Survivors of sex trafficking are resilient individuals capable of employing strategies when needed to manage situations of marginalization and oppression such as gender oppression, racism, and poverty. Nonetheless, trafficking-related research and services has most focused on risks, deficits, and vulnerabilities. This leaves researchers and practitioners with little knowledge for understanding and supporting survivors’ preferred resilience strategies. In this presentation, the researcher answers the question, “How do survivors manifest and maintain resilience?” through a participatory constructivist grounded theory method (Charmaz, 2014) where participants engaged in data interpretation. Data comprised 75 in-depth interviews with 44 other survivors of sex trafficking, and was analyzed with a community co-analyst. Findings showed that the core of resilience was the ability to make preferred choices amidst very limited options that: (1) brought participants closer to goals, (2) did not move them further away, or (3) moved them away as little as possible so they could recover as quickly as possible when there was an opportunity. Choices were facilitated by four elements: hope, purpose, values, and assets. These elements revealed how participants’ personal agency interacted with structural inequalities, foregrounding personal power, and implicating social services and other sectors in their experiences of risk and opportunity. Participants noted they needed the most support for making choices during the period immediately after trafficking. Participants recommended that this resilience knowledge be used to create training materials, self-help materials, and a resilience-enhancing app. The presentation concludes with recommendations for community-engaged, participatory research for improving resilience-enhancing services for survivors.
Logan Knight is an assistant professor at the School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. As a survivor-researcher-advocate, she seeks to promote socially just, inclusive, and equitable research with survivors. Logan’s research interests include resilience and posttraumatic growth, and community-based and spiritual interventions for human trafficking.