Why does modern slavery still exist?: Survivor-led

The business card

On the day I got out, a woman handed me a business card. I was nineteen. I had been trafficked since fourteen. I did not own a phone. I did not have an address. I had not been to school in five years.

I did not know what a business card was for.

She was kind. She had training. She had a protocol. The protocol assumed I was a person who knew how to be a person in the world. I was not that person. I was a body that had learned to survive by becoming invisible.

I run a recovery organization now. Eleven years. We serve people the system rescued and could not figure out what to do with. The raid is the beginning. Everybody thinks the raid is the end.

The law enforcement people are brave. The agents who came through the door risked their lives. I am alive because of what they did. But the prosecution rate is 0.03 percent, and they know it, and they keep working anyway, which tells me they are doing it because it is right, not because it is working. Right without working is a stance.

The economists mapped the pipeline. I have been inside the pipeline. The map is accurate. Accuracy is not understanding.

What we want is simple. Be in the room when the policy is written. Not as testimonials brought in to put a face on data and thanked before the budget discussion. We want the budget discussion. Peer support — survivor-to-survivor mentorship — is the most effective intervention we have seen and the least funded, because it does not produce publishable data.

Where we concede ground: Lived experience is knowledge. It is not a license to override every other source of knowledge. We have not always held that line.

What would change our mind: A national strategy designed without survivor input producing 50 percent improvement in recovery outcomes over ten years.

Read the full synthesis: Why does modern slavery still exist?