Why I’m More Wary Than Ever Of “Anti-Trafficking” Influencers:

…especially the religious ones.

I say that as a person of faith myself. I can’t think of anything in this world, not even the violent traumas I’ve experienced, that has driven me further away from my faith in the past as people claiming to represent Jesus while causing harm to vulnerable communities, and/or looking the other way when someone they like or are being paid by is causing harm.

My intention in writing this post is to give a heads up to survivors who are newer to speaking out publicly or having their story in the media for the first time, because people seeking to use our trauma for their own agendas is unfortunately really common & it’s hard to know who you can trust. I’ve spoken pretty extensively on Twitter & also in other spaces about helping survivors discern who to trust when it comes to journalists, & I feel it’s important to be cautious with influencers as well. Even though I have had media training & have a lot of experience speaking to the media & people in the policy world & influencers & everyone in between at this point, I still am not immune from making mistakes in trusting the wrong people & I hope to help other survivors avoid some of the same hurt I’ve experienced in this way.

I’ve long been very wary of anti-trafficking influencers without lived experience of trafficking themselves, appointing themselves subject matter experts & claiming to speak for us. In this post Although all survivors are experts on our own personal experiences, even that does not qualify us to be subject matter experts. That takes so much learning, un-learning, community reflection & time to get to a place where we can ethically speak on things that help not only us as individuals, but our communities as a collective. I myself have had extensive training to learn what it means to be trauma informed & how to implement best practices in the work I do, because nobody is immune from potentially causing harm to others, even amongst our own communities.

An important clarification- when I say “influencers without lived experience (of trafficking) themselves” I am not implying anyone should be forced to disclose their own trauma, but when someone outright says they are NOT a survivor & can’t relate firsthand, I take their word on that. So when I say person without lived experience, I’m not assuming someone isn’t a survivor because they didn’t say they are, but because they explicitly said they are not.

What I wish more people understood is that causing harm isn’t limited to putting your hands on us. It’s also when you refuse to listen to us, then continue to speak over us & think you know better than we do. I’ve especially seen (& personally experienced) this when people like this find out you also are or have been a sex worker in addition to being a trafficking survivor- they tend to look at us like we’re too traumatized to know what we really need & therefore should be disqualified from speaking for ourselves. We must need brave heroes like them to do it for us because we just don’t know better. This line of thinking is so arrogant & so harmful. I’ve also experienced this a lot when conservative religious anti-trafficking influencers find out that I’m not heterosexual. Or that I speak out about misogyny & the harms of purity culture in religion, as someone who identifies as a Christian feminist. & so on & so on. Anything that deviates from their own views on how faith should be, and/or what they think a “well-behaved victim who deserves my support” should look like.

Whenever a new self-declared anti-trafficking advocate/influencer pops up, the first question I want to ask them is this- are you truly pro-survivor, or are you just anti-adult industry? This question feels important to me because many trafficking / sexual violence / domestic violence survivors also are or have been sex workers, & many sex workers are also survivors of some or all of those things. More on this topic later in the post.

I had some interactions with one of these anti-trafficking influencers that left me feeling incredibly unsettled the last couple of months. I didn’t plan to write about this but after talking with a few other survivors who were already aware of & wary about this person & after also sitting with why this bothers me so much for a while, it’s because this is such a bitter reminder of how we as survivors get treated in so many situations. Like we’re disposable the second we don’t fit the “perfect victim” narrative someone dreamed up about us when we were just nothing more than a post topic or an idea to them.

In a world where viral videos = big payouts & career-making opportunities for content creators, & a world where where many survivors live in poverty, it feels inherently unbalanced & exploitive when creators post about us without our consent & then profit from it. I’ve spoken on this many times over the years, especially on TikTok.

I’ve seen so many people build up their entire massive followings from nothing after going viral for posting about me, & I’m just one person, just one example. I’ve seen this happen with so many other survivors stories as well, & I wonder how many of them are even aware that these videos or posts exist about them. I’ve lost count of how many times creators have made viral content about or including me, & I can only recall one single time where the creator talked to me a little bit first & also made a point of de-monetizing the video as he didn’t feel ethical profiting from the trauma of others. It feels especially offensive to me when these creators then use the clout gained from my trauma to promote harmful “solutions” I don’t agree with, such as policies that harm sex workers & immigrants- just to name the two most common groups I see thrown under the bus to supposedly “end trafficking” by these influencers.

A lot of these creators try to justify creating this content without consent under the guise of “spreading awareness.” There’s certainly a time & a place for spreading awareness, but it should never be done at the expense of a traumatized individual’s agency, safety, or well-being.

I’ve had many conversations with other survivors about how this is the kind of thing that one should be able to sue for emotional distress over, or at the very least for our image & likeness being used without our consent for someone else to profit from in any way shape or form. Maybe one of us could/should set a precedent in this way. This type of harm might not be the same as the ones who violently harass, stalk, threaten, slander & try to falsely discredit us in an attempt to silence us but it’s still harm nonetheless. In some ways, to me at least, it hurts even more sometimes- especially when it’s someone you took a chance on trusting & believing had good intentions.

To be blunt, I personally as an individual haven’t needed help spreading awareness about what happened to me for a long time. I appreciate those who do so with good intentions & with speaking to me first, but when people don’t do that it just causes more harm than good. My own posts in my own words on TikTok / Twitter (especially Twitter) have gone viral many times & had millions of views. My story was also investigated & reported as global front page news in 40+ languages in 2020 by BBC World News. I don’t necessarily want or need more awareness for my individual case. There are tons of other victims out there, I’m just one person & we need awareness spread not just that bad things happen in the world, but awareness of real SOLUTIONS & harm reduction & community support.

Nobody should ever have content made about their trauma without their consent & for someone else’s benefit, benefits like clout & actual money because yes these influencers get paid extremely well for their viral posts about us & I’ve seen more people than I can count especially on TikTok & Instagram literally build their entire followings from the ground up because a post about my case or someone else’s went viral. That feels exploitive & I’m far from the only survivor to say so. It costs nothing to ask us if we consent to content being made about us & to check that everything being said is even accurate before doing it. Many of us are very easy to find online.

The specific person I’m referring to in this post reached out to me via DM after seeing me respond to some comments on some of his posts about me. I was going to refer to him in gender neutral language to further hide his identity, but I feel it’s important to name that he is a man because I feel like the misogyny specific to Western conservative religions plays a role in things like this & of treating outspoken women as a threat or something best ignored.

This person initially seemed very receptive to hearing feedback from me, & said things like “I haven’t experienced anything like you have before, but we’re in this together. I can hopefully get a better understanding of what it’s like to better communicate that to the world.” & “I’m here for you.”

There were some initial red flags for me that I chose to ignore at the time, such as him telling people to go read my blog where he said I “fight against the (porn) industry” - I was glad he actually linked my own words unlike a lot of influencers, but that statement told me he didn’t actually read my blog at all, because the industry I spend most of my words on there fighting against is actually the evangelical rescue complex industry. I sent him the link to my first blog post about this, & he said he read it & that it was very eye opening for him. That post can be read here: https://www.rosekalemba.com/blog/dg05qroc6c9s3m7f1g2m7duv5kaojp

If you haven’t already read that post, it’s relevant because it’s about the exploitive organization & its affiliates I refer to repeatedly in this post.

In addition to some light initial critical feedback, I also gave him positive feedback on some of his posts, because I appreciated that he spoke about things like labor trafficking too instead of solely sex trafficking (a lot of influencers just pretend labor trafficking doesn’t exist because it isn’t perceived as being as scandalous or having as high of viral video potential as sex trafficking) & that he showed recognition + support for male victims of trafficking & other forms of exploitation as well.

This person has made multiple viral videos about my trauma on multiple social media platforms, with some of the videos about me having over 3 million views. The comments sections are unmonitored by the creator, & they can get pretty horrendous. One of the hardest things everytime content is created about me without my consent & goes viral is that I have no time or way to prepare myself for the uptick in harassment, doxxing & other forms of abuse I experience as a result. When I make my own posts, I am taking that responsibility & awareness onto myself & knowing it might happen again & preparing myself for it. When someone else speaks about me & over me on my own trauma, I don’t have that same chance to prepare myself. I’ve now had multiple happy life events clouded by this unexpected uptick in harassment that I wasn’t able to prepare myself for, & it has impacted my closest loved ones too.

On one site, the comments section was full of people claiming to have links to re-uploads of videos of my childhood abuse, people threatening me, people trying to doxx me. & even some well-meaning people left comments that hurt me, such as people ignorantly assuming my father doesn’t care about me & seeking to harass him because he didn’t land himself in jail for taking revenge against my abusers- something I begged him not to do from the start because I couldn’t stand to lose him too. That’s just one example of many. Not everyone who left a comment like this did it maliciously, some were just curious where my family was, but some outright attacked my father & he has gotten harassing, cruel messages.

This particular influencer completely ghosted me after I fairly gently & privately criticized him for continuing to promote & support & solicit donations for organizations that have grievously harmed not only me but other survivors as well, after I spent literal hours upon hours answering this person’s personal questions about how this organization has harmed me & others, & about my own personal trauma & related struggles. I very rarely will open up to a stranger like that anymore, but I chose to take a chance on trusting this person.

To be completely blunt, it’s shitty, cowardly behavior to treat someone like this who made themselves vulnerable to you just because they called you out (again- privately & gently) about perpetuating harm. I don’t know if this specific person interprets any criticism as an attack, or if Exodus Cry (an organization I feel is exploitive to survivors) staff or affiliates told him to stop speaking to me (as they tried to get me to stop speaking to another survivor I knew years ago when she started criticizing them publicly)

Regardless of the reason- if you can’t handle feedback from the same people you claim to be fighting for, then you shouldn’t be claiming to be speaking for us publicly. What hurts the most is that this person does have a massive following & I asked him to use that to help spread factual awareness about the MMIR epidemic & how that relates to trafficking. I tried a few times to get back in touch with him after he ghosted me partially for this purpose, but he continued to ignore me. I also tried to get back in touch because I was concerned about him possibly taking my criticism as a personal attack, & I didn’t want some fairly young person who I still feel has good in them feeling bad about themselves no matter what. I believe every person is going through something, & if I can leave things on a peaceful note with everyone I can, I try my best to.

He has completely stopped speaking to me, even when I just asked for reassurance that the things I trusted him with are safe & asked to just pray together one more time as we may have different approaches to our religion, but share a common faith in Jesus. Even when I asked him to please restrict his comments on one site because masses of commenters were claiming to have links of my abuse, & I didn’t have the stomach to check if they really did or if they were trolling. He couldn’t even take two minutes out of his day to give me a single response about any of that. Yet all his videos about me are still up. He is still benefiting from my childhood trauma.

It makes me feel nauseous & used every time I get a new comment or DM about one of his posts about me. The most recent one I got was yesterday. Another survivor DM’ing me is how I even came to be aware of this person in the first place last year, & she asked me if I wanted her to say something on his post because he’s posting videos about me yet elsewhere on his account promoting this organization that deeply harmed me & many other survivors. She is also the same person who let me know that he was posting on his story to solicit donations for them, again right after I spent hours & hours on calls with him two days in a row answering all his questions about how they hurt me. When I went to look at his story, I couldn’t see the post. So he clearly felt some type of weirdness about promoting that organization after speaking with me, because he hid his story from me. I was able to see it on my other account.

Another survivor I’m also in community with looked into this specific person (he said that if people like this are going to look into us to make public posts about, it’s fair if we do the same & I tend to agree) after reaching out to me & learning about my interactions with him & it appears that over the last few years he’s made other types of content such as prank videos & art videos, with the clearly stated intentions in those videos of trying to go viral & build a big following but then finally landed on anti-trafficking content & stuck with that after quickly gaining a massive following from it. It really hurts to sit with the feeling that someone you chose to take a chance on trusting & opening up to possibly sees your pain & the pain of other survivors as just a way to go viral.

Again- I’m asking anyone reading this not to make assumptions about the specific person I’m referring to, & to not harass him. I don’t think this is some evil person, just young & perhaps a little arrogant. He even said to me himself “I’m just a young immature guy, I’m going to make mistakes & am still learning so please speak your mind to me” which I initially thought was refreshing honesty to hear, but then when I took him up on that & very mildly & privately criticized him it was a whole different story. I told him that above all, I was very concerned that other survivors seeing him promote this organization are going to think they’re safe & trustworthy & then end up exploited by them too. They can’t really hurt me any worse than they already did. But they can harm others still, & I’m afraid they will.

Re-living our trauma is exhausting emotional labor, & for some reason the vast majority of these influencers feel so entitled to that, & expect us to go into graphic detail about our trauma so they can “better understand.” Sometimes I make a personal choice to do so in good faith, trying to assume someone has good intentions & it’ll be worth it. It hurts a lot to feel vulnerable & to have spent hours upon hours of my time & emotional labor answering very personal questions, just for someone to then immediately publicly support & promote an organization that abused me & so many other survivors.

Another big issue I have is when these influencers use the clout & attention they gained from our trauma to then promote harmful “solutions” to trafficking or other forms of exploitation. This guy, like most from this particular type of influencers, is conservative & openly promotes border control & anti-immigrant policies as a supposed “solution.” I do not consent to my trauma being used in this way. As an Indigenous woman, I don’t see my relatives from south of the made up colonial border as any less Native than me. Attacking my southern relatives in my name isn’t okay with me, or blaming them for trafficking. This is just one of many harmful “solutions” he promotes.

On the topic of anti-sex industry organizations & people: Although many organizations benefit their own agendas from trying to pit us against each other, the reality is that survivors & sex workers aren’t two separate groups of people with opposing interests & rights. We are often one in the same, both survivor & sex worker, & even those who aren’t (such as those who only identify with one of those two labels) have far more in common than most realize. & the thing is, you don’t have to like the existence of or support the sex industry whatsoever to support sex worker’s rights & safety. I’ve personally experienced a lot of extreme abuse, stalking, doxxing, harassment & smear campaigns against me for speaking out about harm I experienced in the industry as a child.

That’s not okay. No industry should be immune from criticism, especially when ALL industries currently exist under exploitive systems including but not limited to capitalism, gender based violence, & colonialism. I’ve seen so many other sex workers get viciously attacked too for speaking out about abuse they experienced in the industry over the years, many of these being publicly active sex workers who are very much vocally against criminalization of themselves & other sex workers. It’s a problem when we can’t speak out about harm we’ve experienced & fight for harm reduction without being accused of being fake survivors or fake sex workers & viciously attacked & our safety put in danger because we are accused of “trying to make the industry look bad.” Again, no industry should ever be above criticism especially by the people who have been or are in said industry. But- you can criticize an industry without attacking or harming the marginalized individuals trying to survive in it. That’s the only way an industry should be criticized. People just trying to survive should never be seen as acceptable collateral damage.

When we are attacked for speaking out about harm we experienced in the industry, it feels like the flip side of the same coin of anti-sex work organizations calling us “the pimp lobby”  & otherwise trying to discredit us for fighting for sex worker rights & safety as we also fight for survivor rights & safety- which again, are not actually opposing interests at all despite so many orgs, politicians, influencers etc trying to make us believe so to benefit their own agenda.

This all being said- it’s not exactly breaking news at this point that a lot of organizations, influencers & other individuals pretend to be anti-trafficking when they’re really just anti-sex work. This dishonesty & misinformation easily confuses people by appealing to their emotions, because a lot of genuinely good-hearted people consume this type of content.

For me, the biggest giveaway of an organization or individual that is not truly anti-trafficking but rather just anti-adult industry is that they are willing to harm survivors & essentially write it off as sad but necessary collateral damage to their real goal of taking down the porn industry, etc. It was really telling to me that one influencer I spoke with recently told me “it’s my job to be a vessel for these organizations” referring specifically to the organization I linked a blog post about earlier, because if you look at a lot of his posts, you would think he was trying to be a vessel for survivors. Organizations led by people without lived experience do not speak for us & are not synonymous with survivors. If people are just wanting to do paid promo posts for organizations, they should be more upfront about that at least.

This individual is just the most recent influencer I’ve interacted with, & just one of many to make posts about myself & other survivors without our consent, but he’s the one I spoke to the most extensively by far in a long time so I think that’s a big part of why I still feel so exhausted & hurt over this. I have been vocal over the years about how I don’t think lasting organizing can happen & metaphorical bridges can be built for the greater good if we refuse to ever talk to anyone across the political aisle, so I took a chance on doing that & I feel like I got burned once again. I even thought maybe I had made a friend I could pray with & shared the same faith with, & I was happy about that. This situation turning out the way it did sucks. I feel far more sad than I do angry. I’m angry at the bigger picture of this being such a prolific occurrence for survivors, not so much at this one individual who is still a young adult just trying to find his way in the world, as we all are.

That being said, although I didn’t name his name here, & am asking people not to harass him if they think they figure out which account I’m talking about, I do worry this person may try to retaliate against me in some way because he already joked about probably being able to get me “cancelled” because of his platform size. I took it as a joke at the time, but now feel a bit differently. I & many other survivors have also experienced harassment from followers of influencers like this & been told outlandish offensive things like that we must secretly be traffickers ourselves because we don’t support a specific person’s brand of messaging about this topic. But I refuse to feel intimidated into silence by anyone.

Another survivor I’ve been talking about this all with asked me if I’d be open to talking with this influencer again if he ever reached back out, & I think I would be but not without a lot of caution. It’s exhausting emotional labor to pour out your heart to someone just to not be listened to. It would also feel disingenuous to me if none of my earnest attempts to reach out again privately worked, but me speaking publicly did. To me, that shows that someone cares more about public perception & their ego than private harms & impact on vulnerable people.

That being said, I would potentially be open to talking with & praying with this person again, if he seems sincere because conflict resolution & community building are some of my most tightly held values & ultimately I want to believe in the good of other people & I believe people deserve a chance to learn & grow & reflect. I’ve been given many such chances in my life, & I don’t think I’m above giving others the same chance when I have the opportunity to do so. I truly wish this person the best & all I asked for is that he listen & consider the risks to survivors of promoting harmful organizations & institutions to his massive audience.

Another big problem with this kind of influencer is that they always, without exception that I’ve seen so far, promote blatantly false statistics. Edit: Shortly after I published this blog post, someone DM’d me correctly guessing who I was talking about & sharing that he was now claiming that less than 1% of trafficking victims survive. I looked for myself & sure enough he said that multiple times. I guess it must be easy to try to justify speaking over us & ignoring us when we say you’re perpetuating harm if you let yourself believe 99% of us are dead so we just can’t speak for ourselves & need you to do it for us.

I know that survivors are not a monolith & we don’t agree on all things all the time (who does?) & some survivors might even feel they’ve had positive interactions with orgs like this. But that doesn’t negate the harm they’ve caused others. If someone throws bricks at 7/10 people who walk past them, but does something nice for a few people, that doesn’t mean it undoes or excuses the harm caused to the other 70% in this hypothetical example. It wouldn’t be okay even if they only did it to one person.

Survivors deserve better than the endless amount of people & organizations & institutions benefiting from our trauma while most of us are still struggling just so survive our lives. We deserve better than being endlessly told that someone is speaking for us because we’re supposedly voiceless, when in reality we have our own diverse voices that are just constantly being silenced by those who think they know better. Good intentions definitely count for something in my book, but ultimately impact matters most of all. Nothing about us without us.

The person I’ve talked about in this post also has an account where he speaks as Jesus to his followers & if I was still in a different or newer place in my own faith journey, someone talking like that could confuse me & make me think that Jesus Himself would actually treat people this way- since those claiming to represent Him sure are. That makes me sad to think about. These things can really spiritually damage a person, I know that firsthand because some of the worst violence I’ve ever been through as a child was by someone who claimed to love & represent Jesus. Even lesser wounds like this situation I’ve written about today leave scars too. The Jesus I know would never use someone’s pain for His own agenda & then throw them away like they are trash.

As my father who is a fellow survivor who inspires me daily said so succinctly when we talked about the way this influencer (& so many others like him) ended up acting- “I don’t always claim to know the answer to ‘What Would Jesus Do’ in every single situation ever, but I feel like He definitely wouldn’t do this.”