Team Values

“Judgements are obsolete when valuing other’s life experiences”

• We recognize that the lived experience of each person who has been trafficked (often referred to as victims and/or survivors) is unique and important. We value lived experience expertise. Members of the advisory group and other people with lived experience in our work can choose to discuss their experiences how they want. This includes their decision to share only what they want about themselves and their experiences. The project will not tell anyone how they should describe, label, or frame their experiences.

• We recognize that our research cannot capture all the complexities of the lived experiences of people who have been trafficked. We recognize that our modeling efforts may abstract these traumatic experiences but cannot capture the full extent of human rights abuses that have occurred because of human trafficking. Despite this limitation, we believe our research can help. 

•  All members of the project will maintain confidentiality and respect privacy. 

“If you want real world numbers, you have to have real world people”

• We value all forms of expertise and knowledge equally. Team members may have knowledge through their professional work, their lived experience, and their educational background. We recognize that each form of expertise is necessary to truly address the research questions about human trafficking. 

• We believe that both academic rigor and lived experience are irreplaceable sources of expertise and knowledge. As a team, we seek to bridge the gap between the academic and lived experience communities. We believe we are stronger when these multiple forms of knowledge are brought together, and we seek to create ways to integrate these different ways of knowing. 

• We understand that each team member’s time and experience are valuable. We seek to build a strong team through social engagements to help us each bring our full selves to the work. We will show our value for each other’s time by ensuring that we make progress towards our professional goals as well.

• We seek to maintain transparency, trust, and understanding of each other's intentions. Mistakes may be made, but we will return to the table as a group and work through it.

• We believe it is unacceptable to use shared knowledge generated by the team, such as research questions, ideas, datasets, and/or tools for an individual team member’s own personal agenda. Knowledge and ideas that are generated by our team should be properly attributed to everyone that helped create them.

“Care for each other and ourselves, recognize our limits and boundaries”

• We recognize that this research is emotionally challenging. We encourage team members to prioritize self-care and will actively support them in learning about different types of self-care practices. We will openly discuss how to self-reflect on how the research is impacting us and about safeguards for honest evaluation of one’s current mental and emotional health. We will ensure that each team member realizes they can step away from the work whenever needed.

• We recognize that we are more effective at our research goals when we take intentional time to reflect and space to take a break when topics get heavy. We use consistent team-based activities to ground us. These team-based activities include, but are not limited to, check ins during monthly all-member meetings, built-in debriefing activities after a particularly difficult topic, and breathing activities to end our discussions.  

• We support new members when they join the team through an onboarding process. This includes having new academic members read and engage with articles that provide background information about human trafficking, research methods, and past research products by the team. We are intentional in preparing the academic members, including students, to prepare to engage directly with the advisory group. Further, this includes having members with lived experience read the research produced by the entire team and having members of the team meet with members of the advisory group to discuss what to expect during team meetings and our research together.

• Systematic forms of oppression and discrimination exist and impact the ways each of our team members show up individually to our collective research space. We acknowledge that racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism–among other forms of oppression and discrimination–impact each of our team members differently and shape the ways in which we each engage with each other and the topic of commercial sexual exploitation. In our collective research space, we actively work to dismantle our individual biases and assumptions to create a welcoming environment that fosters mutual understanding, collective production of knowledge, and, ultimately, healing and liberation.

“Move slow to go fast”

• An individual’s susceptibility and a community’s vulnerability to human trafficking is deeply rooted in broader social structure and culture. It is not just an individual factor.  We seek to take a structural and intersectional approach to understanding the root causes of human trafficking. We acknowledge that patterns of oppression and violence in human trafficking within the United States stem from the history of enslavement of Black people and other people of color, the colonization and genocide of Native peoples, and other forms of structural violence and oppression such as those based on gender and sexuality.

• We recognize that traffickers are effective at exploiting susceptibilities of marginalized populations—including people of color, indigenous people, LBGTQIA2S+ people, and disabled people—and that systems, policies, and processes that further marginalize people contribute to their susceptibility and, therefore, contribute to the trafficking of individuals in these populations. 

• Many of the factors that make people susceptible and communities vulnerable to trafficking are stigmatized (e.g., poverty, criminal record, generational trauma, foster care, or substance use). Through our research, we seek to destigmatize the types of susceptibilities that may have led a person into trafficking. Instead, we call attention to the socio-structural factors (i.e., poor public policy) that make some individuals more susceptible and populations more vulnerable to trafficking.

• We seek to ensure that our research methods are attuned to the impact of trauma on individuals and communities. This includes awareness of how trauma impacts the brain and body, as well as historic and intergenerational traumas. A focus on healing-centered approaches recognizes that all people have resources for healing; it centers the healing rather than the trauma. Research should do no harm to the communities and individuals that are involved or impacted. Research practices at every step should be careful to avoid retriggering trauma and incorporate mindfulness.

• We will conduct high-quality, rigorous research focused on the long-term goal of helping to disrupt and dismantle human trafficking networks and the systems and processes that enable them to operate. 

• We recognize the potential for unintended and harmful consequences to arise from our research and strive to ensure our findings and their limitations are articulated clearly to prevent misinterpretation and misuse. We are intentional about this issue by spending time during each meeting to reflect on potential unintended and harmful consequences.

• We acknowledge that as a team we do not speak for or include all experiences in trafficking or commercial sex. We will be clear about what our research addresses and what it does not.

• We are committed to conveying our research findings with clarity and clear language. We will not exploit the pain of trafficking to garner interest and support in our research. We will not use sensationalized images, such as people in chains or being abducted, because we recognize that trafficking experiences don’t always look like this. We also work to disrupt human trafficking without co-opting the language of slavery or abolition.

• We will make our research accessible to people we work with and the broader public. We will do our best to present our results in different modes (e.g., papers and videos) through a variety of academic and non-academic channels to reach different communities.

• We recognize the difference between research and advocacy. We can take research outcomes to advocate for trafficking-related policies, but we should not let potential advocacy efforts influence our research approach or the interpretation of our findings. Our goal is not to tell impacted communities what to do but, instead, to help their decision-making by presenting reliable data, information, knowledge, and analysis to them.