Healing Centered Advocacy Means Moving Beyond the Binary

Last year, we were contacted by New Moon Network, which proposed bringing together advocates with lived experience from a range of positions on the decriminalization of the sex trades to discuss policy. We were honored to have the opportunity to shape and navigate this group and these conversations. As two facilitators with deep roots in anti-trafficking advocacy, we have experienced firsthand how policy lines, not shared experience, can dictate who you are allowed to be in community with.

Over the first few months, we reached out to allies and advocates to identify the six people we wanted to put in dialogue to find the places where our advocacy overlaps and we share important goals. In that process, we asked six incredible people to trust the space we could hold and offer their time and perspective. As people with lived experience and people who advocate from painful experiences, we share so much more than we often realize.

As facilitators who love building spaces for community, we decided to shape the time together as both time for shared skill-building and conversations about our values and policy goals. 

We came in with some usual worries about how to create a space for people who have been historically mistrusted in advocacy spaces. It was important to center care from the beginning and build relationships not just for the project's outcome but also to practice our relationship skills as a tool for liberation in our movements. Nothing about this was about landing in perfect agreement. Throughout the process, we stayed grounded in each session and each moment, slowing down, being honest, and being led by the people most impacted, not by the people with the biggest platforms. 

‍The Background of the Divide

 In a story as old as misogyny, a false binary was created to posit that there were two, clear camps of people in the sex trade: victims and whores. The concretizing of this binary through rhetoric, funding, and policy has led to people in need not being served, funding being weaponized, policy-makers tabling the entire issue, and energy being wasted. It has served those least impacted to the detriment of those most in need of care and community. It has flattened our personal stories to the detriment of our truth and healing. If you would like to read more about this divergence and the history of anti-trafficking advocacy, Alicia Peters's Responding to Human Trafficking offers a thoughtful historical perspective.

Without question, this division of people with a shared experience between those deserving of care and those deserving of punishment has caused unnecessary trauma, especially for those who are already experiencing the harm of violence, stigma, and discrimination. Many people who have experienced the pain of exploitation have come to collective spaces to find more harm. It is long beyond time to heal this rift and these wounds of division.

In this project, we wanted to directly undermine those lines of separation without shying away from the deeply held beliefs that ground our work and experience. It was our hope to help break these cycles of division for future advocates and to bridge gaps within these movements by centering on shared values and practicing community building across differences. We wanted to reflect these intentions throughout the process, opening our discussions with shared community agreements and going through a process of collectively chosen shared learning topics. This process allowed everyone to root their conversations in shared experience and growth, even as we would return to advocating for differing pathways forward after the cohort. We shaped conversations to prioritize relationship-building skills and especially sought out generative conflict as a way to move us forward together.

Through six ninety-minute sessions, we were able to see what this form of connection could be. In every conversation, it was evident that when these spaces are grounded in a community of people with diverse lived experiences and shared commitments to care, relationships can form. While we discussed policy issues spanning from immigration to service funding, the collective value elected to ground recommendations was that everyone, regardless of experience, deserves safety and nonjudgment. The clearest consensus was that everyone’s experience was valid and all deserved care.

With this foundation, the group reached consensus on several policy issues and chose to prioritize the six recommendations, providing us with direction for advocating for more care. It is our hope that more of these conversations are possible. At RHJ, we are already going back to the drawing board to envision how we can build stronger relationships and develop our movement’s ability to connect over conflict. 

We sincerely hope that this is only the first of this iteration. We have learned several lessons and are excited to try new strategies for generative conflict, collective witnessing, and finding the connective lines that bring us together in community. In a world that encourages disconnection and urgency over reflection, this cohort offered something else: a reminder that community-led dialogue, when rooted in care and intention, is a transformative strategy. It is how division is interrupted, how deeper understanding is built, and how advocacy becomes more aligned with the full spectrum of lived experience. We feel honored to have been a small part of this project and are excited to continue being a bridge builder for our collective liberation. 

Out report, Beyond the Binary, shares the recommendations from these generative conversations. We encourage you to read and hear the voices of the incredible advocacy who came together in the spirit of healing and connection, to move our movement forward, together.