Empowerment at Work?: Examining Employment-Based Economic Empowerment Initiatives for Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Abstract

Many organizations serving survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) have begun economic empowerment programs, providing financial literacy education, vocational training, and/or employment opportunities for survivors. Yet, very little research has examined these programs, especially those that employ survivors. This project draws on a qualitative, multi-method study of 15 organizations that serve and employ CSE survivors to examine how economic empowerment is constructed through organizational discourse and practices, what tensions emerge in these processes, and how organizational actors frame and respond to them. The findings outline the components of “economic empowerment” and explicate the key tensions of authority-autonomy and compassion-accountability.

Keywords

commercial sexual exploitation human trafficking‌economic empowerment nonprofit social enterprise

Introduction

As commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) has risen in the United States over the past two decades (Office of Indiana Attorney General, 2020), a growing number of nonprofit organizations have begun offering services to CSE survivors, including medical care, housing, psychological treatment, education, and life skills training (Macy & Johns, 2011; Reichert & Sylwestrzak, 2013). However, few organizations have addressed survivors’ economic vulnerability, even though “lack of options and poverty are identified as causing relapse into CSE” (Wilson, Critelli, & Rittner, 2015, p. 75). As a result, a new crop of CSE nonprofits is emerging. These organizations offer wraparound services for survivors of CSE and operate businesses that aim to facilitate the “economic empowerment” of survivors through vocational training and employment opportunities.

However, little is known about effective programs for survivors of CSE, let alone those that offer job training and employment (Gerassi, 2017). Although gender-based violence researchers have examined economic empowerment initiatives (e.g., Postmus et al., 2012; Renzetti, 2017), these programs primarily emphasize financial literacy training. Given the risks of economic vulnerability for survivors, more research is needed to understand how nonprofit social enterprises aim to facilitate “economic empowerment” for those in employment programs. Thus, this study examines how employment-related economic empowerment initiatives at 15 organizations that serve CSE survivors are constructed through organizational discourse and practices, what tensions emerge, as well as how organizational members navigate them.

Women's Economic Empowerment

The World Bank was one of the first to use the term “women's economic empowerment,” defining it as “making markets work for women (at the policy level) and empowering women to compete in markets (at the agency level)” (World Bank, 2012, p. 4). Although scholars have critiqued the emphasis on the economic dimensions of women's empowerment for being overly simplistic (e.g., Rowlands, 1995), research demonstrates that women's economic independence is critically linked to the achievement of many other empowerment outcomes (Kabeer, 2012). In a review of studies on women who gained access to paid work, Kabeer (2012) stated, “women's paid work appeared to constitute an economic pathway to changes in their lives that went beyond the economic domain” (p. 17). However, Kabeer (2012) highlights the importance of the nature of one's work, as not all work opportunity is empowering. “Good jobs,” or those characterized by fair and steady pay, legal protections, and decent working conditions, are more empowering than jobs with low pay, dangerous working conditions, or exploitative environments (e.g., sex work, unskilled agricultural labor, domestic labor). Bad jobs are disempowering in part because they often operate as survival jobs, worked out of necessity. Thus, jobs themselves are not the answer to economic empowerment, as the kind of work is essential. Yet, very little research defines empowering work beyond key features such as decent pay, benefits, and consistency. Even less has examined empowering work for individuals recovering from trauma, particularly those moving from exploitative work (CSE) or other forms of gender-based violence.

Women's Economic Empowerment and Gender-Based Violence

Although poverty is a key risk factor for gender-based violence, few U.S.-based antiviolence organizations proactively address financial independence in their programs. Some argue the U.S. model is based on psychotherapy and therefore emphasizes the psychological aspects of recovery and empowerment more than the economic components (Wilson et al., 2015). More recently, intimate partner violence (IPV) experts have called for initiatives that prioritize the economic empowerment of violence survivors (Goodman & Epstein, 2009; Renzetti et al., 2014), asserting that “financial instability and the threat or actual experience of poverty, in addition to the negative mental health impacts of IPV, are among the factors that motivate women to return to abusive partners, thus increasing the risk of revictimization” (Renzetti et al., 2014, p. 677). Renzetti (2017) argues:

In the context of domestic violence, economic empowerment has three components:

financial literacy, which is defined as having the knowledge and skills necessary to make sound financial decisions and acquire resources; (2) economic self-efficacy, which is a person's beliefs about and confidence in their ability to achieve financial security and economic success (however they define success); and (3) economic self-sufficiency, which is one's ability to independently meet one's needs of daily life. (p. 275)

Most economic empowerment initiatives for IPV survivors focus on building financial literacy (e.g., Postmus & Plummer, 2010; Postmus et al., 2012), teaching resume writing or job interviewing skills, or providing asset-building programs such as savings matches or small loans (Postmus, 2010).

These programs are necessary, yet few organizations offer employment opportunities as a means of facilitating the final component of economic empowerment—economic self-sufficiency. The poverty-related risks of violence and revictimization are particularly pronounced for CSE survivors, as the nature of abuse is tied to one's economic vulnerability (Gerassi, 2017; Wilson & Butler, 2013). However, U.S.-based CSE aftercare programs “seldom focus on income generation activities or provision of employment to assist victims in exiting CSE,” despite the risk of relapse due to poverty (Wilson et al., 2015, p. 75). Although little research exists on employment-related economic empowerment initiatives for CSE survivors in the United States, emerging research points to the potential effectiveness of these programs. One study evaluated the impact of a job skills and employment program for HIV + , drug-using women engaged in prostitution in the United States As the participants often pursued sex work to purchase drugs, the researchers observed a decline in prostitution as women earned money selling the products made in the vocational training program (Sherman et al., 2006). The researchers claim that “behaviour change sustainability is most likely to succeed if women have access to job training programmes and licit employment opportunities” (p. 7). Despite some promising results, in the United States:

There is far less available research on … interventions and approaches which would prevent entry/re-entry of women into the sex industry, and enable those affected to successfully rebuild their lives after CSE by addressing their traumatic experiences, economic empowerment, and safe environment. (Wilson et al., 2015, p. 72)

Successful programs also exist in countries such as India and the Philippines (e.g., Gill & Cordisco Tsai, 2018). In India, “needs based, market driven, viable and sustainable” enterprises are operated by collectives of CSE survivors and involve traditional and culturally specific employment opportunities such as:

catering, hotel housekeeping, sewing and garment design, laundry services, pizza parlors, coffee kiosks and computer skills, as well as non-traditional employment such as construction, production of herbal medicines, fisherwomen cooperatives, ATM maintenance and petrol filling. (Wilson et al., 2015, p. 75)

Given the success of employment-related economic empowerment initiatives in other countries and the emerging research pointing toward the efficacy of similar programs in the United States, further research is needed to understand the experiences of those in these programs and tensions that emerge in these attempts to facilitate empowerment. Moreover, given the lack of in-depth understanding of empowering work, research should examine how empowering work is constructed through the organizational discourse and practices of economic empowerment programs.

Theoretical Lens: Contradiction-Centered Approach to Organizing

Many scholars and practitioners derive their definition of empowerment from Paulo Freire (1990), who explains empowerment as the process by which individuals perceive they can transform their circumstances, believing their situation “not as fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting—and therefore challenging” (p. 73). However, empowerment remains a contradictory and tension-filled concept (e.g., Batliwala, 2007; Rowlands, 1995; Stohl & Cheney, 2001). For example, communication scholars have revealed how organizational structures designed to facilitate participation and agency can constrain the very empowerment they seek to produce (e.g., Ashcraft & Kedrowicz, 2002; D’Enbeau & Kunkel, 2013; Stohl & Cheney, 2001). Linabary's (2017) study of an online women's empowerment organization reveals how material-discursive practices that support the inclusion and participation of some are perceived by others to be exclusionary. International development has been roundly criticized for its paradoxical practices (Batliwala, 2007; Rowlands, 1995), as traditional, paternalistic approaches to development often reproduce the same—or construct new—power structures that oppress the groups they seek to empower.

For communication researchers, tension is an umbrella term used to describe contradictions or conflicting ideals that result in “stress, anxiety, discomfort, or tightness in making choices, responding to, and moving forward in organizational situations” (Putnam, Fairhurst, & Banghart, 2016, p. 69). For instance, in their study of refugee resettlement programs, Dykstra-DeVette and Canary (2018) highlight the role of discourse in constructing tensions. They identify the tensions in language used for programs specifically designed to facilitate others’ empowerment:

Who empowers whom? Who is the actor and who is the passive recipient of power? Framing the organization as the actor enabling another to access opportunities renders those being empowered as passive recipients receiving resources and education rather than the actors themselves seizing new opportunities to actively participate in their future. (p. 11)

Thus, an active/passive tension exists in organizational attempts to facilitate others’ empowerment, and it is often presented and mediated through discourse.

Whereas management and functionalist approaches often seek to resolve conflicting or competing ideals, organizational communication scholars argue that contradiction is an ontologically defining feature of organizing (Ashcraft & Trethewey, 2004; Putnam et al., 2016). Organizational contradictions can generate a variety of productive or counterproductive outcomes, including vicious and virtuous cycles (spirals of events with either negative or positive outcomes), double binds and paralysis (a feeling of “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t”), unintended and unanticipated outcomes, enabling and constraining actions, opening up and closing off participation, and transforming and reproducing organizations (Putnam et al., 2016). Therefore, these scholars encourage examining how organizational members discursively frame contradictions, arguing that “employees can react to contradiction in various ways, and that their framing techniques of workplace tensions can have various personal and organizational effects as a way to learn about their construction and their outcomes” (Tracy, 2004, p. 120). As Dykstra-DeVette and Canary (2018) argue in the context of refugee resettlement:

… a failure to see the tension as productive can conceal a fundamental component of what empowerment programs intend to achieve, namely, self and community care and independence. Statements that construct empowerment as completely bound up in self-sufficiency ignore the role of capacity building within the community so that dependence is generally perceived as a disadvantage. (p. 11)

Their example identifies the productive role of tensions and the importance of examining how they are constructed through organizational discourse and practice. Thus, taking a tension-centered approach in this study foregrounds the contradictory nature of attempts to facilitate empowerment and the need to surface the discursive framings of tension and how they shape individuals’ strategies for navigating them.

The Present Study

This exploratory project examines how employment-related economic empowerment initiatives are constructed through organizational discourse and practice within U.S.-based organizations serving CSE survivors, as well as what contradictions emerge and how organizational members navigate them. Given the dearth of research, this information is necessary for organizations seeking to support CSE survivors and their reintegration into their communities. Thus, the research questions for this project are:

RQ1: How is employment-related economic empowerment constructed through organizational discourse and practice at organizations serving survivors of commercial sexual exploitation?

RQ2: What tensions emerge in this construction?

RQ3: How do organizational members frame and respond to these tensions?

Methods

This project draws on a larger study of 18 U.S.-based organizations that serve CSE survivors and aim to facilitate their economic empowerment, 15 of which operate social enterprises. As this analysis focuses specifically on those organizations employing survivors of CSE, it examines the 15 that employ survivors, drawing on 35 interviews with organizational members, analyses of 180 organizational documents, and 54 h of observation at the two largest organizations, River Oak and Freedom Int’l. At these two organizations, I conducted “passing organizational ethnographies” (Cooren et al., 2008), collecting interviews from eight organizational members at River Oak and 13 organizational members at Freedom Int’l, 54 h of total observation at these organizations, and 131 of their internal and external documents. A “passing ethnography” refers to efforts by researchers to engage in ethnographic-like analysis of multisite, multiagent phenomena (Couldry, 2003). This method is well-suited to multisite qualitative work wherein researchers seek to discern patterns that potentially stretch across contexts. However, a passing ethnography recognizes that researchers, with limited time and multiple contexts, should seek “as much context as [can] reasonably be obtained” (Cooren et al., 2008, p. 53).

Participants

As little research has examined organizations in the United States that aim to facilitate the economic empowerment of CSE survivors, I sampled U.S.-based organizations that serve domestic CSE survivors and operate or aspire to operate social enterprises. After obtaining IRB approval, I contacted two large U.S.-based organizations that employ domestic CSE survivors in homegrown social enterprises, seeking to develop an in-depth knowledge of their organizations’ approaches to economic empowerment. I received permission to examine these organizations as case studies and collect ethnographic data at their locations. To understand the perspectives of a variety of organizational members, I then recruited individuals in diverse roles, including sales, marketing, finance, and volunteer coordinating, among others, emailing them about their interest in participating in an interview.

To pair the in-depth data with a broader sample of organizations that employ survivors, I recruited 16 organizational leaders for interviews, drawing on River Oak's network of partner organizations and internet research on organizations that employ CSE survivors. These 18 organizations (see Figure 1) are located in 13 states in the continental United States and serve women leaving prostitution or trafficking, as well as addiction, incarceration, and/or life on the street, as many of these risk issues intersect. These organizations also operate enterprises that cover a range of goods and services, including bath and body products, cafes and catering services, cleaning products, farming/gardening, and more. Although data was collected from 18 organizations, this study examines only those employing survivors as part of economic empowerment initiatives; thus, the three organizations without current employment opportunities were removed from the sample. Data collection and analysis took place during the summer and fall of 2018 and continued into the winter and spring of 2019.

Figure 1.

Spectrum of Participating Organizations, Ranging from Traditional Nonprofits (NPOs) to Social Enterprises.

In this figure, three nonprofits that operated residential programs and outreach centers aspired to develop social enterprises to add job training and employment opportunities for survivors. Ten of the organizations operated small- to medium-sized enterprises, defined as employing several women for only a few hours a week or a few women for longer hours. These organizations identified primarily as nonprofits with small businesses to develop survivors’ job skills. Nonprofits with large social enterprises are primarily workforce development programs that draw labor from their own community centers or local residential programs. The two case study organizations employ dozens of survivors in multimillion dollar social enterprises. River Oak is located in a major metropolitan city in the U.S. South, and Freedom Int’l. is in a suburb of a larger city in the U.S. Midwest. River Oak employs roughly 70-80 employees, and Freedom Int’l. employs approximately 30–40 staff. Finally, one for-profit social enterprise was included in this study as it employs a few survivors from a local residential nonprofit.

Procedures

Interviews

I conducted interviews with eight staff members at River Oak, 13 staff members at Freedom Int’l., and 16 leaders of other organizations. These data were essential to understanding organizational members’ perceptions of their economic empowerment processes and their tensions, as well as practical insight into the stories behind why employment-related initiatives emerged. I employed a semistructured interview format to standardize among interviews while also creating space for participants to lead the conversation toward topics of interest. The protocol involved questions about how and why organizational members started social enterprises, how they conceptualize economic empowerment, and what challenges exist in facilitating empowerment, among others. Interviews with various organizational members helped provide further insight into the day-to-day tensions within economic empowerment processes. Thirty participants were white women; two participants were white men; three were African American women, and four were identified as survivors of sexual abuse or exploitation. Originally, I sought to incorporate more voices from self-identified survivors; however, organizations like River Oak politely denied my request to interview members of current programs. Thus, I only contacted those who had graduated recovery programs and were employed in professional roles at the various organizations, per my IRB restrictions.

The interviews were between 26 and 78 min long, with the average interview lasting 45 min, and were conducted in person or on the phone, based on the individual's preference and ease of access. Despite assumptions that face-to-face interviews are the “gold standard” in qualitative research, increasing research points to the capacity of phone and online interviewing to generate similar, “thick” data (Deakin & Wakefield, 2013 ; Kazmer & Xie, 2008). For a few participants, we continued to correspond about the interview topics via email after our phone conversation. At the end of each interview, I emailed the participant an invitation to accept a $10 Amazon gift card. The interviews were then transcribed, generating 532 pages of single-spaced text, and uploaded into NVivo qualitative analysis software.

Participant Observation

As part of the “passing organizational ethnographies,” I collected 54 h of participant observation data at River Oak and Freedom Int’l. I attended or participated in several different kinds of organizational events and activities, including fundraisers, community workshops, weekend-long educational trainings designed to teach prospective entrepreneurs’ River Oak's social enterprise model, community trafficking awareness trainings, tours of organizational facilities, and more. I spent time in their cafes and shops, purchasing products and food and interacting with staff and customers. I also hosted a Freedom Int’l. product party at my home, inviting friends and family to shop their retail product made in their social enterprise and in their partner organizations’ social enterprises.

Throughout the process, I wrote ethnographic field notes to document the activities and interactions I observed (Bernard, 2011; Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). During the observations themselves, I took “jottings” (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 2011) that I later adapted into more thorough descriptions and reflections on the activities observed. After the events, I wrote up detailed field notes and analytic memos to record and reflect on what took place at these organizational activities. In total, this process generated 96 single-spaced pages of field notes, memos, and reflections. These observational data added meaningful context to the interviews, allowing insight into how organizations speak about economic empowerment to a variety of stakeholders, whether prospective entrepreneurs, customers, volunteers, or employees. These events enabled me to capture thick descriptions of organizational processes and also allowed greater access to the perspectives of CSE survivors themselves, as they were occasionally involved in these organizational activities and events.

Document Collection

In addition to observations and interviews, I analyzed 204 documents from all of the organizations. This process provided insight into how organizations articulate the purpose, processes, and outcomes of their economic empowerment processes to their stakeholders through documents such as websites, blogs, annual reports, fundraising materials, educational workshop training manuals, and more. From the case study organizations, I collected both internal and external documents, examining how organizational members communicated with donors and partners. From the other organizations, I collected publicly available documents such as website content, blogs, survivor stories, and other materials available online.

Data Analysis

After collecting the data, I uploaded the digital copies of the transcripts, field notes, and organizational documents into NVivo, a qualitative analysis software, for thematic analysis. This software enabled me to visualize the connections between different forms of data and draw out patterns that stretched across data sources. I began first with open coding, the “initial, unrestricted coding of the data,” categorizing chunks of text into general, descriptive themes while also adding analytic memos (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011 , p. 250). These themes included labels such as “social enterprise origin story” or “employee pay.” Then I began second-level coding, in which I grouped the smaller, descriptive codes into larger codes that captured broader categories of meaning, for example, “meaningful work” or “work as therapeutic” or “trauma-informed communication.” To guide this process, I followed Owen's (1984) criteria of “(1) recurrence, (2), repetition, and (3) forcefulness” (p. 275). Finally, I engaged in selective coding or using the research questions and theoretical positioning of the study to guide the selection of relevant codes and patterns for incorporation into the research narrative. Thus, I began creating codes that reflected the tensions within the constructions of economic empowerment. These codes included labels such as “compassion vs accountability” or “mission as anchor.” After selecting larger themes and writing up the findings, I emailed the completed draft to all interview participants, inviting feedback on the themes or any concerns about privacy, since manuscripts can unintentionally include identifying information. After 2 weeks of soliciting responses, I made minor adjustments to the final manuscript.

Researcher Reflexivity

Throughout this project, I enacted reflexivity primarily through journaling. This writing interrogated how my positionality informed my approach to the project, recognizing that I possess a “view from somewhere” rather than a neutral, “objective” stance (Haraway, 1988, p. 589). More specifically, I sought to understand how my social location as a white, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, U.S. American woman shaped my approach to collecting and analyzing the data. I am also a former employee at Freedom Int’l. and the daughter of two social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders, one of whom founded Freedom Int’l. Thus, in my reflections, I examined the assumptions stemming from both my upbringing and experience working in this sector; the power dynamics inherent in the roles I have filled as “helper,” rather than an individual receiving services; as well as how these roles reflect historic inequities in race, class, and religious affiliation. Alongside journaling, reflexive discussions took place with the project's co-PIs and dissertation committee members. Collectively, these reflections drove much of my ethical decision-making, such as seeking grant funding to provide Amazon gift cards to participants, so that their labor would not be free. These reflections also motivated my decision to return a draft of the findings to participants, as I described above.

Findings

Although most of the sampled organizations offer traditional economic empowerment initiatives such as financial literacy training and asset-building programs, the analysis revealed that employment is an essential—if not the most important—part of the economic empowerment process. By working, survivors learn vital job skills, gain economic resources and job experience, and can develop financial independence. However, unlike typical employers, these organizations seek to provide empowering work. Rather than simply offering a paycheck, empowering work facilitates the healing process and the growth of one's sense of self-worth and accomplishment. As noted by Kabeer (2012), little research has described what empowering work is, rather than what it is not. Even less has examined empowering work for individuals recovering from trauma, particularly those recovering from forms of exploitative labor (CSE). Thus, the following sections detail the four components of empowering work as constructed by members at the organizations serving CSE survivors.

Empowering Work: Work That Gives to Self and Others

The analysis illustrated how working in the social enterprises provides employees a sense of pride, accomplishment, and self-esteem. For example, Rita, a founder of a catering social enterprise in Ohio, described the “confidence that comes from conquering a recipe and having it taste delicious, and serving it to people and having them say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.’” At multiple Freedom Int’l. events, the founder, Crystal, described bringing a necklace designed by a survivor to an event for high-ranking U.S. military officials. This necklace was very popular, and Crystal described telling the survivor after the event:

… the most powerful men in the Marine Corps’ wives were buying the work of your hands, fighting over the work of your hands, she jumped up, ran around the table, and sang a song. She went home and told her babies, ‘Your mamma is an artisan.’ And that is authentic dignity. I can tell her until I’m blue in the face that she has worth, and value, and dignity as a human being, as a woman, but when people fight over the work of her hands, that is just such organic, authentic dignity.

Crystal's story highlights how the pride and accomplishment one feels from work well done cannot be imparted onto someone that they must experience it on their own. Helen, a founder and program director of an organization in Kansas, also shared how this sense of accomplishment paves the way for other kinds of healing and empowerment. She shared about a resident's hesitance to make artwork to sell in the local community:

… one of the girls, she's like ‘I’ve never been an artist. I can’t do this. I was always told I can’t do this. I’m not an artist.’ Hers was the first piece to sell when we opened our greenhouse. So someone from town, one of the local accountants bought it for their office. She was baffled. She was like … and I said, ‘[name], it's really pretty.’ It just … There was a whole open space that she never even knew. It's like, ‘Somebody just bought my artwork? For like a business in town!’ Like, ‘What's happening here. Maybe I have other stories that I’ve written wrong. Maybe I can rewrite other stories.’

By linking the survivors’ realization that her work is valuable to a shift in self-understanding, Helen portrays how one's work being purchased and deemed valuable enables survivors to reevaluate their own potential.

Empowering work gives to others as well. Survivors and organizational leaders expressed the importance of designing a product or service that gives back to the community. For example, making food for others is seen as providing nourishment to the community, as demonstrated by a survivor's statement in a recent report by River Oak:

I believe you should put all of yourself into the food you’re making for others. I want our customers to taste the Spirit we make our dishes with and feel the love we have for them. ‘Soul food’ means you put your soul into what you make.

She highlights how cooking for others is showing them care, even linking it to a spiritual practice in which the chef pours their soul into the food for the sake of others.

As many of the organizations create bath and body products, the data is rich with examples of how these products offer healing to their users. Organizational leaders described choosing this business model because of its symbolism. As Kristy, a founder of a residential program and social enterprise in Nebraska, described:

… the bath and body products, I think it's tied to what [River Oak's founder] talks about and it's that healing component. It's making something with your hands that it smells good, and it feels nice, and it's beautiful, and it's wonderful, and you know when you make it that it's going to somebody to make them heal.

Thus, the healing properties of these products make survivors feel as though they are extending to others a product that reflects their own healing process. This giving is a feedback loop—by giving to others, you are giving to yourself. The satisfaction one feels from mastering a recipe or design stems from others experiencing joy from one's work. The mutually reinforcing nature of giving through meaningful work feeds into a larger process of empowerment—where women feel pride and accomplishment by offering something of beauty and value to others.

Empowering Work: Having a Voice in Decision-Making

In order for work to be empowering, agency is necessary. More specifically, survivors need to have a voice in their work goals and conditions. Maureen, a café director at River Oak, described this agency as one of the most important parts to a successful enterprise:

I think it's important for everyone to feel like they have a voice whether they’re the dishwasher or a line cook or the chef. For everyone to have a voice and feel like they contribute and that they feel like they’re not just being demanded what to do. If they see an improvement, that they’re heard and that we offer the opportunity to make those changes. I think for everybody to have a sense of purpose, and again I think that's kind of a no brainer.

Maureen demonstrates how ownership over one's work is one of the ways that empowering work “gives back” to the worker. The concept of ownership forms the foundation for the “survivor leader” model many of the organizations adhere to. Rather than simply employing women, they explicitly seek to move them into leadership where they are in decision-making roles that help chart the course of their organization.

Some enterprises are completely designed by the survivors themselves. For example, Violet, a founder of a nonprofit residential program and social enterprise in Arizona, described how her business model was developed by two women in prison: “I have an initial proposal that was actually developed by two inmates on the inside. I thought it was good enough to just present to the department. I didn't mess with it at all.” Similarly, Hope, an executive director of an organization in Florida, described how their social enterprise was born out of conversations with the women:

So our thought was, well we kind of gathered all the women that are currently in our program, and just had a thinking session about what kind of products would you want to make? What would this look like, what would you want to do? And of course there was like a lot of things going on the board, but the most consistent was bath and body.

Even if the survivors do not design the entire enterprise themselves, all of the organizations work to make survivors agents in the design or sale of products and services. Programs may build the product offerings according to the survivors’ ideas, or, even if survivors do not design the entire product, they still maintain a voice in its development process. Several organizations that sell food described utilizing recipes from the women or their families. Tiffany, a founder of an organization in Kansas, describes a pie-making fundraiser the women launched to raise capital for the social enterprise:

“I don’t have much … but I have my grandmother's secret pie crust recipe.” She said, “And anybody can make it.” I was like, “Really?” And I was like, “Well, what if our volunteers help us make pies? And we’ll just make as many pies as we can make.”

Even by sharing the survivor's statement that she “doesn’t have much,” Tiffany demonstrates how having a voice in one's work is also a part of learning about your own value—that you can contribute ideas and skills to help others.

Empowering Work: Agency to Explore One's Interests

In addition to agency in decision-making, survivors desire agency in what kind of work they do. In this way, empowering work is that which enables women to explore their interests and potential. Not only do survivors face many barriers to employment, but even when they overcome these barriers, they typically work in low-skilled positions. As Tiffany explained, survivors “don’t have the opportunity to use their leadership skills, their creative skills, and they just see themselves as nothing more. And that's sad because they are so much more.” Therefore, providing employment that enables women to explore their interests and potential is a unique opportunity—something different from the typical job opportunities provided to them. In fact, one organization's success metrics hinges on the question, “did [the survivor] find a dream or something that she wants to pursue and did she actually pursue that?”

When unable to provide the right fit for a survivor in their own enterprise, several participants described their efforts to find the right job for a survivor in the community or to eventually start an enterprise that fits the interests of the women in their program. For instance, Hope discussed how the organization's “dream” is to open up a salon because a “very common interest for our community at least has been cosmetology and people wanting to do hair or sometimes people already having that in their background.” Maggie, a founder and president of an organization in Georgia, shared about the “victory” of finding an apprenticeship for a survivor with a very unique career interest:

Well, we have a resident who was interested in working on the upholstery of cars which got kind of very out there for us. We’re able to find through some of our connections and her family, a guy in the community that has been running this car shop for a few generations, and it's been in the family, and maybe that's taking her on and first hiring her as kind of an unpaid intern or she was able to go through training and learn upholstery, and then eventually a paid employee and that felt like a very unique victory for her that I wouldn’t have imagined whenever we first started.

Many organizational leaders expressed more joy in finding the “perfect fit” for a survivor than simply employing them in their own enterprises. Monica, a survivor-leader at River Oak, provided insight into how the right position enables her to explore her interests and potential. She stated:

My dream was to get clean. No only am I clean. Not only am I not trapped in a 10 block radius anymore, but I get to travel around the United States and I have been out of the country… so that's why I really love the position I got.

By describing her dream as “getting clean,” she highlights the importance of healing in the overall economic empowerment process. However, after she got clean, her work enabled her to travel all over the world and explore her interests and potential. While healing is important to overall economic empowerment, work offers something qualitatively different when it enables women to pursue their passions and potential.

Empowering Work: Work That Is Communal

The data also portrayed a pattern of community as necessity—for recovery, but also for empowering work. For instance, a graduate from a residential program in Kansas claimed, “I have learned that nothing heals my heart more than being with women. This is the most important element for me. Working with the women is a joy to me and very important to my own recovery. I wouldn’t be where I am today” (organizational documents). Similarly, a graduate and employee at River Oak notes, “Not that long ago, I had just accepted that I would die on the streets. Now I know I have a future. It took a community to keep us on the streets, but it also took a community to help us get better” (River Oak Annual Report). Monica also shared about the significance of community in recovery:

And it's good to have the relations with staff, but it is absolutely amazing when there's a whole community of people behind you, helping you and saying you can do it and we will help you in any way we can. And the difference that that door made for me, I had tried group homes so many times. I’d go into a 30 day program, but I had been using for over 26 years, so what was 30 days gonna do? That was just like a break.

Similarly, Helen, a survivor and founder of a social enterprise for women recovering from alcoholism and abuse, referred to “human wall of community” as the “central part of healing.” However, unlike a solely therapeutic program, she described how community is also essential to make for empowering work, as the work itself becomes healing as well. She elaborated, “The human wall of community is the ability in the wintertime for us to cram into that aquaponics and work together, or go to the green house and work together. Because, that's where the conversations come.” Helen identifies an important aspect of colaboring—that healing conversations come alongside working together. The embodied, physical process of gardening together enables discursive processing of one's trauma and recovery experiences. As this healing is necessary for survivors’ overall economic empowerment, community is necessary for empowering work. Several participant stories illustrated the importance of community for empowering work by describing its lack. For example, Rita explained how their organization won a local competition to operate a café in a local library. However, the plan fell apart, partially due to the isolation the survivors felt:

Then when we got them trained, the survivor really wasn’t comfortable having that responsibility of being there by herself. We couldn’t afford to have two people, so what we ended up doing was having this cute little café, but we were employing people that weren’t survivors, to run a café that was losing money, and we were like, “We can’t keep doing this.” That's where we thought, this model of satellite locations around the city doesn’t work for us because it was a stress on management to try to manage these people that weren’t there with you. We weren’t large enough to do that. It didn’t work for the survivors. The survivors wanted to be in the kitchen, they wanted to be where all of us were, they didn’t want to be out there on their own.

Rita goes on to describe how the kitchen is a “community hub” that keeps the survivors connected and supporting each other in their healing processes.

Tensions Within Organizing Economic Empowerment

Within this construction of empowerment, tensions emerge, particularly in how organizations seek to facilitate others’ economic empowerment. Thus, the following tensions reflect a larger tension within the organizing empowerment process: the active-passive tension. Organizations seek for survivors to be the agent in their own healing and empowerment; they do not want to be the “rescuer” or “savior.” However, the nature of trauma and addiction recovery requires external support and structure, thus making organizations important agents in the process. In this way, the tensions of authority-autonomy and compassion-accountability stem from the larger active-passive tension inherent within organizing empowerment processes.

Authority-Autonomy

The analysis demonstrated that survivors need to be their own agents in the healing and empowerment process (autonomy), yet also needed the support and structure of the residential/workforce development program (authority). Such a finding reflects a larger shift in therapeutic programs for those recovering from CSE or severe mental illness (e.g., Drake & Whitley, 2014; Ladd & Neufeld Weaver, 2018), as organizations seek to move away from a “paternalistic perspective” that historically located authority in the practitioner or “expert” and limited clients’ agency in the recovery process (Drake & Whitley, 2014, p. 237). For example, a graduate from the River Oak program shared, “I’ve always been a great team player but never had to be my own leader. River Oak constantly pushes me to grow” (River Oak's 2017 annual report). At an education workshop, another survivor shared, “I’ve tried multiple times to go off and do what I want,” but “when I would veer off, they would gently guide me back” (field notes). These two stories highlight the need to lead oneself—make autonomous decisions to seek recovery—but also the need for the community to exercise shared authority. This way, when someone goes off to “do what she wants,” she can be redirected and keep working toward healing and independence.

In navigating this contradiction, participants attempted to “reframe” the authority-autonomy tension by positioning the poles in a new relationship, one in which “opposing forces become encompassed inside each other to form a new whole” (Putnam et al., 2016, p. 63). Participants described how the right kind of authority actually feeds a survivor's true freedom or autonomy. In other words, over time, she is able to make responsible agentic decisions when she is safe from the influence of drugs, pimps, or other negative forces. For example, an individual at one organization describes the program as one wherein “women learn to become more self-sufficient by having responsibility” (organizational documents). In this way, survivors become more autonomous and independent when they follow the structure of the program and take on responsibilities.

In navigating this tension, participants described the importance of “getting the intakes right” or finding individuals who are willing to forgo their own decision-making and follow the authority of the program. As Emily stated about their residential program, “You’ve got to get the right people in there. That sounds kind of cold, but here's the thing. Not every person that needs transitional living wants transitional living.” Similarly, at an education workshop at River Oak, the staff of the residential program emphasized the “preadmission process” where staff screen each applicant to “see if she's a good fit” and “make sure that she's ready to commit to that program and is able to satisfy the requirements of the program” (survivor leader, field notes). To ensure that the survivors are willing to follow the authority of the program, they require all of the women on the waiting list to call every week in order to stay active on the list. This is also part of the screening process, aimed at ensuring the applicants are willing to follow the authority of the program.

Even when individuals are willing, conflicts inevitably arise between the program or staff's authority and the survivor's sense of autonomy. When residents or employees buck up against the rules of the program, the staff aim to refocus the survivors on how the rules are in place to help serve the survivors. As Emily described, “And you say, ‘Okay, what are you willing to do to change?’ They’ll tell you anything. ‘Anything, I don’t want to go back to that.’ I’m like, ‘Really? Because when I ask you to do some shit you don’t like, I’m going to remind you that we had this conversation.’” Emily's dialogue illustrates how, when a survivor dislikes an instruction, she attempts to refocus the survivor on her original goals—her willingness to do anything because she doesn’t “want to go back to that.” She stated, “if you can take them in that wounded and hurt place, let them be vulnerable but safe and then guide them to a place of hope,” explaining the importance of identifying the pain of their previous life and emphasizing how following the authority of the program will help them grow and recover.

In order to emphasize how autonomy-authority is not at odds, participants often have survivors set their own goals for their healing and growth. Such a finding reflects the growth of a strengths-based approach to CSE survivor recovery, in which the provider and the client work collaboratively “to discover, to explore, and to exploit survivors’ strengths and resources in the journey of achieving their goals and realizing their dreams” (Ladd & Neufeld Weaver, 2018). By working together, staff reframe authority by rooting it in survivors’ goals. Then, when staff refocus survivors on these goals, the authority the goals exert is originally constructed by the survivor, thus reinforcing her autonomy. As Maggie shared:

And really listen to the voices of who is coming to the program because it's super easy for us to think we know what other people need but we don’t. Each individual knows what they need the very most and let them have a lot of voice in their recovery and in their journey and be there to assist and help them but don’t think you have the answers to rescue someone else.

Leah, a program director for the in-house social enterprise at Freedom Int’l., claimed that this process must to be an explicit conversation. She stated, “you need to have conversations with women about what their needs actually are” and talk explicitly about “goal-setting.” She argued that doing so is important because “it's not me rescuing them or saving them. They have the power themselves to heal.” Cathy, a founder and president of a social enterprise in Tennessee, described a similar process for the women who work in their business. Every year, they meet with the women and talk about specific goals they have. Then, they create a plan for her to achieve those goals. She stated:

… one of the survivors that works with us is Spanish-speaking, and she wants to learn English. We’ve been talking to her on a translator on our phones for a year and a half. It's holding her back a little bit from getting other work and really feel like part of the community. She also wants to learn how to drive. So today we broke down the steps that it would take in order for her to do these things.

When organizational members create authority according to the goals set by survivors, they can refocus survivors on those goals when they resist following the program or the staff. Similarly, at the River Oak education workshop, survivor leaders shared how the rules for the residential program were originally constructed by the first set of graduates from the program. They constructed the house rules with a logic of “This is how we’re going to keep our sanctuary safe and keep each other safe” (field notes). In doing so, participants grounded the program's authority in the survivors’ autonomy. River Oak advocates developing a sense of “shared authority,” where the survivors “regulate themselves.” At the workshop, survivor leaders described how “they’ll tell on each other” because “that's their safe space” that they don’t want violated (field notes). Maureen provided more specific advice in cultivating shared authority:

You want to try and change that mentality that authority is bad, so rather than having this dominant approach, it's more of a team oriented and a we mentality. It's using pronouns like ‘we’ and ‘us’, and not ‘they’ and ‘them’ and ‘I’. I think that's been really key in that it's not a ‘me’ and ‘them.’

Leah also described being intentional about language as a way to lessen the perception of a hierarchy. She said, “I try not to use the word ‘supervisor’ or ‘manager’ because I never want them to feel a power dynamic from me.” Instead, she wants to cultivate a “team environment.” Thus, in order to navigate the authority-autonomy dialectic, participants aimed to make authority shared rather than hierarchical, rooting the rules in the survivors’ autonomy.

Compassion-Accountability

Participants also expressed feeling a tension between compassion and accountability. Whereas authority-autonomy reflected differences in decision-making between survivors and staff, compassion-accountability addresses how organizational members hold survivors to their goals when difficulty arises. As one organization claims, they “strive for a balance between accountability and freedom, truth and grace. So, we attempt to run each decision, each rule, each activity through that messy & inexact filter” (organizational documents). Similarly, Maureen explained, “That's definitely the challenge is finding that delicate balance between compassion and accountability,” or as Leah shared, “They’ve lost their support system, so they need to feel familial… but they also need accountability.” Organizations want to show compassion and support to survivors when they experience triggers, setbacks, or even relapses. However, they also desire to hold them accountable to their recovery and healing goals, not letting trauma or other challenges serve as a reason to keep from growing.

Even though participants may express this tension as a “balance,” in their descriptions of navigating the tension, they approach it as a dialectic—emphasizing that staff must do both—exercise compassion and hold survivors accountable, despite that doing so may be “messy and inexact.” In navigating this tension, one strategy participants employed is lovingly reinforcing consequences but framing mistakes and setbacks as “learning opportunities.” As Hope said, “like we have a woman relapse, but if they come back and they are like willing to go to detox or they’re working out again, like relapse happens. I’m not going to fire them over that.” Hope highlights when the woman is willing to learn and change, compassion is important, and she can receive a second or third chance. Similarly, Maureen referred to these reactions and mistakes as “learning opportunities.” She stated:

There are … learning opportunities and that's how we try to view them. When there's a knife fight, a screaming incident. Obviously there has to be consequences because otherwise that's just enabling and allowing. That's not training, that's not helping. It's following through with consequences in a loving and respectful way, but also addressing the deeper issues that are there.

Maureen explains that balancing the tension comes down to lovingly reinforcing consequences while also pushing survivors to address the causes for their difficulty or emotional reactions. As she elaborated:

You take certain triggers and rather than just brushing them off, you say, ‘Okay, here we go. Okay let's talk through this. What caused you to react that way? How do you think we need to do it again for the future,’ and then also letting the whole staff know we know that if your hand comes up next to this person's face, it's gonna trigger them. So we don’t want to do that, and then if someone accidentally does that, to that person, ‘How are you going to cope and react? Do you need to remove yourself? Do you need to…,’ and you know just kind of getting a plan for that.

Rather than write off their reactions because they are in recovery, Maureen explains how discussing these setbacks is the truly compassionate approach. She described how organizational members should ask questions to help survivors process why they behaved how they did.

Participants also expressed how accountability in the workplace is essential for survivors’ success in other jobs after they leave the program. Leah described how the program is “very grace-filled and nurturing, but you can’t just not show up. A workplace will expect that.” She connects her responsibility to holding women accountable to preparing them for the workforce. Stacey, the director of business development at River Oak, also conveyed how accountability is in the survivors’ best interest:

I feel like, because the women aren’t going to get a free pass. So it's like, I don’t want to set you up to fail, but if you don’t do your job, you’re not going to have this job, because I’m not going to enable you.

She describes how she does not want to set women up for failure by enabling them; thus she highlights how accountability helps women meet their recovery and empowerment goals.

Other participants expressed the importance of reinforcing consequences out of compassion for the other survivors. As Rita, the director of a catering social enterprise, explained:

Drug testing is one, we do random drug tests, people can’t work for us if they haven’t been sober for six months. We drop them before they come to work, and unfortunately that, I’d say 50% of the people that come to work for us don’t pass that first drug test. That's just sad and it's so hard but because we are that program for recovery it's important that the women that are there understand it's safe and they’re not gonna be triggered by somebody that's using beside them.

In order to exercise compassion to all the women in the workforce development program, she holds everyone accountable to sobriety. Survivor leaders at River Oak advocated for the same approach in the residential program. At the education workshop, they described how holding women accountable to sober living is necessary for the success of everyone in the program. To provide justification for reinforcing rules, one survivor leader said, “If someone comes in and smokes dope in the house, that's violating your safe place” (field notes). Therefore, just as reinforcing authority enables women to meet their goals of true freedom and autonomy, holding women accountable is exercising compassion toward her and others in the program.

Thus, as organizations seek to facilitate individual economic empowerment, tensions inevitably arise regarding the locus of responsibility in the empowerment process. Even though empowering work may be constructed as that which gives to self and others, is agentic, and communal, these components require a dynamic interplay between organizational actor and survivor. The push-pull nature of authority-autonomy and compassion-accountability reflect a dialectical organizational tension that participants must navigate. By reframing these tensions as noncompetitive, but interdependent, they develop creative responses in navigating their outworking within organizational life.

Discussion

As economic definitions of economic empowerment often equate job opportunity with empowerment (Rowlands, 1995), we know little about the nature of empowering work beyond features such as consistent pay, benefits, and safe working conditions. For organizations in this study, empowering work is agentic and therapeutic, enables individuals to pursue their interests and potential, and symbolically offers to others the healing and restoration one has received in their recovery process. Such findings reinforce Kabeer's (2012) claim that the kind of work is central to economic empowerment, and they reflect studies of CSE survivors in the Philippines employed at a trauma-informed organization, wherein experiences of pride and accomplishment appeared to help survivors reclaim the experience of work after trafficking (Gill & Cordisco Tsai, 2018). The significance of empowering work for CSE survivors also underscores findings from mental illness recovery research, as scholars increasingly highlight the importance of agentic, meaningful employment in the recovery process (Drake & Whitley, 2014). Additionally, as researchers of gender-based violence often focus on the financial literacy components of economic empowerment, this study expands understandings of economic empowerment to incorporate employment, adding to preliminary studies on the benefits of therapeutic work for gender-based violence survivors (e.g., Renzetti, 2017). Since “there is scant evidence regarding effective programs and services specifically for women involved in CSE” (Gerassi, 2017, p. 14), this information is essential for building economic empowerment programs backed by empirical research.

Second, this study illuminates the tensions embedded within attempts to organize others’ empowerment, highlighting the specific ways tensions emerge in organizations serving survivors of CSE. To aid practitioners, the findings also portray practical ways organizational actors discursively frame these tensions in order to navigate them in their organizational context. Although most tension-related research examines the effects of contradictions on the organizational employees, this study identifies how particular discursive framings can support economic empowerment goals. For instance, by situating the authority structures of the program around the self-determined goals of the survivor, the organizational members create shared authority and then hold survivors accountable to the goals they identified rather than organizational leaders. While goal-setting in workplace environments has been a helpful practice for Filipino survivors of CSE (Gill & Cordisco Tsai, 2018), participants in this study take this workplace practice farther—positioning survivor goals as the center for authority in the programs, thus reframing the tension between authority-autonomy by placing authority in the hands of the survivors themselves.

Similarly, by discursively framing setbacks, relapses, or outbursts, as “learning opportunities,” the organizational actors insert compassion into the practice of holding a resident or worker accountable, demonstrating that compassion and accountability must be held together. Moreover, by avoiding disciplinary language and utilizing terms like “learning opportunities,” the accountability measures do not center the authority of the organization but the healing and growth of the survivor. By rooting navigation of tensions in the survivors’ experience, not only do organizational actors shift the focus from themselves to the survivors, but they do so out of alignment with their mission. Moving forward, organizations should keep striving to center their navigation of tensions in survivor's agency, as doing so echoes best practices in gender-based violence and CSE literature. Historically, empowerment initiatives have often born contradictory results, as development work emerged as top-down, with “most professionals … trained to work in ways that disempower and which tell other people what they should do and think” (Rowlands, 1995, p. 105). Although gender-based violence researchers and practitioners have long advocated for a survivor-centered approach, social enterprises can be uncharted territory for practitioners, and social entrepreneurs or organizational leaders seeking to employ CSE survivors may have little training in survivor-centered models of employment. The U.S. Department of State recently highlighted the growing need for survivor-centered services, as even trafficking organizations often claim to be “survivor-informed” but do not meaningfully integrate survivor perspectives and feedback into their operations or leadership (Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, 2021). The importance of centering survivors undergirds the “survivor-leader” model adopted by many organizations in this study. To create advancement opportunities and to center survivors’ experiences and voices, many organizations promote survivors who have graduated recovery programs to leadership positions within the social enterprises or therapeutic programs. Thus, the end goal is a program or enterprise built by and for survivors.

In addition to using survivor voices as an anchor, organizations should also strive to center compassion when navigating tensions. Doing so reflects a trauma-informed approach to operating residential or social enterprise programs. Trauma-informed approaches develop deep understanding of the nature and effects of trauma, actively seeking to avoid retraumatization by providing physically and psychologically safe environments, collaborative and supportive approaches to service delivery, transparency, and empowerment-based thinking. Most organizations in this study strive for a trauma-informed workplace, although the dearth of research on this topic means that many organizations are innovating, as in the case of River Oak's in-house committee that seeks to hold all members of the social enterprise accountable to a trauma-informed workplace. Organizational members’ attempts to center compassion in navigating compassion-accountability are central to a trauma-informed model, as noted by the 2021 TIP Report which calls for greater involvement from survivors in antitrafficking organizations as a form of trauma-informed care. Thus, organizations in this study that adopt a trauma-informed approach that centers survivor leadership can offer insight to other organizations seeking to employ survivors.

However, the study is not without limitations. One, the majority of participants were white, middle-class women. The homogeneity of the sample in part reflects the homogeneity of this emerging organizational space. As such, this study not only raises questions about who can do the work of supporting survivors of CSE but also reflects a certain, more privileged perspective on the nature of economic empowerment. Furthermore, due to the difficulty in accessing the first-hand experiences of CSE survivors themselves, this study's explications of economic empowerment highlight practitioner perspectives. Although survivor insight was sought through participant observation, organizational documents, and a few interviews, the analysis would have benefitted from more first-hand experiences. By incorporating more diverse voices and experiences, future research can also seek out a more “crystalline” perspective on empowerment (Dykstra-DeVette & Canary, 2018), particularly seeking out similarities and differences between the survivor and the organizational actor in understanding empowerment.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Danielle J. Corple

Author Biography

Danielle J. Corple (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Wheaton College, IL. She studies organizations, new media, and social change, with specific research interests in nonprofit/social enterprise communication, issues of vulnerability and empowerment, and ethics.

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