Client care strategies, stressors, and solutions in frontline anti‐trafficking work

Abstract

Anti-human trafficking efforts are increasingly folded into normative frontline work sectors. Service providers must expand their understanding of clients to include the needs of exploited or trafficked persons, even though they may not receive a commensurate increase in training or resources to accommodate these new cases. Using semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the US Midwest, this paper argues that frontline workers move beyond "traditional" emotional labor to labor inflected with forms of crisis, dirty, edge, or extreme work when confronted with trafficking. The specific needs of trafficked clients require the utilization of normatively gendered client care practices: listening, empathizing, performing appropriate responses to clients' emotional displays. However, new or compounding stressors may emerge alongside these new service populations. In order to ethically provide services without risking increased burnout, street-level bureaucracies must invest in resources for frontline workers to invest in their own emotional well-being.

Taking Care at Work: Gender, Coping, and Anti-Violence Work During COVID-19

“…As detailed in our executive summary (Schwarz & Welch, 2021), we created our own sample of participants by using publicly accessible data from state-level anti-violence coalitions and Google keyword searches. This strategy allowed us to find larger institutions, often receiving grant funding or state support, as well as smaller, more grassroots groups with a narrower focus.…”

“…Managing workloads can also be a coping strategy, both in accepting more tasks and setting harder boundaries between self, clients, and labor. For example, in her study of anti-trafficking stakeholders, Schwarz (2021) discovered some service providers took on more tasks and activities “in the short-term to maintain longer-term benefits for themselves, clients, and coworkers” (p. 538). These benefits included the maintenance of limited resources, resistance to burnout faced by lower-level staffers, and cultivation of rapport with clients facing complex needs.…”