Participatory Research with Survivors: Promoting Safety When Engaging People with Lived Experiences in Research
June 2026 GLC Monthly Learning Call Brief
What safety actually requires and how to build it
Key Learning Points from our May Calls:
Safety in research means far more than safeguarding and ‘preventing harm’
Survivors are knowledge holders whose lived experience is a form of expertise no other source can replicate
Research should ask how survivors can shape knowledge, not simply what happened to them
Meaningful participation means co-design, shared leadership, co-authorship and fair compensation
Informed consent is a continuous relational process, not only a form to be signed
Safety does not end when research ends — support must be structured before, during and after
Organisational culture, not just protocol, determines whether research is genuinely safe
Trust deepens over time — a single interview creates a snapshot, not a story
These principles extend beyond research to how we engage all people in our work
Introduction
Participatory research with survivors is not a new concept for most practitioners in the anti-trafficking movement. Many of us have encountered the language, been present in conversations about it, perhaps even implemented some version of it. And yet our June calls — led by Peter Olewe and Maryfin Kemunto from Azadi, with contributions from GLC members, researchers Dr Glenn Miles and Dr Angela Robinson — did something that the best learning calls do: they sharpened something we thought we perhaps already understood.
What emerged across both sessions was less a set of new ideas than a more exacting and honest account of what these ideas actually require of us. We were reminded afresh about the important role of survivors in the movement, as highlighted by Maryfin from Azadi: "people with lived experience possess unique forms of knowledge that academic and professional expertise alone cannot provide." Alongside this, and perhaps where the most exacting reflection occurred for call attendees, was having our attention drawn to how easily survivor participation in research can become extractive if we are not actively vigilant. This places a responsibility on all of us in a movement that exists at its core to help people out of and confront extractive systems. Peter from Azadi encapsulated this well: "Safety should be understood not as compliance with ethics protocols alone, but as the cultivation of an organisational culture that prioritises care, trust, mutual accountability and healing."
The calls provided a great deal of practical ground on how to promote safety when engaging people with lived experience in research. If we can hold the concept of "not extractive" as our compass, it positions our perspective in a way that allows us to more readily identify the protective path that leads us where we most need to go.
What We Learned and Discussed
Rethinking what safety means
Azadi's presentation opened with a reframing of safety that set the tone for everything that followed. Safety in research is not adequately captured by safeguarding as we have traditionally understood it, that is, the prevention of abuse and misconduct. True safety extends into emotional, psychological, social, physical, cultural and community dimensions, and rather than focusing only on preventing harm, it actively works to create environments where people with lived experience can contribute, heal and thrive. This reframing has direct implications for how research is designed, what support structures must be in place, and what questions researchers and organisations are responsible for asking.
The question Azadi poses throughout their research process is this: when participants leave, are they more supported and empowered than when they arrived? The aim is not simply to minimise harm but to ensure that engagement contributes positively to dignity, healing and well-being. Safety, understood this way, begins before any research activity takes place - with careful risk assessment that considers emotional risks, privacy concerns, power dynamics and potential triggers. Azadi ensures peer counsellors are available throughout every research engagement, with debriefing structured before, during and after.
From research subjects to knowledge holders and shapers
Research should ask not what happened to survivors but how survivors can shape knowledge, because they are the people who hold the knowledge that can most meaningfully inform policy and practice. Glenn put it plainly: “Survivors are simply not sources of data. They're the most authoritative experts on their own experiences. Lived experience [is] a form of expertise no literature review can replicate.”
In practice, this means co-designing research topics with survivors from the outset, ensuring shared leadership throughout, crediting survivors as co-authors, and compensating their contribution as the professional expertise it is. Ensuring survivors are present not just as voices to be heard but as decision-makers who shape what gets asked, how it gets asked, and what happens with the answers can prevent survivors simply being consulted on the margins, drawing on trauma narratives and rooting out tokenism.
Azadi’s approach to compensation is an acknowledgement that lived experience expertise is expertise, equivalent to what any external consultant would be paid and not simply a gesture of appreciation or a participation incentive. Co-creating compensation frameworks with survivors, differentiating rates by role and context, and providing practical support such as childcare and transport, ensures that participation is genuinely accessible rather than nominally open. This extends to geographic obstacles too — to a question from Caitlin (Blue Dragon, Vietnam) about engaging survivor research communities across dispersed geographies, Peter clarified that Azadi trains survivor focal persons in each of their regional communities so that peer support, advisory capacity and research participation are available to survivors regardless of where they are located
What ethical practice looks in promoting safety
Ethical practice cannot be satisfied by one-off measures. Informed consent is not an event but a continuous and accessible process in which participants can withdraw at any time and researchers regularly check whether participants remain comfortable. Peter shared one of the more complex scenarios Azadi has encountered — a survivor withdrawing consent after a research paper had already been published — which prompted them to co-create policies with survivors about what ongoing consent around published contributions should look like. They are still learning from it.
Trauma-informed engagement means replacing invasive, trauma-focused questions with an orientation of genuine curiosity and respect, replacing "what happened to you?" with "what would you like to share?", which gives participants control over their own narratives. Nuanced language matters throughout. To this, GLC member Irwin from The Salvation Army asked about navigating language when interpreters are used, and Peter described the Azadi dictionary (available on our resources page here), their co-created terminology resource ensuring researchers and interpreters work with empowering rather than victim-reinforcing language.
Support must also extend beyond the formal research engagement itself. Many survivors have reported feeling abandoned once their contribution has been made and the relationship quietly ends. Ethical practice means communicating with survivors about how their contribution has shaped outcomes and actively promoting collective care and peer support. Azadi's approach of open feedback channels, continuous conversation with survivors, and treating mistakes as opportunities to improve — offers a generous and honest model for how organisations can keep learning.
What trust built over time brings about and reveals
Glenn's three case studies brought the principles into lived practice. In a current project with survivor leaders connected to the Global Association of Human Trafficking Scholars (GAHTS) survivors themselves generated the research questions with no agenda imposed by the professional team. The survivors will also hold lead authorship on the resulting publications, a tangible demonstration of what a genuine shift in academic knowledge production can look like. In Cambodia, male survivors trained as research assistants brought trust, cultural legitimacy and peer rapport that outside researchers could not have replicated, and when a shooting incident required the fieldwork to stop entirely, the team halted data collection to prioritise the safety of survivor researchers. Glenn reflected that accepting a smaller final dataset was not a failure but integrity.
The most sustained of Glenn's examples was a ten-to-twelve-year longitudinal study with 128 survivors, and what it revealed above all was that a single interview creates a snapshot, not a story. Trust built over a decade allowed narratives to become richer, more nuanced and sometimes fundamentally different from what had been shared in the first year. By the close of the project, survivors were presenting recommendations directly to NGOs, community leaders and police, holding institutions accountable for service gaps and retraumatisation, with their voices published in the research literature. Glenn shared about the difficulty of ending the project and on the sense of abandonment some survivors experienced when it concluded, a reminder that the researcher's responsibility to participants does not simply expire when the project does.
Implications for the movement and the GLC
The learning from these calls travels beyond those whose work explicitly involves research with survivors. The trauma-informed orientation that Azadi brought to these calls is, at a deeper level, an orientation toward the full diversity of human experience and human communication. In a globally distributed community working on deeply difficult things, we are always, to some degree, working alongside people whose histories we do not fully know. Extending care, patience and genuine respect to everyone in the room is what human-centred work looks like.
For those who conduct research with survivors, these calls offer a clear set of questions to sit with: Are our practices empowering or extractive? Are survivors shaping the questions, or simply answering them? Are we compensating lived experience as the expertise it is? Are we maintaining relationships after the research ends? And are we scaling deep enough to do this well, or scaling wide at the expense of doing it properly? The legacy of prior extractive research practices has, in some contexts, made survivors reluctant to engage at all — a reasonable response to real experience — and rebuilding trust is slow work that cannot be compressed to meet a funder's timeline or a sample size requirement. Angela Robinson named this pattern directly from her experience in academic anti-trafficking research, and pointed to the Dignified Futures Research Network as one effort to build different norms from within academic settings. For those interested in going further, visit www.dignifiedfuturesnetwork.org where resources from their launch events and first workshop are available.
These calls also connect naturally to our March calls on Collaborating with Survivor Networks, which explored what survivors themselves share about what they need when engaged in collaboration - deeply complementary and worth reading alongside this brief and revisiting those recoridngs if you haven't already.
Following Nicole's suggestion on the Western call, we are also exploring the possibility of a follow-up session with Azadi on how they train survivors in the research process. If this is something you would be interested in, let us know.
Sign in to the Members Area to watch the May call recordings. If you are not yet a member of the GLC and are interested in the calls or joining, email the Secretariat Team at team@globallearning.community, or read more about membership at globallearningcommunity.org/joinus.