a source of safety and protection.

But many survivors see it differently: African-Americans, for example, or undocumented immigrants. They criticise that engagement because they see law enforcement as a source of harm or as something they don’t trust. An organisation with an active relationship with law enforcement might not feel like a good fit for those survivors.

This may come as a surprise, but many of the survivors who get platformed as ‘leaders’ have more in common with the first group than the second group. Many don't come from communities where law enforcement is a regular source of fear, and they don't come from communities where their consensual, adult sexuality has been policed or shamed. So they struggle to incorporate that lens into their work.

If those are the only survivor leaders on offer as role models, other survivors who would like to be leaders may not feel that space is for them. It is disorienting when a sense of not being heard, valued or welcomed comes from the movement theoretically advocating for you.

Joel: There's general agreement that survivors need to have voice in human trafficking conversations. However, many are concerned that the engagement so far hasn’t been genuine – that survivors are being bolted onto pre-existing positions and policies, rather than being given the power and opportunity to change the agenda. Would you agree?

Chris: For me there’s a key difference between survivor leadership and movement leadership. Most ‘survivor leadership’ entails storytelling to policymakers, funders, and other survivors. There’s a lot of that. There’s much less genuine movement leadership – i.e. people with lived experience wielding power.

Who holds decision-making power in anti-trafficking organisations? Usually it’s allies. They might be well-meaning, but they’re people without lived experience. That's a challenge. We need to ask ourselves: what would it take for us to have more movement leadership by survivors?

It certainly will require some allies to de-centre themselves. That’s a big ask, and part of my job is managing ally fragility. They signed up because they wanted to do something good. It can be really hard for them to hear that their best efforts aren’t what is needed. But it’s important.

So much anti-trafficking work in the US is still shaped by the idea that someone is broken. The idea that survivors don’t understand their decisions and need to be rehabilitated. It’s a fundamental flaw in the way the movement views impacted people, and it bleeds over into survivor leadership. If that's how you think about survivors, you're not going to be able to magically flip a switch once they become colleagues. Or if they are critical of your work.

Feedback from survivors is now commonplace, but it comes with a lot of selection bias. Say you want to assess a shelter. What are you likely to do? You probably going to reach out to some of the people who graduated – the people for whom the programme was obviously a good fit. But what about the people who dropped out? You ask organisations that question, and you’ll often hear something like: ‘they just weren't ready for healing’, or ‘it takes people time to truly implement changes in their lives’. They don’t allow space for the possibility that what they’re doing doesn’t meet the needs of some survivors.

We see the same in the criminal legal system. Say a law enforcement officer wants a survivor to speak at a training. There are some very well-meaning law enforcement officers who would say: ‘I know a survivor. I rescued her, and she still sends me a Christmas card every year. I can reach out to her.’ That survivor’s story is of course valid. But singling it out still creates selection bias.

This is the norm of survivor leadership. It often involves well-meaning people, and it is backed up by survivors who are excited to bring their wisdom to the table, but who do not necessarily realise how the group has been curated to lessen critique from the outset.

Joel: So how can survivor leadership be done better?

Chris: We could start by changing how we receive feedback. Instead of bringing in survivors who are years out from their trafficking experience, simply keep asking your current clients: is this meeting your needs? And actually listen to what they need, rather than telling them your menu of current options. If they really have a sense that you're there to support them, they can tell you what they need and how to get them there.

And we need to offer options for involvement. It feels different to say to a survivor:

See the difference? That survivor’s value isn’t equal to their story, and they get to choose how much of themselves they put out there. And we promised to pay. We always need to keep economics in mind. If you want somebody who is housing insecure or food insecure to join you, you need to be upfront about the expected payment.

In short, you find out what leadership means to them, and then help them get to that place.

Joel: What do you mean by help?

Chris: Training. Say a survivor approaches you with a brilliant idea for a peer mentoring programme. Instead of saying ‘that would take a lot to implement’, you could tell them the information you would need to consider it properly, show them how to put together a proposal, and help them refine their idea once they have a solid draft. Give them that professional development.

An organisation should be willing to help all of its employees become leaders. But if you’re hiring survivors intentionally, you really need to make sure that they’re not over-working and that they’re able get the training and mentoring they need to get to where they want to be. You might have hired them to be a peer advocate, but what if they want to become a shelter manager? Or a trainer? Find out and help them work toward their goals.

There has to be that commitment to de-centring yourself as you build up survivors’ capacities to engage.

Joel: You’ve said a couple of times that survivors must be able to refuse the role of storyteller without ending up outside the movement. How easy is that in practice? And what does it mean for people who have lived experience but reject the label of survivor?

Chris: In many anti-trafficking spaces you can either be a survivor or you can be a professional. Once you disclose as a survivor, you're expected to become a survivor leader and do the things a survivor leader does. Whereas if you don't disclose, you have a chance of being seen as a movement leader, as a professional in your field.

We've got to break this binary. We’re trying at the NSN. Our membership criteria say that if your lived experience involves certain things, your voice counts as much as anybody else's. And we want to hear from you. You start by inviting them in, showing care, and letting them know they're welcome. And if you do that, they'll feel more comfortable showing up.

Joel: It can often be very uncomfortable showing up. How do you negotiate differences of opinion while maintaining a welcoming space? Sex work, for example, is a classic flash point. And understandably, people with lived experiences of trauma have drawn different conclusions. How do we engage those differences of opinion without it becoming a very heated argument?

Chris: There is a big difference between public and in-group conversations. There are a lot of external forces pressuring people to say certain things in certain ways in public. Movement leaders, funders, laws like the US Trafficking Victim Protection Act, or rules like the anti-prostitution pledge that's written into so much anti-violence funding in the US: these all make people want to defend what they believe is right and prove to others why they are wrong.

In-group conversations, where those external influences and power dynamics are absent, can be had differently. You just have to be intentional about it. At NSN we talk a lot about generative conflict versus counterproductive conflict. Counterproductive conflict sets out to be right or to prove the other person wrong. It is not focused on having a solution. Generative conflict, in contrast, aims to hear, understand, and collaboratively develop solutions together. Both happen, of course. We keep going back and forth in a little dance until we land something we can agree on.

It can be really hard for trauma survivors. But if we're going to figure out how to untangle the math of survivor leadership we need to keep at it. Right now we have survivor leaders who say very different things in public than they do in private. Because they're scared of losing their job, or because they don’t want to invite yet more harassment, violence and abuse. We've got to mitigate those power dynamics, and learn how to hold those really tough spaces so people can stay in difficult conversations.

Joel: You’re a network devoted to ‘fighting human trafficking’. Do you think that’s the most effective way of framing the problem? Or do you use that language pragmatically in light of donor and policymaker priorities?

Chris: I feel pretty strongly that human trafficking is not itself a unique form of violence. It's a criminal definition that sits at the intersection of a bunch of different forms of violence, but doesn’t wholly encompass them.

Things like partner violence, violence against immigrants, or transphobic violence. Some of the violence is criminalised and some isn’t, like some inherently violent forms of crime prevention. Separating the criminal definition of human trafficking from the violence we observe allows us to also to recognise the ways that state violence and structural violence perpetuate human trafficking. And how massive gaps form because the state doesn’t set out to address the violence. It seeks to address the crime.

Addressing the violence is something different: sex worker safety, migrant justice, homelessness. This is all anti-trafficking work.

The violence and the crime are not synonymous.

That is something we make sure to clarify at NSN. We say we want to end trafficking, but we do movement work, not sector work. This means that we have members working on substance use harm reduction, because that's something they feel can reduce trafficking. Others are working on sex worker safety because they feel that's trafficking prevention. Still others are involved with migrant justice because they’ve realised how important that is to preventing trafficking.

For me, the movement is the survivor-led work being done in all of these related fields. The sector is the system we've built up to formalise and codify the work. The movement versus sector debate is very similar to the violence versus crime debate. They’re not the same. And the movement is so much bigger than the sector.

Joel: This is a good point to end on, but is there anything you’d like to add?

Chris: The reality is if you can bring people together in a space where they're not going to be attacked, they can come together. Freedom Network recently hosted an event that I think has immense potential as a first step to creating dialogue. It was an invitation-only, sex worker and sex trades meeting. Half of the people who attended were Freedom Network members. And half of the people who attended were sex worker safety advocates who do street outreach, harm reduction, sex worker rights organising, etc. Many of them were also trafficking survivors.

We named the harm that anti-trafficking organisations and policy have caused. We did that right at the very beginning. And once they realised that we were all on the same page, we were able to have a conversation about what anti-trafficking work that does not actively harm sex workers might look like.

Conceptually, how do we mitigate harm to victims and people? How do we make sex work and anti-trafficking work safer? How do we protect people? How to get them appropriate services?

We went into these different policies in small groups. We had people collaborating. It was amazing. The trust that was built was really wonderful. And I think that the more we make those spaces, the more we can stop seeing each other as the enemy and start seeing each other as people who share the common goal of ending exploitation.

Online, I can't disclose that I advocate for sex worker safety without some trafficking advocate calling me the pimp lobby or asking why side with the traffickers. We have to stop that.

It is time to actually have a conversation.