Though I’ve had years of experience interviewing trauma survivors, my National Fellowship project on sex-trafficked foster kids presented a unique set of challenges. For one, the project’s focus was sexually abused children. Even if I could find children who were willing to talk with me, I knew that interviewing them might not be in their best interest, and could potentially be harmful. But as in all forms of gender-based violence, sex trafficking is driven by an abuser’s tactics of power and control — and traffickers disempower victims into silence. So it was important to me that the project include the stories and voices of survivors.
To deepen my understanding of this issue, I was grateful for the chance to observe and interact with child sex trafficking victims at juvenile court, during an undercover law enforcement sting, and throughout ride-alongs with a social worker and a probation officer. My favorite reporting experience was attending a ropes course designed to empower kids who had been victimized by the sex trade. Some had been free from their trafficker for a year; others had been sold by their exploiter the night before. But for that day, they all got to just be kids.
Without these experiences, the project wouldn’t have been as immersive or meaningful — I scrawled in my notebook the entire time. However, I limited my official survivor interviews to young adults who had been trafficked as children. I felt more comfortable knowing that adult survivors I spoke with had some recovery, and that they could give informed consent to an interview. Still, because these adults were in the foster system before they were trafficked as children, the degree of complex trauma they had survived was staggering.
[For more on this story by Lily Dayton, go to https://www.centerforhealthjou...ng-trauma-survivors?]
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