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You are picnicking with friends along a rapidly flowing river. Halfway through your meal, you see a young girl drowning - you jump in and pull her out. You don't pay attention to where she goes, and you sit back down to dry off and finish your picnic. Two minutes later, you see somebody else drowning. You jump in and save her, too. Five minutes later, there are ten people in the river, and you're frantically trying to save them. Then there are 40, then 80. In your desperation to save them, you never stop to understand where they are coming from, who is throwing them in, and where they go after you save them.

This is the story of how many NGOs react to social problems - pulling people out of a river without any plans for what should follow or how to address the source of the problem. In the field of anti-trafficking, rescue operations often violate the human rights of those being rescued; rehabilitation rarely provides the care and training necessary for women to heal and sustain livelihoods; and repatriation practices frequently return women to situations where they are just as vulnerable to the socio-economic factors that were originally responsible for their trafficking - but often with the additional stigma of having worked in the sex industry. Consequently, many girls and women, despite receiving services from NGOs, often end up in the same or worse conditions than before they were trafficked.