"If you want real world numbers, you have to have real world people."
The Bringing Life to Research Survivor-Centered Research Partnership Toolkit is our first project that is led by our survivor-centered research partners. This project, which starts in October 2024, will create a toolkit that describes best practices for survivors and other survivor-centered practitioners to partner with researchers as equally important members of teams researching sex trafficking. We know that there are researchers who also have lived experience in trafficking, some will choose to research trafficking, while others may not. The toolkit specifically will support inclusion of people with lived expertise in trafficking who do not also have research training. This is an important type of expertise that is much needed within the research community. The toolkit will help survivors ask the right questions to make sure that their expertise is valued as equally important as other members of the team and their time is appropriately compensated. It will further provide suggestions to make sure that the research team is trauma-informed and focuses on the expertise that survivors have to offer rather than their personal experiences. We hope the toolkit can help other survivors, beyond our survivor-centered research team, contribute to research to understand sex trafficking. The toolkit will also educate other researchers seeking to engage lived expertise on best approaches to use in their research processes.
The Bringing Life to Research toolkit is supported by the National Science Foundation through a supplement to grant number 2039584. The views and conclusions presented here are those of the project team and should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the National Science Foundation.