PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH WITH ANIRBAN: Survivor-led Organizing for Empowerment and Changing Systems that Drive Trafficking in Persons

In the field of Counter Trafficking in Persons (CTIP), there is a growing consensus around the need to engage more meaningfully with survivors (people with lived experience), not merely as recipients of support, but as people with knowledge and expertise about what works and what doesn’t work in CTIP programing (Ash and Otiende, 2023). Survivor engagement has become an important requirement for manyCTIP projects, and survivor empowerment has become a common goal. If we are to do justice to these ideas, to center survivors as both partners and valuable assets in our CTIP work, we must ensure that they are not conceptualized or operationalized in superficial ways. This report presents our experiences and findings from a research project carried out in partnership with a set of survivor leaders in Bangladesh. We offer our insights into the nature of survivor leadership and its implications for meaningful engagement with survivors to support substantive empowerment.

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