Do No Harm: Understanding Intersectional Experiences in Human Trafficking

“The series begins Thursday, May 5 at 2 pm (EDT) and recurs on Thursday each week until June 9 at 2 pm (EDT).

Human trafficking is an abhorrent crime that we have a collective duty to address. Doing so requires policy changes and investments in services and programs to support survivors and those who are targeted by traffickers. Too often, the policies and investments sought by anti-human trafficking groups end up harming those vulnerable and marginalized groups.

Do No Harm: Understanding Intersectional Experiences in Human Trafficking is the second part of webinar series focusing on anti-oppressive, trauma-informed anti-human trafficking practices. Human trafficking is a complex phenomenon, including multiple intersecting experiences. Reducing this complexity to a single narrative causes harm. The upcoming six webinars will focus on how different aspects of peoples’ identities inform their choices along the spectrum of exploitation.

Webinar 1 (May 5): Choice and Human Trafficking: Working Beyond the Binary of Fully Victimized and Fully Choosing in Order to Better Understand Exploitation and Provide Better Support

Description: Dr. AnnaLise Trudell discusses choice by using sex positivity and harm reduction approaches, helping to better understand the context of individuals’ lives, bringing an intersectional approach to understanding the parts of identity that limit choice, and how working beyond the binary of choice is essential to supporting survivors of human trafficking and of all forms of exploitation. “We don’t rescue people. We don’t go into other peoples’ lives and rescue them. They rescue themselves if that’s something that they think they need and we are there and we show up with the resources that they need to do that.” – Dr. AnnaLise Trudell

Speaker: Dr.AnnaLise Trudell, Manager of Education, Training & Research, Anova

Webinar 2 (May 12): Anti-Human Trafficking Work with People with Developmental Disabilities

Description: This presentation will talk about the intersectionality between people with developmental disabilities and anti-human trafficking work. We will examine how today’s anti-human trafficking systems harm individuals with developmental disabilities.

Speaker: Maddi Doerrl (she/her)

Webinar 3 (May 19): Understanding Migrant Workers’ Choices through Intersectional Lens

Speaker: Amanda Panambi Morales Vidales, Migrant Worker Group Facilitator, Legal Assistance of Windsor

Description: The migrant who comes to work in Canada lives and faces a vulnerable reality in many areas. These vulnerabilities are a consequence of the lack of protection, and the consequences are varied. Specifically, they can be seen in the ease with which migrants can fall prey to exploitation and human trafficking, breaking their social and personal fabric. Some of these ruptures occur in the individual, family and social spheres, making the worker vulnerable to any abuse. This presentation aims to talk about these losses not as a consequence of their own decision but as a consequence of the lack of legal and social protection that the host country has for them.

Webinar 4 (May 26): Sex Trafficking and Black Girls: An Intersectional Examination of Racial Disparities in Victimization and Identification

Speaker: Rhonelle Bruder (she/her),PhD Researcher, Founder & Executive Director, Project iRISE, Human Trafficking Educator & Consultant

Description: This session will apply an intersectional lens to explore sex trafficking through a historical context and examine how present-day structural systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, and classism underlie Black girls’ vulnerability to trafficking. While providing a deeper analysis of how trafficking narratives perpetuate both the hypervisibility of Black girls’ bodies and the invisibility of their victimhood.

Webinar 5 (June 2): “It’s Not Violence When the Police Do It”: State-Sanctioned Violence Under the Guise of Anti-Trafficking ‘Rescue’

Police say their focus has shifted from arresting and prosecuting individual sex workers to ‘rescuing’ those they believe to be victims of human trafficking. Not only is law enforcement’s anti-trafficking approach ineffective, but it also continues to harm sex workers. If anti-trafficking approaches are to be effective, they must center sex workers’ knowledge, expertise and experience.

Speaker: Alison Clancey (she/her/hers), Executive Director, SWAN Vancouver

Webinar 6 (June 9): TBD

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This series continues the dialogue from part one of this project- Do No Harm: A Fresh Perspective on Anti-Human Trafficking Work that took place last spring and helped us uncover blind spots and tensions within the anti-human trafficking work.”

Recordings are here- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDdiVjkjwgPhwQgXx42kIHg