ASK AN EXPERT SERIES 

IMPLEMENTING A VICTIM-CENTERED, TRAUMA-INFORMED 

PROGRAM FOR SURVIVORS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On September 24, 2020, three experts shared their insight and answered participant questions during 

this first in a series of Ask an Expert sessions hosted by the Office for Victims of Crime (OVC), Human 

Trafficking Capacity Building Center. The conversation focused on applying and enhancing policies and 

procedures centered on survivor safety, trust, choice, collaboration, and empowerment. Following are 

the questions and abbreviated answers provided by the panel of experts during the discussion. 

Questions and Answers 

How does trauma impact survivors of human trafficking? 

Trauma varies for each person and can affect any aspect of their life: daily functioning, emotional wellbeing, relationships, self-image, goal setting and follow through, engagement in services, mental health 

and physical health. Trauma impacts the whole person in a variety of ways and can increase or 

decrease in a moment, triggered by something as simple as a smell or a noise. 

What does it mean for an organization to be victim-centered and trauma-informed? 

Trauma-informed care realizes the prevalence of trauma, recognizes how trauma affects all individuals 

involved, and responds appropriately. Being a victim-centered, trauma-informed organization begins 

with understanding the physical, social, and emotional trauma on the individuals it serves, but it 

doesn’t end there. Trauma-informed organizations also recognize the impact of trauma in the lives of 

their staff members; how staff may bring greater empathy, passion, and commitment to their work as a 

result of their own experiences with trauma; and how staff who are survivors may also be more 

vulnerable to their own trauma triggers and vicarious trauma in their work. The OVC Model Standards 

offers guidelines and suggestions on improving the quality and consistency of response to victims. The 

pathway for thinking about what it means to be person-centered and trauma-informed in engagements 

with individuals can be conceptualized in these four ways─

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ASK AN EXPERT: VICTIM -CENTERED, TRAUMA -INFORMED CARE 

1. Being trauma-responsive and having an understanding of how trauma impacts the brain, how 

it impacts every human and every individual, and the substantive trauma literacy we bring to 

trauma consciousness; 

2. Being ethical and honoring ethical standards in our interactions with individuals and in the 

delivery of services; 

3. Being empowerment-based and looking at what individuals want, what their goals are, and 

how they seek to get to their end goals; and 

4. Being culturally relevant and recognizing the impact of culture and taking the time to 

understand the relevance for each individual person. 

How is staff best trained on this approach and its practices? 

Staff should be trained on these principles in a comprehensive way including crisis response, 

screening, intake, meetings and communications with clients, and collaboration with community 

partners. Training should be delivered through various means, such as access to resources (e.g., 

guides, reports, research, presentations, and white papers), in-person trainings on related topics, and 

staff discussion. Project Trust’s Trauma Response to Uplift Survivors of Trafficking is an OVC-funded 

training and technical assistance provider that supports agencies and organizations with integrating a 

trauma-informed approach into each level of service delivery and organizational structure. 

What is the best way to start making changes in an organization and how can an organization train its 

staff in this approach? 

It starts with the organizational culture and making changes at all levels of the organization. Staff at 

the manager and director levels can incorporate a trauma-informed, human resource policy in their 

organization. Think of trauma not as something only clients deal with; think of trauma as something 

staff inevitably deals with at some point in their work in the organization, both personally and 

professionally. Best practices for training staff can include— 

1. Requiring staff to participate in trauma-informed practice training. Not just once, multiple 

trainings over time. 

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ASK AN EXPERT: VICTIM -CENTERED, TRAUMA -INFORMED CARE 

2. Engaging in agency or program self-assessment and involving multiple staff at different levels in 

this process. Engage survivors and former program participants to inform practices. 

3. Reviewing, assessing, and changing policies and procedures as needed to improve 

programming. This should be fluid and ongoing. 

4. Starting small, focusing, and creating a plan to expand and continue efforts over time. 

5. Implementing practices and continuing to assess and adjust programming practices and 

policies over time. 

How can an organization put these guidelines into practice? 

The Guiding Principle’s Self-Assessment document helped the Bakhita Empowerment Initiative 

prioritize focus areas and makes a plan for moving forward. The steps taken by the Bakhita 

Empowerment Initiative include— 

1. Completing the Guiding Principles Self-Assessment; 

2. Receiving technical assistance from OVC TTAC and Project REACH; 

3. Developing an advisory board to offer feedback from former program participants; and 

4. Engaging other agency staff—administration, development, and other programs—to inform 

changes in programming and share training/resources. 

What are some ways to create expectations for clients in advocating for their needs while also 

addressing the required information for program services? 

The policies and procedures in place to guide the intake and assessment process are critical. Thinking 

about informed consent is an opportunity to set and manage expectations and be transparent about 

what a program can and cannot offer. It is an opportunity to talk about the limits to confidentiality. 

Build in documentation and processes to ensure transparent conversations occur every single time 

staff meets with a client. All client conversations are grounded in informed consent. This is where the 

trauma consciousness comes in, the language we use, the tone we use, how we come into the room, 

how we're conscious of space. The Bakhita Empowerment Initiative uses a rights and responsibilities 

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ASK AN EXPERT: VICTIM -CENTERED, TRAUMA -INFORMED CARE 

form. Rights are empowerment based, and responsibilities explain the expectations of clients in the 

program. It is really important to be transparent and to talk honestly about what a program can and 

cannot do. This helps ensure, at the very beginning, you address the service provision, make sure 

clients are engaging, and the organization is responding to client needs and wants. 

What are some ways staff can experience vicarious and secondary trauma? How has it been handled 

successfully and not successfully? 

This is a shared responsibility, a responsibility of staff and also of supervisors and agency leadership. 

One tool the Bakhita Empowerment Initiative has used is talking about self-awareness. This started 

with a facilitated training to talk about self-awareness and has been a tremendous tool for a supervisor 

to better understand staff. There are traumatic things happening in our world. Being able to address 

them with cultural humility is important. Being able to say “I'm here to listen; I’m here to learn; I'm here 

to help and serve you” can go so far. 

How can upper management be held accountable for trauma-informed practices and for ensuring the 

environment is a safe, trauma-informed environment? 

It takes humility, accountability, and requires a shift in dialogue. Accountability comes from cultural 

structures within organizations that hold individuals accountable. When there are positions of power 

without systems of accountability, there is a way to get around those conversations. So, it's two parts 

both hard conversations and organizational policies. 

How can you use pet therapy teams to work with survivors? Are there any model programs? 

Equine therapy and trauma have been positively connected in research. Animals as a therapy aid can 

be incredible. Having a therapy animal with a survivor can change the game; people can feel safe. 

When people feel safe, they communicate better, which allows service providers to understand their 

wants and needs, connecting them to services. 

As victim service providers, what would you like to see integrated into the legal realm (e.g., attorneys, 

courts, policy advocates)? 

We need to move away from making cases so dependent on a victim's testimony and do a better job of 

gathering evidence in other ways. Right now, the system is dependent on survivors of crime to make 

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ASK AN EXPERT: VICTIM -CENTERED, TRAUMA -INFORMED CARE 

these cases possible, and that can do a lot of harm. It is important to understand the neural biological 

impact of memory. When asking individuals to recall events in sequential order—and the brain 

fundamentally does not encode traumatic memory that way—something is missing in crime 

investigations and the reliance on those pieces. Having a collective, baseline understanding as to why 

individuals may not be able to recall traumatic events in sequential order, asking questions in a 

different way, and using systems that validated sensory-based memories and other pieces could result 

in different outcomes. 

What are some suggestions for offering trauma-informed care through an interpreter? 

Think about where and how an organization sources interpretation. Is there training for interpreters 

and translators to understand different kinds of language? What kind of confidentiality agreements 

exist that can protect individuals? Provide supportive measures and make sure interpreters have a 

baseline lens of what it means to speak to someone in a person-centered, kind, and respectful way 

throughout the process. 

The following questions were submitted during the Ask an Expert Session and due to time constraints 

were unable to be addressed during the live discussion. The answers are provided here. 

Are there any model Family courts that are recognized as a trauma informed? 

The National College of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFC) is a respected leader in traumainformed juvenile and family courts in the country. NCJFCJ collaborated with the National Child 

Traumatic Stress Network Justice Consortium to provide judges with useful questions and 

guidelines to help them make decisions based on the emerging scientific findings in the traumatic 

stress field. More recently, NCJFCJ released a publication with 10 key recommendations to help 

juvenile and family courts become more trauma-informed. Lastly, the Alliance for Hope 

International shared an example of a model approach to creating a trauma-informed environment 

in court in a 2020 webinar. 

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ASK AN EXPERT: VICTIM -CENTERED, TRAUMA -INFORMED CARE 

How do we support our clients on their plan of action while balancing their trauma and making sure 

they are able to do the things they need to reach their goals? 

This comes back to meeting clients where they are, taking time to listen, taking the time to explore the 

support they need, and how this support furthers the goals they are seeking. It is about 

gaining an understanding of a client’s experiences of trauma and in turn helping the client understand 

how this trauma is impacting their life. It is about sitting down with a client to discuss their hopes, 

dreams, and fears, and assessing potential opportunities and any limitations. Finally, it is about 

creating a plan of action together with the client to best reflect the person's safety concerns, their 

goals, and their pathways to those goals. This will drive the delivery of services and provision of ongoing support in a victim-centered and trauma-informed way. 

Additional Information 

Contact the Human Trafficking Capacity Building Center at contact@ovc-htcbc.org or 1-844-682-0411. 

Office for Victims of Crime – Human Trafficking Capacity Building Center