relationships require trust

A wellbeing model for ending exploitation in commercial sex requires intentionally fostering trust with individuals and communities, particularly with people in the sex trades. We earn trust by being trustworthy, which means we do not trick or manipulate people into doing what we think they should do. For people who are experiencing or have experienced trafficking, being tricked, manipulated, and threatened are all too familiar. We don't build trust by replicating the behaviors of their traffickers. We don't foster restoring a person's agency and autonomy by taking it away "for their own good." 

Many common "anti-trafficking" strategies rely on tricks, manipulation, and threats, which erode sex workers' trust in us as partners in ending exploitation and destroy trafficking survivors' belief that we are invested in their long-term wellbeing.

Examples of harmful anti-trafficking strategies include:

• Telling someone that unless they're being trafficked they are going to be arrested. "If you're not a victim, that means you're a criminal." This is common, and it leads people who are being trafficked to deny it to protect their trafficker or avoid consequences (and thus increases their criminalization). It also pressures people who are not being trafficked to claim they are in order to avoid a criminal record and fees that would make them more vulnerable to violence.
• Responding to someone's ad to evangelize or try to get them to exit commercial sex. This is a common tactic among non-governmental agencies to try to "help" someone. For people who are being trafficked, they may not be able or ready to leave, and this may put them at increased risk of harm from their trafficker. For people who are not being trafficked, they made the ad and spent the time because they need income and sustainable solutions, not shame and assumptions. Meeting with them to share scriptures or try to shame them into leaving shows them that you don't care about their time or needs.
• Creating conditions in which clients are scared of arrest or public shaming. This is a a tactic that some people have proposed as part of an "end  demand" approach. For all people in commercial sex (trafficked or consensual), this creates dynamics in which they are forced to take riskier clients in order to make income or meet quotas. For people who are not being trafficked, this may also reduce their income, safety, and economic stability without changing the fundamental conditions that create vulnerability, such as homelessness or housing insecurity, criminal records, poverty, employment and housing discrimination, and family disruption.