When Burnout Reveals the Truth: What the Anti-Trafficking Field Can No Longer Ignore

Every few years, the anti-trafficking field releases another report diagnosing its own dysfunction. The Safehouse Project’s recent white paper is the latest to outline the emotional toll of the work, the predictable cycles of vicarious trauma, low wages, inconsistent leadership, and the churn that destabilizes survivor support.  To many in the field, these findings feel revelatory.  But to sex workers, survivors, and people who have lived inside the systems that claim to “save” us, none of this is new. We have been naming these problems for decades. The core issue is simple: you cannot build trauma-informed services on top of carceral logic, exploitative labor conditions, and structures that burn through staff as quickly as they burn through donors’ goodwill.