Tensions in Social Work Field Placements Serving People With Lived Experience of Human Trafficking

Social work field placements offer social work students a crucial opportunity to understand better the needs of people who have experienced trafficking, and to fill existing gaps between survivors’ needs and service agencies’ capacity. Seven Master of Social Work students and four field instructors in agencies serving people with lived experience of human trafficking were interviewed by phone. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes within and across participants. Students and field instructors discussed four key tensions in their work related to human trafficking: (a) the need for rescue from forced sex work versus an attitude of positivity toward voluntary sex work, (b) advocacy versus clinical staff silos in the agency’s work, (c) lived experience versus professional experience, and (d) trauma-informed practices promoting survivors’ self-definition and self-pacing versus agency procedures for diagnoses and outcomes. Implications include the need for students to be trained better on the agency stance on sex work, balancing the contributions of professional and lived experience, and balancing diagnosis and timeline expectations with trauma informed self-definition and self-pacing. In the rapidly evolving field of trauma-informed social work practice, students may arrive knowing trauma-informed practices that the site agency has not yet integrated.