Moving beyond victims, villains and saviors in the fight to end trafficking
By Hannah Blair | November 7, 2022
Everyone loves a hero. We collectively root for the sword swinging savior who battles the villain, rescues the damsel, and walks away bleeding but victorious. When the fight is ending human trafficking, “rescued” survivors are flaunted as trophies, and the heroes assumedly responsible for their freedom are rewarded for their courage and altruism. We put the “savior” on a pedestal and turn survivor stories into measures of success – metrics with a marketable soundbite.
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The rescue narrative is built on foundations of self-aggrandizing saviorism and an immense lack of accountability. At its core, it is about power — who wields it and who yields it — and it thrives on centering the hero. The idea of heroes and rescue missions is an attractive narrative in the fight to end exploitation because it serves our society’s sensationalized view of trafficking, provides measurable claims of impact, and attempts to quantify the issue.
A brave hero who saves a helpless woman from a cruel trafficker is the storyline we wrap around the topic of trafficking.
We see this narrative in most media reports of “rescue” operations. Any time trafficking victims are recovered, particularly in a coordinated effort, the information we are typically privy to through the media is vague details of the operation, the number of “rescued” victims, and the number of traffickers or sex buyers who were arrested.
We don’t learn how the victims initially came to be trafficked, and the barriers they will have to overcome to reintegrate into society are glaringly absent from media reports. We have no idea how these “rescue” operations affect policies centered around preventing trafficking or if they have had any sustainable impact on dominant trafficking rhetoric and structural conditions that create marginalized and vulnerable communities susceptible to trafficking.
A rescue politics approach to human trafficking doesn’t serve victims or survivors. This narrative completely disregards the life of the trafficking victim and shifts the focus to criminal justice interventions as the appropriate and most sensible solution to ending trafficking. Ultimately, we are left with a rescue story punctuated by arrests and prosecutions with an emphasis on the unmitigated “heroes.”
This type of discourse is divisive and a red herring fallacy, and ultimately prevents systems from adequately responding to trafficking.
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The rescue mentality results in public policies that only focus on criminal justice interventions as solutions to end trafficking. Anne Johnston and Barbara Friedman spent a year analyzing how U.S. news outlets framed the topic of sex trafficking, focusing on how trafficking was defined and the possible solutions presented. The two dominant societal frames they identified were crime (37%) and politics/legislation (26%). Paired with our rescue mentality in our efforts to end trafficking, it is no surprise that the solutions most often presented are rooted in a criminal justice approach.
This disproportionate focus ignores the societal, community, and relational vulnerabilities that need to be addressed to truly decrease trafficking; ignoring these foundational contributors harms the individual and the community’s ability to avoid or recover from human trafficking.
When public perception centers on a criminal justice solution, it diminishes the funding and political will for the harder battles of true prevention and long-term recovery.
Instead, resources and policies focus on a small window of time, and success is based on the number of investigations, arrests, and prosecution—with little consideration for the survivor or what post-exploitation life and success looks like to them. Through the lens of “rescue,” we approach freedom from trafficking with a here and now mindset.
We get stuck on the concept of “rescue” and when the “rescue” is the focus, survivors get left behind.
Because the truth is, it’s not a “rescue” if you don’t also ensure a survivor’s financial security, provide access to safe housing, and create a comprehensive trauma treatment plan. It’s not a “rescue” if you don’t also help them network with peers to form healthy relationships and provide goal-planning services so they can see a great future ahead of them. In order for a trafficking victim to truly be “rescued,” support services must go beyond crisis management and provide them with resources and avenues to live an empowered life free from exploitation.
The consequences of trafficking don’t stop when someone is no longer being bought and sold. The physical, psychological, and social ramifications that occur as a result of being exploited aren’t resolved in a single moment of bodily freedom. After months or years of abuse and isolation, the healing road for survivors is complicated, extensive, and tender. Those exiting trafficking need safe, broad, trauma-based, and thorough support systems in order to succeed – and the care should extend beyond criminal justice and be long-term.
The term “rescue” doesn’t give merit to the process that is at play when a trafficking victim exits exploitation.
The term “rescue” doesn’t acknowledge that freedom from trafficking is a process and instead diminishes healing to a single moment.
Instead of framing trafficking with “rescue” operations and criminal justice system approaches, effective solutions must address the root causes of trafficking that make individuals vulnerable to trafficking in the first place. We cannot extract sex trafficking from the structural conditions that lead to exploitation, like poverty, racism, and abuse.
There also needs to be a shift from the “rescue” narrative to language that empowers victims and survivors. The word “rescue” implies a certain level of action on the rescuer to restore freedom to a victim of trafficking. Alternatively, “recovery” implies an action of removing a victim from a situation or assisting them with their exit – without indulging in the dangerous “rescuer” mentality. True freedom can only be chosen and embraced by the survivor themselves. This happens after recovery as a survivor is empowered to make healthy choices for their own lives instead of being made to accept what is chosen for them.
Understanding and honoring survival and re-integration is necessary to create programs and policies that address and prevent trafficking, and provide adequate aftercare provisions for survivors.
If we want to see the end of human trafficking in our lifetime, we must go beyond framing the issue as a matter of victim, villains, and saviors. Solutions can no longer be limited to aggressive law enforcement and stronger state policies but should extend to a more complex and nuanced approaches that attend to the root causes of trafficking and create empowering aftercare provisions for survivors.
Photo Credit: Asya Cusima
Freedom is more than the absence of trafficking and those exiting trafficking must have accessible
resources, the autonomy of choice, and equitable opportunities; when freedom truly becomes a choice and they are empowered in lasting ways to leave the Life and step into a new one.
Hannah Blair