5 Ways Traffickers Build False Safety Through Trauma Bonding

Wheel of Risk Digging Deeper: Healthy Relationships (Part 3 of 4)  

One of the most powerful ways a trafficker exerts control over individuals they exploit is through relational means. They create a relational bond that is one of the hardest dynamics to overcome for survivors in the healing process. The bond is blinding and so many survivors want to believe their trafficker really loved them and didn’t really mean to do what they did. It is easy to feel loyalty and commitment to someone you love, and hard to see when they are abusing loyalty or using it to control you because we want to see the best in those we are in intimate relationships with, whether they are family members, friends, or significant others (Roe-Sepowitz & Bayless, 2021).

The trafficker creates a sense of false intimacy, safety, and love through trauma bonding which is defined as an emotional, psychological, and physical attachment and dependency between an abuser and their victim. “These bonds are typically marked by paradoxical complexities of abuse, control and dependency, and deep feelings of love, admiration, and gratitude in the victim for the abuser” (Casassa, 2021, p. 2). Below are five examples of how these bonds are used to manipulate their victims and create false safety within the relationship through a series of promises that needs will be met. These basic relational needs are used to keep someone trapped in that exploitative situation- and there is no better way to understand this than from the voices of those who have lived it. 

1. The Promise of Love: The Intimate Partner/ Romeo, Finesse pimp- This individual is someone who has lured you into a close, intimate relationship, showered you with affection and attention,  and then coerces you into selling sex to show you how much you love him or her (Bender, 2013).  

2. The Promise of Family: Familial dependency and loyalty- Families are complicated structures of attachment that children depend on for safety, security and their needs to be met. This attachment and naturally developed loyalty to one's family,  is used by familial traffickers to traffick vulnerable individuals in the family (a lot of the times children) to keep them silenced, controlled, and reliant upon the family. All with the goal to keep the secret and keep the victim from asking for help (Sprang & Cole, 2018). 

3. The Promise of Belonging: Friends and Peer Pressure- Friends and peers can pressure individuals into trafficking scenarios, sent by pimps to use their relational connection to convince their friends that this individual will provide them a family, and a safe place. In other scenarios, it is culturally just a norm for pimping and prostitution to exists and friends and peers advocate for this lifestyle to those in their relational networks (Austin-Smith, 2014). 

4. The Promise of Security: Labor Trafficking- a lot of the time labor trafficking happens when vulnerable individuals in poverty, facing or risking homelessness are promised shelter, or a job with financial stability. Instead, when they start the work, they find out they have been brought into a situation that demands more than they were told, and includes elements of force, fraud and coercion (Murphy, 2016).  

5.  The Promise of Shelter: False Families- Gang and Cult structures are similar to one another in that they offer what individuals need, a support system that will always have your back no matter what. The level of loyalty, commitment, shared experiences and sacrifice demanded bonds together individuals in a gang or cult structure. Yet, because of the inherent power dynamics at play in these groups, there are individuals at the top of the heiarchy that have power and control over others, often commanding, coercing, or luring individuals into situations where they are exploited for sex or labor (Boyle-Laisure, 2021).     

References

• Austin-Smith, Holly. (2014). Walking Prey: How America’s youth are vulnerable to sex slavery. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. 

• Bender, Rebecca. 2013. Roadmap to Redemption. 

• Boyle-Laisure, Robin. (2021).”Preventing Predatory Alienation by High-Control Groups: The Application of Human Trafficking Laws to Groups Popularly Known as Cults, and Proposed Changes to Laws Regarding Federal Immigration, State Child Marriage, and Undue Influence.” International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation, 1, 27. https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1392&context=faculty_publications.

• Casassa, Kaitlin. “Trauma Bonding Perspectives From Service Providers and Survivors of Sex Trafficking: A Scoping Review.” Trauma, violence & abuse. (2021): DOI: 10.1177/1524838020985542. Accessed on August 9, 2021.

• Murphy, Laura T. (2016). “Labor and Sex Trafficking Among Homeless Youth: A Ten-City Study Executive Summery.”Loyla University Of New Orleans Modern slavery Research Project.” Retrieved August 17, 2021. (https://www.covenanthouse.org/sites/default/files/inline-files/Loyola%20Multi-	City%20Executive%20Summary%20FINAL.pdf). 

• Roe-Sepowitz, Dominique and Angelyn Bayless. (2021). “What you need to know: Sex trafficking and sexual exploitation, a tool for parents of teens.” Arizona State University School of Social Work. Retrieved October 15, 2021 (https://ncjtc-static.fvtc.edu/resources/RS00007771.pdf). 

• Sprang, Ginny, and Jennifer Cole. (2018). "Familial sex trafficking of minors: Trafficking conditions, clinical presentation, and system involvement." Journal of family violence 33(3): 185-195. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10896-018-9950-y.