Cultural Awareness and Representation Shouldn’t be an Afterthought in Anti-human Trafficking Programme and Policy Design

As a person with lived experience of being sex trafficked, I am acutely aware of the lack of progress in preventing this violent form of abuse. I see the reality of the problem from a personal and professional lens and am invested in making real change. Faith-based groups, feminist organisations, social work practitioners, police, prosecutors and non-profits all claim expertise in the issue of child sexual exploitation, but very few include individuals with lived experience related to the issue or have lived experience themselves. Organisations that do include people with lived experience tend to hire them as front line workers with little ability to influence policy or procedures. This reflection focuses on the need for people with lived experience to inform all aspects of work to address sex trafficking because of the essential cultural knowledge that they possess. Ample evidence points to the value of peer support in numerous fields, and I have witnessed its effectiveness within the context of sex trafficking, but it has not been researched well in this area. I regularly monitor journals in the hopes that researchers will reflect on why peer support appears to be successful when so many other programmes are not, but I continue to be disappointed. I suspect that many programmes are unsuccessful because they are not based on a real understanding of the culture in which victims are entrenched, which facilitates continual abuse. Years ago, when developing an intensive training module for the Province of Manitoba’s Anti-Exploitation Strategy, I began to articulate ‘the Game’ in Canada in a cultural framework (Berry et al., 2005) so that people being trained could have a glimpse into the culture that victims were entrenched in. Culture is learned: we are taught values, norms and rules so we can function as a society. Traffickers understand that to have control over someone, they need to ‘re-socialise’ them into the culture of the Game. I have witnessed survivors providing peer support to others in the Game to help them exit the abuse based on a shared cultural understanding. The Game shares the same features of every other culture, except it is a closed system: it is designed to keep outsiders out and to isolate those being trafficked. Many of the individuals working within the anti-trafficking sector have a sense of this and may even understand it to some degree, but without lived experience, it is impossible for them to achieve the deep understanding shared by those who have been trafficked. When describing certain elements of the Game, some people (mostly those lacking lived experience of being trafficked) use terms such as trauma bonds (Dutton and Painter, 1981) or Stockholm syndrome. I argue that the former is too closely connected to domestic violence, which has some overlapping similarities to the control and violence between the victim and the trafficker, but the development of the relationship is different. Traffickers use deceptive tactics to lure the victim into believing the trafficker has an interest in a relationship, has concern for their well-being, is a helper, friend, etc. The trafficker thus uses deception/manipulation to facilitate the criminal offence of human trafficking. Stockholm syndrome describes the psychological bond that captives or hostages might feel towards their captors (Landers et al., 2017). Again, similarities are present but the victim’s bond with their captor usually develops after the criminal offence has occurred, whereas in trafficking, the intentional cultivation of a bond facilitates the criminal act. I have chosen to use the term re-socialising to describe the nature of the relationship in trafficking because of the Game’s strong cultural components and the systematic way traffickers facilitate this offence. The changed worldview of victims is one of the most difficult aspects to tackle when trying to remove a person from a trafficker and the Game more broadly. Their skewed worldview means that many elements of mainstream society feel like threats due to differences in norms, values/beliefs and rules. I believe this largely explains the failure of programmes, policies and assistance developed by people without lived experience—they are trying to help survivors fit into an existing system based on cultural norms and values that the victim may no longer share. Parents, families and communities struggle to find effective resources for trafficked people with little success. Effective design and operation of programmes for survivors must be led by individuals with lived experience—and they must have the power to shape the design, policies, practices of programmes. It is essential to recognise that their deep understanding of the Game’s culture can help victims navigate the push/pull forces as they try to escape. For example, programmes need to incorporate policies that don’t exclude survivors for engaging in behaviours that are normal among sex-trafficked people. Most cultures have numerous components (University of Minnesota, 2022; Mandal, 2022) but for ease of understanding I have broken the Game into eight components: language; cognitive systems (values/beliefs); norms; rules; political systems; economic systems; and arts/technology; and spirituality (Berry et al., 2005). In the following discussion, I explore these components, which I have spent a great deal of time unpacking during my life and throughout intensive training sessions I have delivered over the last nineteen years. My trainees have included people working in programmes, law enforcement and child welfare, as well as prosecutors and medical professionals who consistently tell me that understanding the culture of the Game is extremely helpful. It also demonstrates why those with lived experience are uniquely well-suited to design effective programmes and policies. It is my hope that by understanding the nature of the Game, those developing and implementing policies and programmes will realise how critical it is to include people who have been trafficked in roles where they can meaningfully affect responses. I have been teaching people about the culture of the Game for almost two decades, and in my trainings, I often compare the culture of the Game to that of other organisations that re-socialise individuals into their culture. The military is a good example because military training for enlisted individuals involves similar processes. Recruits are taught their ‘duties’ at bootcamp: what to wear, how to behave, what to eat, when to eat, when to sleep and how to speak to authority. During this process, they are also subjected to very strenuous activity, both mental and physical, for weeks on end. This process of re-socialisation into military culture is required to equip them to carry out their duties; for example, to respond to commands in high-stress environments. Importantly, it is very difficult for people who leave the military to re-socialise back into mainstream culture or society. This example to helps people understand how sex traffickers re-socialise young people, and why survivors struggle so much when they are removed from the Game. The language used in the Game includes its own slang and elements from other subcultures. Language is one way in which we identify people from a shared culture or an outside culture (Berger and Packard, 2022). The language of the Game includes thousands of unique phrases, which may vary regionally: examples include: telly, bottom bitch, finesse, choose, serving, square, stable, thoroughbred, guerilla pimping, signed on, trap house and caught a case. The values and beliefs within the Game are extremely misogynistic, and victims are slowly re-socialised to internalise these. I have long been aware that this process is faster among children who have previously been exposed to violence (i.e. in the home and by society for many Indigenous and racialised people). Many of these children have been exposed to these values and beliefs as they witness violence against their mothers, sisters or aunts. However, even young people who have never had any exposure to this kind of misogyny can be re-socialised to believe that women are the property of men, that any violence they suffer is a result of their own fault for not ‘being in pocket’ or a ‘thoroughbred’, not wanting to have ‘wife-in-laws’ and essentially acting in any way the trafficker considers unacceptable. By the time children are re-socialised, the trafficker does not need to be in the same physical space, because their entire worldview has shifted to what is acceptable in the Game. The norms of the Game are very different from those shared by most people in mainstream societies. Within the Game, it is normal to experience violence from infraction of any rules. It is very common to be considered a piece of property, to eat only when permitted and to have a daily quota of how much money you must earn before resting. Some traffickers lure victims through drugs and alcohol, while others do not permit victims to use drugs and alcohol because they can affect appearance and eat into the trafficker’s profits. The rules within the Game are mostly made up by the trafficker, and sometimes the entire gang or ‘family’ that is doing the trafficking. Some traffickers will only allow their victims to ‘work’ (i.e. be sexually exploited) indoors through legal venues like strip clubs, massage parlours, etc. Others traffic their victims online; this has been a large component of the Game for the last twenty years as technology has advanced. The internet has allowed traffickers easier access to children through their smart phones, laptops and tablets. Additional rules dictated by the trafficker might include being told to charge a specific amount for a specific sex act and being available to sell sex for a certain number of hours. Most girls get one day off if they have been well behaved but that could also be dependant on if they are being trafficked in a strip club or massage parlour. In legal venues, the girls have two sets of rules, the venue’s management, and their trafficker’s. Most victims are forced to provide all sex acts requested, even if they do not want to—having options is typically removed little by little over time, giving them less control over their own bodies. Importantly, these rules change regularly—but only when the trafficker want them to change, and usually affect victims negatively. The political systems in play in the Game are like strategies used in mainstream society to manipulate or persuade others. Traffickers pay attention to the needs of victims, usually by observing social media posts. Social media already performs a socialising function and most young people are highly social online, often posting their entire lives on social media. This is the perfect place for traffickers to gain intelligence on their victim and begin the re-socialisation process. They identify and speak to young people’s needs, making promises that are generally not kept. If compared to our political systems, while on the campaign trail, politicians promise all sorts of changes to make people’s lives better. However, once elected, often those promises don’t happen or take years to happen. With traffickers, their campaigns involve grooming people to ‘buy the dream’ and promising they can fix any problem the young person is having, meet any need and make them successful. I have called this the ‘transitioning in’ or ‘glamorisation’ phase of the offence. By the time the young person figures out the reality of the ‘dream’, they are already entrenched in the Game, and life outside of it seems so contrary to their new values and beliefs that it seems impossible to leave. The Game has an entire underground economic system. Crypto currencies are a relatively new feature, but it didn’t take long for criminals to figure out that these types of currencies are less traceable, and difficult or impossible for law enforcement to trace back to the illegal activities. Many professional drivers move victims around for exploitation and may require the victims to pay through sex acts. Some victims are paid through drugs in trap houses, where their traffickers sell drugs but have realised the benefits of selling drugs and sex in the same place. Legal venues have also heavily profited from the trafficking of children: examples can easily be found on Leo’s List, the former BackPages and/or PornHub, along with thousands of other legal websites and venues. In this aspect, the Game generally overlaps with mainstream society. Many traffickers also use less-known technologies, such as apps to change or hide their cell numbers or may install spyware on their victims’ cell phones to monitor their locations, texts and photos. They may utilise pre-purchased credit cards to avoid tracing through hotel/motel records or may use home-sharing technologies to move victims quickly through jurisdictions and spaces where less people will see their coming and goings. Art is often seen in the tattooing or even branding of victims. People unfamiliar with the Game may not be able to think past the exploitation to understand the impact that going through life with a trafficker’s nickname tattooed on a highly visible part of their body can have on a young person. Even tattoo removal can have retraumatising effects. This is one of the most difficult aspects of the Game’s culture to describe. Many people with lived experience have told me that ‘pimping is a religion’. Some have told me they felt they lost their soul while they were being trafficked. Others have told me that what saved them was reconnecting with the spirituality or religion they had learned from their biological or adoptive families. Some describe the Game as a cult and the trafficker being akin to God. Most of us struggle to understand this powerful component of the Game, including myself, and I find it difficult to provide a definitive description. But it is an important component within the process of re-socialisation—perhaps an endpoint for some when they are deeply enculturated and feel their power resides within their abuser. This very brief overview of the Game’s culture helps reveal why peer supports have had so much success in assisting people on their healing journey. By drawing from their own lived experience of being trafficked when working with a victim, survivors are not required to describe or verbalise the push/pull factors, or the situations victims have been in: They speak the language of the Game and have implicit understanding—the victims are aware of this. Once you have been through the process of being re-socialised into the Game and then again out of it, the people you are working with don’t need to describe it to you—there is an instant sense of recognition and understanding by the children and women you are working with. The unique cultural understanding that allows us to help each other also allows us to effectively inform policy and design programmes for children and people who have been trafficked if given the opportunity. Most programmes that have been designed for other vulnerable people don’t fit our needs because few understand this culture and the difficulty in re-socialising back to mainstream—how long it takes, and what is required. Many vulnerable populations have recently adopted the motto ‘nothing for us without us’—this has simply not been applied in efforts to help the victims of sex trafficking. Very little policy, legislation or programmes have been developed to serve this population with meaningful and long-term input from survivors. The lack of success in most programmes is not a result of being led by bad people. Their hearts are in the right place, but the fact remains that programmes and organisations that engage with survivors tend to do this only in the short term and tend to place survivors only in front line positions. Survivors are rarely in leadership positions with the power to lead or make decisions related to programmes. They may be given a few hours to share their story and talk about what they need, rather than having the authority to direct the intent of policies or to design programmes. Few of the survivors I know have been formally trained in trauma-informed approaches, strength-based theory, cognitive behavioral therapy or the stages of change, but it is still known and accepted that survivors of sex trafficking have good success supporting others through peer mentoring. From my own work, I know that their insights are invaluable for more then just peer mentoring or other front line roles, but that our insights tend to be dismissed because of lack of formal training. When agencies only employ survivors in entry-level jobs but do not invest in them to build their capacity and move into a leadership role, it ultimately makes it difficult for survivors to adequately support themselves and their families. When their capacity isn’t being built, they do not develop the needed skill sets to write and design programmes and policy, or to work with government on legislation and research. Most of their involvement in this work is driven by other people with formal education who lack a true understanding of how they see the world when being trafficked and after. Programmes that are truly trauma informed, and person centred must begin training staff who are survivors. There are components, feelings and thoughts about the Game that remain hard for me to articulate even after having gained a master’s degree in Social Work, but over time, I have come to understand myself not as a victim of trafficking, or as a survivor of trafficking, but as someone with lived experience. This has been part of my process of moving out of the Game. With the right supports, others who were sex trafficked can move through a process from victim to survivor, to a person with lived experience. They will seek out programmes and organisations that have put survivors in leadership/decisionmaker positions, and ultimately will pay it forward through the work they can do with other survivors. Many people have told me that I have left an important legacy. I thank them politely, but the real legacy belongs to the women who gave me an opportunity to pay it forward and work with children who suffered the same way I did—not just in the Game but for years afterwards. I can only hope that one day someone feels the same about me. For over twenty-two years, Jennifer Richardson has applied her knowledge and experience as a person with lived experience of being sex trafficked to help develop best practices, programmes, tools, policy, legislation and training to guide work with trafficked women and children across Canada and the USA. She has led two provincial Anti-Human Trafficking Strategies (Manitoba and Ontario), and is a vital stakeholder to other provinces and the Canadian Federal government in the development of their anti-human trafficking strategies. Jennifer has been nominated and awarded many awards such as RCMP Award of Distinction and the Human Rights Award for her work.

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