When I identify as a survivor of human trafficking, people are often more curious about the pain I endured than about the path that led to healing and leadership, where I stand today. It becomes, for them, all I am – rather than an aspect of my story. Within the anti-trafficking field, there is even a debate around what people like me should be called. Are we survivors? Victims? Advocates? Lived experience experts?

I say call me Aubrey. I want to be seen as a whole person, with the normal ebbs and flows of being human. But as a survivor that’s extremely difficult to have acknowledged, even from professionals in the field who should know better. It’s why many of the agencies and systems set up to help will ultimately fail us. They believe us to be resilient, so strong that their expectations are unrealistic.

This is a truth I lend my professional voice towards. We need to make healing and engaging in the anti-trafficking movement less traumatic than the crime itself.

How can survivors be supported to heal?

There is no single, agreed upon method for engaging with survivors; the jury is still out on what is most effective. But, as much as this preoccupies the field, it’s possible that it’s not the most pertinent question. In my work, I’ve begun to think less and less about the interactions I have with any particular survivor. Instead, I now focus my energy on how individuals, agencies, and communities can provide opportunities for healing, growing and surviving trauma.

My first encounter with ‘survivorship’ as a paradigm for navigating life experiences came after I received a rare tumour diagnosis. It’s not just prognosis followed by treatment. Survivorship is everything that must be recovered physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. It acknowledges the impact on your work, your relationships, your navigation of fatigue and your fear of future wellness. It is being treated as an expert by other experts. Regardless of the number of degrees in the room, my healthcare team trusted me to share how my cancer affected me personally. They acknowledged the fear, the sickness, the vanity loss of my hair. They celebrated the success of the surgery and subsequent clear MRIs.

I have long wondered what the anti-trafficking movement would be like if it took a similar stance towards survivorship.

Following the model of my oncologists, promoting ‘survivorship’ would begin by acknowledging that healing is hard. The ‘rescue’ mentality that continues to plague the anti-trafficking movement is particularly unhelpful here. There is a lot of superiority built into the concept of rescue – the rescuer is inherently the one who calls the shots – and as such organisations can be very prescriptive. They struggle to cede control to survivors or adapt to their self-articulated needs.

I, for example, didn’t need to be rescued from just an exploitative setting. I needed to be rescued from the vulnerabilities and abuse that I endured. The ones that led me to believe that I was destined only to be harmed. I needed to be rescued from people who shamed me for what was done to me. Who hushed me from speaking. Who questioned my ability to be a partner, a mother, and a leader because of what I lived through. I was seen and treated as ‘broken’, and people – regardless of valour or intention – tried to fix me.

We fix things. We do not fix people. I was hurt and needed time to heal. For me, past trauma acted as a dysfunctional tether. It made confronting my current challenges harder. Survivorship can help with this – it makes space for individual voice and choice to heal. But traditional ‘rescue’ from trafficking, which is generally limited to physically removing a person from a situation, doesn’t even get started with this.

Survivorship as currently practiced in the anti-trafficking movement also spends far too much time dwelling on the past. If you’re a survivor active in the movement, your assumed contribution is likely to be recounting what happened to you – rather than what you will do. Survivorship in healthcare does a much better job of focusing on what you will become.

As a survivor, how many times was I seen in a future context? Was I ever seen as someone who was capable of change? Who could heal? Someone who could forgive and allow themselves to be loved? Who could own their own home with a graduate degree? We miss these aspects when we limit how we see people. When we consign how they are to ‘good enough’.

Part of that means respecting feelings. Professionals who were helping me at the beginning of my journey of healing told me I needed to “better control my anger.” I should have instead been supported to identify my right to be so damn angry. Only then could I really choose how I wanted it to steer my life. Should I continue to experience my anger as a crushing and explosive truth? Or draw passion and direction from it to reassert my own power? That is a continual choice that I must make daily.

To help survivors, help communities

There are segments of the anti-trafficking world that drive me through the roof. Expertise on human trafficking too often comes from Google searches and what one managed to digest from a book or documentary, rather than from leaning into the root causes of the exploitation one claims to be fighting against.

Too many agencies, even long-standing and well-regarded ones, fail to understand their own power dynamics. Sometimes this means that they fail to use their influence to leverage conversations around housing insecurities, liveable wages, or medical access. When the focus is on ‘rescuing’ a person, we fail to confront the drivers of exploitation and a lot of potential change is thereby never even acknowledged. In other cases, organisations fail to see that using their power to profit off the storytelling of survivors is not the same as effecting change. It’s pimping trauma.

When agencies say they want to improve their survivor engagement, I often ask about the above dynamics. Survivor engagement is not bringing in someone after a policy was drafted to give it a stamp of approval. Survivor leadership is not giving a person the microphone at a banquet. It is about a commitment to survivorship and the vulnerabilities that lead to exploitation. It is about providing options for survivors that do not require any further connection to the movement. It is developing programmes and policies that address all the things that make it harder to heal in communities.

For example, to stand with survivors, we must challenge the practice of arresting survivors, as jail does not make one safe. Doing so would also demonstrate the importance of historical and generational trauma and its effects on those with lived experience. Healing is not just for the individual, but for their ancestors behind them and children before them. It would expose the lie of the ‘easy fix’, identify communal connections and disconnections, and work collectively to ease the hardships of our fellow neighbours.

There are alternatives to the often harmful and inconsistent approaches to survivorship that exist in the anti-trafficking world today. These initiatives encourage curiosity, and a desire to hear from a diversity of survivor perspectives. We all hurt and heal differently. We should see survivors as more than the bedrock of fundraising appeals. We should normalise healing, because we all have survived something. Using these approaches would make this field less about competition and more about cooperation. Less about the trafficking and more about the human.