Promising Practices When Working With CSEC Survivors

A multi-sectoral response based on partnerships, collaboration and frequent communication ensures that needs are addressed within a continuum of care model. This includes service providers, peer supports, and the participants themselves.

As the change process is often lengthy, the best way to support an individual is to assign a primary participant contact who may provide 24-hour support. This helps build trust and engages the client in their recovery.

Key Points of Practice:

• Multi-sectoral collaboration that includes peer support and outreach.

• Establish collaborative relationships with other service providers and determine how your service will work together for the participant. (Becoming a TESS Partner is a great way to build those relationships!).

• Establish protocols that address the continuum of care of the participant.

• Identify a primary participant contact who will be responsible for case management and inter-agency communication.

Consider the whole person. Work with participants to determine what they need and want, then provide non-judgmental, comprehensive, wrap-around services (either on-site or through visiting service providers). Participants will need both concrete services (appropriate housing, health care, legal services, and necessities like food and clothing), as well as services to address multiple layers of physical and psychological trauma. More information on these resources can be found in our TESS Directory.

When necessary, adapt services to better serve participants’ needs. Such as offering services outside of regular business hours, or assisting with transportation or child care.

Key Points of Practice:

• Consider all participant needs and how these may be met. Be creative when necessary!

• Adapt services to eliminate barriers.

• Provide wrap-around/comprehensive services that include after hour-hours support.

• Provide support to participants but allow them autonomy in decision-making and direction.

• Be flexible in practice and advocate for such with other service providers.

• Create individualized safety plans for each participant.

To accurately meet the needs of participants, service providers must be informed on CSEC and the local context, particularly safety issues. Traffickers pose significant risk and therefore participants should have individualized safety plans that take into account response protocols and anonymity.

Consistency, patience, and timely response are essential to trust-building. So is respecting participant assessment of the situation and their needs. While some agencies employ a similar care model to that of intimate partner violence, the dynamics and issues that emerge for trafficking victims can be different. Victims rarely self-identify as such and therefore services must not have language-specific requirements.

Service providers must be trained in trauma-informed care and understand the physical, social, and emotional impact of trafficking on the individual. Trauma-informed practice encourages safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment.

Key Points of Practice:

• Implement basic of trauma-informed care.

• Train all staff and volunteers on CSEC; including indicators that someone may be trafficked, best practices, trauma-informed care for this population, and safety and response protocols. TESS offers free training for service providers!

• Do not require participants to identify as victims to access services.

• Gain informed consent to services and ensure confidentiality.

• Create individualized safety plans and protocols with participants and regularly update as necessary.

• Be available to accompany participants to appointments.

• Ensure housing and meeting spaces are secure.
  For example: locks, cameras, located away from areas of concern for the client, identify the address with local law enforcement, do not allow visitors, have two points of entry/exit.

• Maintain participant anonymity. Do not identify them as trafficked to other participants, change phone number and address with non-care services, ensure all outside service providers understand the importance of participant anonymity.

As marginalized populations are disproportionately affected by CSEC, service providers must be culturally informed to ensure that services are culturally appropriate, particularly in the trafficking context. When possible, participants should be able to access services from people who look like them and have a shared experience of racial or cultural marginalization.

Service providers must also be aware of street culture and youth culture. Services should meet the cultural, emotional, and spiritual needs of the participants and make use of appropriate, reliable referrals. Take the participant’s lead in this regard.

As trafficked individuals have a specific set of experiences, it is essential to put those with lived experience at the center. These individuals are the experts who must inform and sometimes lead the development, delivery and evaluation of services. The use of peer supporters can provide hope to clients and further develop trustworthiness, as someone who has had similar experiences and are therefore essential.

TESS created Cultural Inclusion Guidelines informed by lived experiences of survivors of CSEC, as well as a diverse groups of well-respected partner agencies across Nova Scotia. These are tools for service providers who work with, for and support people from historically marginalized and stigmatized communities in Nova Scotia.

Key Points of Practice:

• Use of appropriate and reliable referrals to culturally specific supports.

• Before referring to a service, check-in with participant to confirm appropriateness.

• Hire gender-diverse and culturally diverse staff that is representative of the people accessing services.

• Discuss holistic needs with participants and help identify how these can be met.

• Be informed on the effects of colonialism, oppression and intergenerational trauma.

• Involve the services of a peer support worker.

• Advocate for culturally appropriate services and spaces such as: prayer and smudging locations, service provider awareness, translation services, appropriate use of language.

• Learn slang from The Game and from youth culture.

• Use TESS’s Cultural Inclusion Guidelines developed by survivors.

To encourage participant empowerment, it is important that service providers promote their ability to make informed decisions and choices in their care and be supported to do so.

In Implementing a strengths-based perspective, service providers should assist participants in making the transition from victim and survivor, to victor and thriver, and eventually to leader. Drawing on participant skills, service providers can create physical and ideological spaces for their contributions and assist in challenging systemic barriers.

This practice can be employed in a multitude of ways including harm reduction policies, working with participants in all stages of change, and continuous reflection on practice.

Learn more about how TESS implements Trauma-Informed leadership into our work.

Key Points of Practice:

• Be a mentor not a saviour.

• Include participants in Case management and direction.

• Centre participants as the expert of their experience.

• Advocate for participant when necessary and invited.

• Employ harm reduction policies when possible.

• Regularly check-in with participants regarding provider-client relationships.

• Include programs and services that assist in the development of like skills, healing and personal growth.