Tiffany Williams is the coordinator of the Beyond Survival campaign of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which works to build survivor leadership and awareness of human trafficking of domestic workers in the United States and around the world. She talks about her work and study on human trafficking and domestic workers across the United States, and the journey behind putting together the report as part of the Beyond Survival Campaign.
I started off about
ten years ago. I started as a social worker and was working with women
trafficked into the US nannies, caregivers and maids. They came from all over.
What we did in 2010, to review all our cases. We looked to see what the impact
of our work had been. While we thought we did help a lot of people and were
survivor centred, we were not seeing a change in the scenario. If you took a
case each from 1998 and 2008, and just changed the dates, you’ll find the case
being the same. The kinds of abuse we see in our field are very much tied to
issues about migration, labour rights, gender, economic inequality, climate
change and foreign policy – all of which relate to issues that people are aware
of on a global scale. But, somehow, it hasn’t entered the consciousness about
trafficking. We decided to do something different. The cases were not
different, so we had to be different.
We joined the National
Domestic Workers’ Alliance. It has 44 affiliate organizations and the groups
are in places all around the country and their focus is on domestic workers’
issues and rights, and not just on trafficking. The situation of discrimination
and exploitation that the industry itself faces – which is a global problem,
not confined to the US or India. It is a condition typical to women’s work in
the informal economy.
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Tiffany Williams | Image from here |
We start with consent.
Does the person want to be in the service? Do they have the ability leave at
any point? We take care of their immediate needs at first. Safety, respect,
immediate needs like housing, shelter and healthcare are given first. We see
our work as service providers as being a source of information and
coordination. There are a lot of stakeholders in a trafficking situation – we
have to deal with the NGO, the police, the government and all of the different
service providers that are out there. As a social worker, the service provider
is supposed to be the key. We also work on survivor-led goal planning. When we
do our case management, we ask our survivor what they want to do next.
Obviously, safety and related concerns are a priority, but we ensure that each
goal is led by the survivor.
One of the things we do is also to tell testimonies. We believe that
testimonies can be a healing process if the process is done right. We work with
survivors and encourage them to share their testimonies on a consent basis. But
unlike the conventional form of telling testimonies, we follow a system that
goes beyond just being a survivor. Most often NGOs think of looking at telling
stories as a way to position a survivor and an advocate, and then telling the
survivor to keep recounting the “sad” story, and then turning to the advocate
to ask them what they suggest is a way to change the scenario. Instead, we get
the advocate to step back and ask the survivor to share her story with the
vision she has for herself and the vision she has for policy change and for the
world.
Trafficking takes away
choice, and the ability to choose what you want to do at any minute in your
life. We try to continually build up an environment of choice for our
survivors. We also do a lot of resilience work with our survivors. When we talk
about resilience, we think about our role not as saviours and not as people who
have solutions to all their problems, we work to help them connect to their own
sense of resilience and healing. There are things that we do and already do in
our lives to heal from our pain. We try to bring that out in our survivors.
Social services in the US are time limited, so we try to make sure that our
survivors are on their path to self sufficiency.