survivors are not a monolith

The reality is, not all survivors of human trafficking want or need the same things in the same ways. Individuals and organizations claiming to speak for all survivors have pushed for:

• Increased criminalization of commercial sex. Even those who say they don't support criminalizing people who sell sex may support criminalizing customers, clients, and buyers of sexual services. This strategy is  ineffective and harmful as an anti-trafficking policy, and has been proven to foster the conditions for violence. See Attacking Demand, Escalating Violence: The Impact of Twenty Years of End Demand Implementation on People who Trade Sex
• Removal of access to platforms that people in commercial sex rely on for their safety. See: SESTA = DEATH to learn why this is horrific policy for survivors and consensual workers alike.
• Banking discrimination against sex workers, which also has ripple effects on gig workers in other fields. See: Shut Down & Shut Out: Access to Financial Services and Online Payments for Sex Workers in the U.S.
• "John schools" and other "prevention" strategies. These programs claim to "educate" sex buyers about the "harms of prostitution," but often reinforce harmful, stigmatizing messages about sex workers and suggest that no sex work is ever consensual. When stigma is reinforced in a strategy meant to "help," we are contributing to a culture that teaches sex buyers that they "own" someone in the sex trades, instead of working to deepen their respect for the fundamental humanity and autonomy of the person selling sex. See: The Impact of John Schools on Demand for Prostitution in Broadening the Scope of Human Trafficking Research

Not all survivors support these approaches, but because of the anti-prostitution pledge and the rampant conflation of consensual and trafficked commercial sex in our society, those survivors have been essentially locked out of movement spaces for almost 20 years.

• Survivors report that services they've received have been conditional on their denial that any of their prior commercial sex was consensual.
• Survivors report that when organizations asked to share their trafficking story in fundraising or narrative campaigns, the organizations shaped the stories in ways that supported conflation or demonized commercial sex.
• Survivors report that if at any point in their professional or movement leadership career they begin to question demand reduction, they are attacked ("pimp lobby!"), accused ("why do you care more about traffickers than victims?"), harassed (even local chapters of national women's rights organizations have a pattern of online harassment of survivors who don't support demand reduction, for example), or fear losing income when the organizations they had been consulting with no longer find them useful.

Beyond that, a lot of folks who are currently experiencing or recently experienced trafficking in commercial sex find that many tactics common in demand reduction do not meet their needs or place them at increased risk of violence.

• Some survivors who are no longer being trafficked use the income from sex work to build stability in the immediate aftermath of abuse, to maintain their independence and keep from going back to their traffickers, or to pay for nonjudgmental, harm reduction-based, or sex-positive therapy and mental health support that is not otherwise available to them, and certainly not in many anti-trafficking programs.
• The vast majority of people who have been in commercial sex, whether consensual or trafficked, have experienced sexual violence or sexual extortion to avoid arrest by law enforcement officers or other government officials. Even if the percentage of government employees who abuse their power in this way may be small, the percentage of people in the sex trades who have this experience is high. Putting people into greater contact with policing and criminal legal systems (including "diversion courts" that force sex workers to get "treatment") increases the risk of violence to already-marginalized communities.
• People in commercial sex are often targeted for housing discrimination, banking discrimination, harmful custody battles, employment discrimination, and more. All of these reduce their options for wellbeing and increase the tradeoffs they are required to make in their everyday lives, which increases their vulnerability to traffickers.