Making services accessible to migrant women who have been sexually exploited – interview with Dr Jennifer Okeke
Migrant women affected by sexual exploitation have unique experiences and needs that services need to be equipped to respond to. To better understand what services can do to become properly inclusive of migrant women, we spoke to Dr Jennifer Okeke, an expert in gender-based violence and sex trafficking.
In addition to researching the experiences of Black African women trafficked into the Irish sex trade, Jennifer is an experienced lecturer on race, ethnicity, human rights and sexual exploitation. She is also the Anti-Trafficking Coordinator for the Immigrant Council of Ireland and is the newly elected Chairperson of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
Last year you completed a PhD research on the experiences of Black African women involved in the Irish sex trade. What was the motivation behind this research?
When it comes to sex trafficking, it is the most vulnerable and marginalised, including black women and women of colour, who are mostly trafficked for sexual exploitation. And it affects mostly migrant women.
If you look at Europe as a whole and even globally, there is no shortage of Black women being exploited for sex. That is also reflected here in Ireland – we have had reports and research done on migrant women’s experiences of sexual exploitation, but where are the experiences of Black women? That is what is missing. For me it's very important that their voices are heard so we can understand: are their experiences the same as other trafficked women or do they differ?
And it's not just women that are settled in Ireland or in Europe, it's also those in the asylum process and refugees – these are very vulnerable women, and one of the things the traffickers know how to exploit is vulnerability. Asylum-seeking and refugee women are part of the cohort of women who continue to be sexually exploited, and many of them are Black.
In your research, only one of the eight women you interviewed had availed of services. What was their main barrier when seeking support?
It was actually two of the women. However, one of them approached services not because she was aware of the support, but because she was found by the police and then linked up with appropriate services. If you take her out, it was only one woman – but even then, she was linked to support through her GP. So it wasn’t necessarily that women knew about the services or how to seek help. In fact, at the time of the interviews, the other six women had never availed of any sort of support.
One of the things I found in my research is the huge gap between the availability of information and the information getting to the people that needs it. The question is, how do we bridge this gap? Because, again, if you look at the majority of women who are exploited in the sex trade, these are migrant women, so they're coming from certain communities within our society. Why is the information not getting into those communities? And it's not just trafficked women, it's also women going through other forms of gender-based violence – they are not aware that services exist and of their rights.
So it was not as if the women I interviewed were aware of the services and then there was an obstacle. The main issue is that they were not even aware of the supports available. We have many NGOs doing amazing work in supporting victims of various forms of sexual exploitation. Yet, a lot of the women who go through this trauma have no clue that this kind of services even exist. You have to recognise that sometimes women are coming from societies where there is huge gender inequality and patriarchy is the norm. When such women migrate to a place where patriarchal norms are not as strict as in their countries of origin, it can take time for them to understand their rights and know that they are protected under the law.
We must consider what are the best ways to disseminate information within diverse communities. We cannot assume that everybody is going to watch TV and see an ad or that every woman is on social media and they're going to see a campaign. It’s about understanding the gaps between the information and the communities and ensuring that these gaps are factored in from the planning phase of the campaign.
The strategy to disseminate information is so crucial. Within a lot of migrant communities there are a lot of gatekeeping and gatekeepers. You need to engage with communities, and this often involves building rapport with community leaders or champions to ensure the campaign filters through to members of the community. Churches, mosques, cultural events and community centres, to mention just a few, would be great avenues to engage with diverse communities.
Otherwise, the information is there, the service is there but you're not seeing the people. And that is not to say that people don't need the services – they do, but they don't know services exist and that they have a right to use them.
When it comes to offering support, some services will say they offer a holistic approach. What should that look like when it comes to supporting a migrant woman who has been involved in the ‘sex industry’?
Holistic approach means different things to different people. The question is, what does holistic mean for an individual? It's about meeting women where they are at. If you take for example psychological care – for a European woman who has been trafficked in the sex trade it might mean that yoga and counselling are able to help her – this is what she knows, it works for her. But what does holistic care mean for a Black woman? What does it mean for a Muslim woman or a Roma woman? It is important to recognise that holistic should not mean “this is what we have” or “this is what we can give you.” Rather it is about what an individual needs in order to find wholeness again.
For a woman who has been sex trafficked, there is a lot of trauma – sometimes the kind of trauma that you and I cannot even begin to comprehend. So what does holistic mean for her? Say, for example, you're working with Black women from Africa, the Caribbean or any other part of the world – music and dance are a way of life for Black people. We saw that during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a lot of them were under the scorching sun, being beaten, working long hours, and one of the things they used in order to find a sense of self was music. No one could take music away from them, and it was a form of therapy.
When talking about a holistic approach, what do we mean exactly? It's about meeting women where they're at and not what we as an organisation want to offer. Because for a Black woman, yoga might not mean anything, but music and dance, the drumbeats might mean a lot to her. Arts and crafts, using her hands to do pottery might be therapeutic for her – maybe this is what she grew up with, working with the clay as a child, growing up in the muddy environment, using the mud to play – that might be therapeutic for her. That is not to minimise the importance and benefits of yoga for example, because we do know that it is beneficial, my point is – recognising that healing can never come through the same things for all individuals. It’s about always being trauma-informed and individual-centred.
Absolutely, and healing is about building a safe space within ourselves. This makes me think that healing can sometimes mean finding a way to relive the place we come from. Because even if as migrants we've been here for years, it will always feel partly unfamiliar, we don't have those deep-rooted connections to the place, we don't have that history. Bringing a bit of where we come from can also surround us with that feeling of wholeness.
You also need to think about the fact that a lot of these women were exploited in Europe. Europe for them might be associated with trauma, so there might be a sense of safety, a sense of wholeness in finding their childhood back, in connecting them back to the familiar. And the familiar might be the beat of the drum that they grew up with or the pots that they used to do with clay and mud with grandma. It might be the basket they used to weave with their grandmother or their mum.
I do know some organisations who support survivors of gender-based violence and provide such environment for women to get involved in arts and crafts. However, I would like to highlight that realistically all of these depends on the funding they have to be able to do what is needed. Organisations might have the ideas and expertise in the room, but without adequate and appropriate funding they are limited in what they can do.
Why is it crucial that services consider the culture and belief system of migrant women when providing support?
It is very important both for the service provider and for the women because – when you're working with survivors, you will hear things that, if you don’t come with an open mind, your first instinct will be not to believe them. You will hear things that sound unbelievable, so it's important to recognise that it's not about your truth, it's about that individual’s truth. It's about them, not about you.
Irrespective of whether a survivor of the sex trade has received formal education or not, the nature of what they have been through means they can read body language very quickly. If they perceive that you don't believe or understand them, they will disengage from you, and sometimes it is hard for them to open up to you again.
If you're meeting a Muslim woman, for example, it is important to understand the relevance of Islam to her. You support her with the knowledge that for this is woman who has been sexually exploited, her religion is still important to her. Islam is not only her belief system and her culture, it is the essence of that woman. Being aware of that is very important, because it will inform your approach in supporting her. And she's not the one to teach you that. Service providers must educate themselves on this kind of cultural competence – organisations can bring trainers to educate and train staff. If you have that cultural competence, it means you're able to render the services adequately and build rapport with that individual, and it makes your own work easier. The lack of cultural competence will lead to survivors’ disengagement.
And I think having that cultural awareness is part of building that trust that many workers say is vital when supporting survivors of the ‘sex industry’.
Trust is everything. If you lack that cultural competence you might unknowingly begin to re-traumatise that individual. Their whole experience of engaging with you might become traumatic for her because, again, you don't have the skills to understand that with this cohort of women you don't do certain things. And the woman might feel misunderstood or discriminated against, not understanding that you, the service provider, simply don't have the cultural competency. It is the role of the service provider to have the competence to understand “OK, the woman I am meeting today is Black African or Muslim or Roma. What are the core things I need to know about her?”
What you are saying about re-traumatisation is really key. Lack of cultural understanding can open up things for a woman if she doesn't feel believed. And at times is not just about services not believing a woman’s experiences of trauma; it can also be not respecting her beliefs.
You don't respect it because you don't know about it. That is why you don't believe it – and trust me the woman can read your body language. She might not be a PhD holder, a master’s degree holder, but she can read your face and your body language and that is where you see them disengage and feel discriminated against. When you provide services, especially for women who have gone through trauma and violence, it’s better for everybody in the organisation to be culturally competent, because the disengagement might even start with the person they meet at reception who might use the wrong kind of language to speak to the survivor. By the time the survivor is meeting the caseworker, she might already have a negative impression about the organisation, and that is when women leave and don't come back.
It's the recognition that cultural competency is a vital aspect of the job, and without it, things can go wrong. When you're into service provision, being cultural competent, trauma-informed and person-centred is a priority.
What other things can services do to become properly accessible for migrant women?
I'm trying to be very realistic, lack of available funding is a reality for services, especially post-COVID, so they are very limited in what they can do. But one of the things is creating activists from survivors. And let us be very clear, it's not every survivor that wants to engage in activism. However, if you have survivors that want to, you need to have structures in place that allow them to find their wholeness and then move on to activism. Survivors understand how to navigate their community and give other women the information. To understand why they were trafficked, they had to manoeuvre a lot of obstacles and think outside the box to be able to survive. Putting structures in place so that survivors can become activists if they choose to is a very important aspect of the holistic approach that organisations can develop if they have the resources to do so.
Another thing is the creation of peer-to-peer supports. To start this kind of support, the survivor has now moved on from survivor to activist, so she's now found herself, her voice, her identity. That same survivor can be a role model for those who are newly identified victims. But again, there need to be structures in place. Say, for example, you have a woman who is already an activist and then you have someone that just only walked into your organisation and is still in that place of vulnerability, of not knowing how her life will turn out – engaging with you is one thing, but engaging with another survivor that really understands the trauma she has been through is really empowering. A survivor, who has healed to become an activist or mentor can be a source of hope, and encouragement for a newly identified victim. More than that, she knows how to get into the community and see where the needs are and disseminate information that maybe you and I cannot disseminate.
In addition to researching the experiences of Black African women trafficked into the Irish sex trade, Jennifer is an experienced lecturer on race, ethnicity, human rights and sexual exploitation. She is also the Anti-Trafficking Coordinator for the Immigrant Council of Ireland and is the newly elected Chairperson of the National Women’s Council of Ireland.
Last year you completed a PhD research on the experiences of Black African women involved in the Irish sex trade. What was the motivation behind this research?
When it comes to sex trafficking, it is the most vulnerable and marginalised, including black women and women of colour, who are mostly trafficked for sexual exploitation. And it affects mostly migrant women.
If you look at Europe as a whole and even globally, there is no shortage of Black women being exploited for sex. That is also reflected here in Ireland – we have had reports and research done on migrant women’s experiences of sexual exploitation, but where are the experiences of Black women? That is what is missing. For me it's very important that their voices are heard so we can understand: are their experiences the same as other trafficked women or do they differ?
And it's not just women that are settled in Ireland or in Europe, it's also those in the asylum process and refugees – these are very vulnerable women, and one of the things the traffickers know how to exploit is vulnerability. Asylum-seeking and refugee women are part of the cohort of women who continue to be sexually exploited, and many of them are Black.
In your research, only one of the eight women you interviewed had availed of services. What was their main barrier when seeking support?
It was actually two of the women. However, one of them approached services not because she was aware of the support, but because she was found by the police and then linked up with appropriate services. If you take her out, it was only one woman – but even then, she was linked to support through her GP. So it wasn’t necessarily that women knew about the services or how to seek help. In fact, at the time of the interviews, the other six women had never availed of any sort of support.
One of the things I found in my research is the huge gap between the availability of information and the information getting to the people that needs it. The question is, how do we bridge this gap? Because, again, if you look at the majority of women who are exploited in the sex trade, these are migrant women, so they're coming from certain communities within our society. Why is the information not getting into those communities? And it's not just trafficked women, it's also women going through other forms of gender-based violence – they are not aware that services exist and of their rights.
So it was not as if the women I interviewed were aware of the services and then there was an obstacle. The main issue is that they were not even aware of the supports available. We have many NGOs doing amazing work in supporting victims of various forms of sexual exploitation. Yet, a lot of the women who go through this trauma have no clue that this kind of services even exist. You have to recognise that sometimes women are coming from societies where there is huge gender inequality and patriarchy is the norm. When such women migrate to a place where patriarchal norms are not as strict as in their countries of origin, it can take time for them to understand their rights and know that they are protected under the law.
We must consider what are the best ways to disseminate information within diverse communities. We cannot assume that everybody is going to watch TV and see an ad or that every woman is on social media and they're going to see a campaign. It’s about understanding the gaps between the information and the communities and ensuring that these gaps are factored in from the planning phase of the campaign.
The strategy to disseminate information is so crucial. Within a lot of migrant communities there are a lot of gatekeeping and gatekeepers. You need to engage with communities, and this often involves building rapport with community leaders or champions to ensure the campaign filters through to members of the community. Churches, mosques, cultural events and community centres, to mention just a few, would be great avenues to engage with diverse communities.
Otherwise, the information is there, the service is there but you're not seeing the people. And that is not to say that people don't need the services – they do, but they don't know services exist and that they have a right to use them.
When it comes to offering support, some services will say they offer a holistic approach. What should that look like when it comes to supporting a migrant woman who has been involved in the ‘sex industry’?
Holistic approach means different things to different people. The question is, what does holistic mean for an individual? It's about meeting women where they are at. If you take for example psychological care – for a European woman who has been trafficked in the sex trade it might mean that yoga and counselling are able to help her – this is what she knows, it works for her. But what does holistic care mean for a Black woman? What does it mean for a Muslim woman or a Roma woman? It is important to recognise that holistic should not mean “this is what we have” or “this is what we can give you.” Rather it is about what an individual needs in order to find wholeness again.
For a woman who has been sex trafficked, there is a lot of trauma – sometimes the kind of trauma that you and I cannot even begin to comprehend. So what does holistic mean for her? Say, for example, you're working with Black women from Africa, the Caribbean or any other part of the world – music and dance are a way of life for Black people. We saw that during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a lot of them were under the scorching sun, being beaten, working long hours, and one of the things they used in order to find a sense of self was music. No one could take music away from them, and it was a form of therapy.
When talking about a holistic approach, what do we mean exactly? It's about meeting women where they're at and not what we as an organisation want to offer. Because for a Black woman, yoga might not mean anything, but music and dance, the drumbeats might mean a lot to her. Arts and crafts, using her hands to do pottery might be therapeutic for her – maybe this is what she grew up with, working with the clay as a child, growing up in the muddy environment, using the mud to play – that might be therapeutic for her. That is not to minimise the importance and benefits of yoga for example, because we do know that it is beneficial, my point is – recognising that healing can never come through the same things for all individuals. It’s about always being trauma-informed and individual-centred.
Absolutely, and healing is about building a safe space within ourselves. This makes me think that healing can sometimes mean finding a way to relive the place we come from. Because even if as migrants we've been here for years, it will always feel partly unfamiliar, we don't have those deep-rooted connections to the place, we don't have that history. Bringing a bit of where we come from can also surround us with that feeling of wholeness.
You also need to think about the fact that a lot of these women were exploited in Europe. Europe for them might be associated with trauma, so there might be a sense of safety, a sense of wholeness in finding their childhood back, in connecting them back to the familiar. And the familiar might be the beat of the drum that they grew up with or the pots that they used to do with clay and mud with grandma. It might be the basket they used to weave with their grandmother or their mum.
I do know some organisations who support survivors of gender-based violence and provide such environment for women to get involved in arts and crafts. However, I would like to highlight that realistically all of these depends on the funding they have to be able to do what is needed. Organisations might have the ideas and expertise in the room, but without adequate and appropriate funding they are limited in what they can do.
Why is it crucial that services consider the culture and belief system of migrant women when providing support?
It is very important both for the service provider and for the women because – when you're working with survivors, you will hear things that, if you don’t come with an open mind, your first instinct will be not to believe them. You will hear things that sound unbelievable, so it's important to recognise that it's not about your truth, it's about that individual’s truth. It's about them, not about you.
Irrespective of whether a survivor of the sex trade has received formal education or not, the nature of what they have been through means they can read body language very quickly. If they perceive that you don't believe or understand them, they will disengage from you, and sometimes it is hard for them to open up to you again.
If you're meeting a Muslim woman, for example, it is important to understand the relevance of Islam to her. You support her with the knowledge that for this is woman who has been sexually exploited, her religion is still important to her. Islam is not only her belief system and her culture, it is the essence of that woman. Being aware of that is very important, because it will inform your approach in supporting her. And she's not the one to teach you that. Service providers must educate themselves on this kind of cultural competence – organisations can bring trainers to educate and train staff. If you have that cultural competence, it means you're able to render the services adequately and build rapport with that individual, and it makes your own work easier. The lack of cultural competence will lead to survivors’ disengagement.
And I think having that cultural awareness is part of building that trust that many workers say is vital when supporting survivors of the ‘sex industry’.
Trust is everything. If you lack that cultural competence you might unknowingly begin to re-traumatise that individual. Their whole experience of engaging with you might become traumatic for her because, again, you don't have the skills to understand that with this cohort of women you don't do certain things. And the woman might feel misunderstood or discriminated against, not understanding that you, the service provider, simply don't have the cultural competency. It is the role of the service provider to have the competence to understand “OK, the woman I am meeting today is Black African or Muslim or Roma. What are the core things I need to know about her?”
What you are saying about re-traumatisation is really key. Lack of cultural understanding can open up things for a woman if she doesn't feel believed. And at times is not just about services not believing a woman’s experiences of trauma; it can also be not respecting her beliefs.
You don't respect it because you don't know about it. That is why you don't believe it – and trust me the woman can read your body language. She might not be a PhD holder, a master’s degree holder, but she can read your face and your body language and that is where you see them disengage and feel discriminated against. When you provide services, especially for women who have gone through trauma and violence, it’s better for everybody in the organisation to be culturally competent, because the disengagement might even start with the person they meet at reception who might use the wrong kind of language to speak to the survivor. By the time the survivor is meeting the caseworker, she might already have a negative impression about the organisation, and that is when women leave and don't come back.
It's the recognition that cultural competency is a vital aspect of the job, and without it, things can go wrong. When you're into service provision, being cultural competent, trauma-informed and person-centred is a priority.
What other things can services do to become properly accessible for migrant women?
I'm trying to be very realistic, lack of available funding is a reality for services, especially post-COVID, so they are very limited in what they can do. But one of the things is creating activists from survivors. And let us be very clear, it's not every survivor that wants to engage in activism. However, if you have survivors that want to, you need to have structures in place that allow them to find their wholeness and then move on to activism. Survivors understand how to navigate their community and give other women the information. To understand why they were trafficked, they had to manoeuvre a lot of obstacles and think outside the box to be able to survive. Putting structures in place so that survivors can become activists if they choose to is a very important aspect of the holistic approach that organisations can develop if they have the resources to do so.
Another thing is the creation of peer-to-peer supports. To start this kind of support, the survivor has now moved on from survivor to activist, so she's now found herself, her voice, her identity. That same survivor can be a role model for those who are newly identified victims. But again, there need to be structures in place. Say, for example, you have a woman who is already an activist and then you have someone that just only walked into your organisation and is still in that place of vulnerability, of not knowing how her life will turn out – engaging with you is one thing, but engaging with another survivor that really understands the trauma she has been through is really empowering. A survivor, who has healed to become an activist or mentor can be a source of hope, and encouragement for a newly identified victim. More than that, she knows how to get into the community and see where the needs are and disseminate information that maybe you and I cannot disseminate.
