Listening to Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation
Summit on Crime Survivors: Commercial Sexual Exploitation
January 29, 2026 – Seattle City Hall
This week I attended the second annual Summit on Crime Survivors, focused specifically on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. I went because I knew this was an area I did not understand well enough, particularly as it relates to our region. I wanted to learn, to listen, and to better orient myself to a reality that is often discussed abstractly, if at all.
The morning included remarks from organizers, elected officials, judges, advocates, and service providers. There was discussion of efforts to support victims and to mitigate harm upstream. A recurring theme was the lack of stable resources—especially for prevention. Funding for services is often reimbursement-based and uncertain, which makes long-term planning difficult and proactive work nearly impossible. This pattern is familiar across the nonprofit and government world: we regularly affirm the value of prevention, yet struggle to fund it because its success is, by definition, difficult to prove.
Just last week, I spoke with the executive director of a homeless shelter who shared a variation on a story he hears often: “If I had just had $500 to fix my car, I’d be fine right now. Instead, I lost my job, my car, and now I’m here.” Money to keep shelters open or to provide food is easier to secure than money to fix the car before everything collapses. Different issue, same structural problem. We fund crisis response far more readily than early intervention.
What stayed with me most deeply, however, were the voices of survivors.
While there was a formal survivors’ panel of three women, the room itself was filled with survivors. Many of the people I spoke with casually—standing in line for coffee, chatting between sessions—were survivors. Their presence, their attentiveness to one another, and their quiet leadership were striking. One woman noticed I had taken a seat in the back of the room and immediately invited me to join her table. She was a survivor. She was kind, grounded, and extraordinarily aware of others. Throughout the day, she made space for people, checked in on them, and helped orient those who seemed overwhelmed. Without any formal role, she became a kind of unofficial host. Watching her care for others was deeply moving.
Another survivor I met while waiting in line for lunch—I’ll call her “T”—shared a sense of real discouragement. She had prepared extensively to testify before a legislative committee in Olympia on these very issues. She was scheduled to testify remotely near the end of the session, but as earlier speakers went over their allotted time, she was ultimately cut and never given the opportunity to speak. Preparing to publicly share a deeply personal story is not a small thing, and having that opportunity disappear carries its own harm.
When I mentioned that I had recently met one-on-one with the state legislator who chairs that committee, her entire demeanor changed. She lit up. There was surprise, relief, and something like hope all at once. She immediately recognized his name and role, and I could feel how much it mattered to her that someone in that position was paying attention. I shared that he had raised this issue himself in our conversation—that it clearly mattered to him, that he and his staff were actively researching approaches from other countries, and that this work was not peripheral for him.
It didn’t undo the fact that she had been silenced that day. But it did seem to lift something. There was a sense that her preparation hadn’t been wasted, that her voice belonged in that space even if it hadn’t been heard yet. The timing of that exchange—having spoken with him just weeks before, having this be the very issue he raised unprompted, and then standing in that lunch line with her—felt quietly profound. I felt genuinely honored to be able to share that moment with her.
The survivors’ panel itself challenged many common assumptions. Two of the three women had been groomed or manipulated into exploitation at a very young age. It was decades later before they fully understood themselves as victims. This is the reality of coercion: being forced into something in ways that are not always immediately recognizable as force.
Another panelist, a trans woman, shared that a roommate had secretly filmed and livestreamed her for years without her knowledge—capturing not only her body, but her transition. That detail mattered. Not because it made the crime worse in some abstract hierarchy, but because it revealed how exploitation so often intersects with vulnerability, identity, and moments of becoming. Her story made clear that exploitation adapts itself to whatever intimacy or exposure it can extract.
All of these women were used—unknowingly, non-consensually, and unwillingly—for the benefit of others. Two of the panelists were over sixty years old and had only been living freely for less than a decade. They were from here. They went to school here. They saw classmates drive by while they were trapped in circumstances they didn’t understand and couldn’t escape. One woman said that given the number of times she had been beaten, threatened, sold, drugged, and placed in life-threatening situations, “it’s a miracle that I’m alive.”
What I keep returning to is the cost of telling these stories.
Survivors are repeatedly asked to recount deeply personal trauma in rooms full of professionals—caseworkers, lawyers, judges, policymakers, and concerned citizens. This is not therapeutic entertainment. It is emotionally taxing. It takes something each time. And if listening is where it ends—if stories are gathered but systems remain unchanged—then even well-intentioned attention risks becoming extractive.
Listening is essential. Human connection is essential. Empathy formed through real encounter is different from empathy formed through reports or statistics. It shapes judgment. It sharpens discernment. It changes how decisions are made.
But empathy alone does not correct structural misalignment. Systems that reliably fund reaction while struggling to fund mitigation will continue to produce harm, no matter how aware we become. Prevention is harder to measure, harder to justify, and harder to defend politically—but the cost of neglecting it is borne by real people, often for decades.
This experience did not leave me with answers. It left me with a clearer sense of responsibility: to stay attentive to where human connection should inform decision-making, to question funding structures that privilege symptoms over causes, and to remain unsettled when awareness is mistaken for action.
That unease, I think, is where the real work begins.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.