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BREAKING THE SILENCE: A SURVIVOR LEADER PERSPECTIVE
By Petrina Montrose
NB*Trigger Warning: This article contains references to sexual abuse and suicidal ideation that some readers may find distressful.
My Personal Story
As a minor, I found myself homeless. What followed was over a decade of my life taken from me in the most violent and intimate way possible. I was a victim of sex trafficking, where my virginity was sold, and my body was commodified and objectified for the pleasure of the elite. My childhood was marked by silent devastation, with hardships that were personal, familial, and social. It is the kind of adversity that leaves no visible scars but carves itself permanently into who a child becomes, leaving an indelible mark on the soul. Gabor Maté observes in “The Realm of Hungry Ghosts” 1, trauma wounds us in ways that often remain hidden from view. When pain becomes overwhelming, the mind may suppress conscious awareness in order to survive. Looking back, I can see how this process shaped much of my own experience.
Growing up in a chaotic environment marked by parental mental illness, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation posed immense challenges. As a result, I developed a deeply damaged relationship with both myself and the concept of seeking help. I viewed the world with mistrust and fear, perceiving the adults and institutions meant to protect me as sources of threat rather than safety. I felt a pervasive sense of powerlessness growing up. I also felt invisible, learning early on that my needs did not matter, that my voice carried little influence, and that I existed on the margins of others' comfort. This powerlessness was not incidental; it was rooted in a painful reality where unmet needs became the architecture of the vulnerabilities that followed.
These men did not find me or groom me. I was trafficked by a woman; my future was unmade by a woman. I urge the legal community to take a moment to reflect on that sentence. When the trafficker is a woman, we often respond with disbelief, blame the victim, and hesitate to challenge our traditional understanding of gender roles in traffickers. At that time, I had no understanding of what was happening to me in legal terms.
From my own experience, I have learned that trusting a woman who has exploited my vulnerability by weaponizing that trust should not be seen as a personal failing. Instead, it is evidence that women can play active roles in trafficking networks, recruiting, controlling, and profiting, not simply as passive facilitators or through coercion alone. Moreover, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime consistently shows that women represent a disproportionately high percentage of convicted trafficking offenders relative to their incidence in other categories of violent crime. 2
How I Overcame/Survived
The research is unequivocal: recovery cannot happen in isolation; it requires establishing physical and psychological safety, sustained long-term support, and critical access to education as a pathway to reclaiming a sense of agency and to reconstructing identity. 3
When I look at what I have accomplished -surviving sex trafficking, marrying the love of my life, and embarking on the most transformative journey of motherhood - I recognise that raising six children while pursuing my own healing through education was both demanding and extraordinarily purposeful. Education gave me a voice, a sense of agency, and the right to occupy a space in the world. My academic achievements became one of the most powerful ways of reclaiming my sense of self: an alternative narrative shaped by a future full of possibilities, rather than one defined by what was done to me. My experiences align with Reimer’s observation: women exiting prostitution described education as transformative in ways that therapy alone could not achieve, providing them with language to name their experiences and communities where their thinking was valued and the futures they could actively shape.4 Paulo Freire argues for the transformative power of education: at its deepest level, it is “the practice of freedom.” For me, this is not a metaphor but a lived reality. 5
Post traumatic growth is the positive psychological transformation that can emerge from the struggle with deeply challenging life experiences, and it is most powerfully cultivated through education. 6 It was also through my own educational journey, breaking intergenerational cycles, transforming pain into purpose and interrupting the intergenerational transmission of trauma. 7 I am currently in the process of being baptised into Catholicism at the Westminster Cathedral in London. For me, my faith gives me what the sex trafficking systemically destroys: an inherent unconditional worth, forgiveness, restoration, love, and healing of the helplessness and shame that trauma instils. The Catholic theological conviction that every human being is made in the Imago Del – the image of God - stands in direct opposition to the dehumanising logic of human trafficking, which objectifies and commodifies a person as a ‘thing’ to be used and discarded.
Hodge observed that spirituality offers a transcendent sense of meaning beyond the scope of secular frameworks alone, imparting a sacred and purposeful dimension to a survivor’s sense of survival and purpose. 8 Zimmerman and Kiss found that among the most resilient trafficking survivors studied, spirituality was consistently identified as one of the strongest protective factors enabling them to move forward. 9
For myself, as a survivor of sex trafficking, enduring fifteen years of sexual exploitation, spirituality offered something no human system could: an unconditional sense of being seen, known, and loved beyond the degradation imposed upon the body. When an identity has been systematically stripped away and personhood reduced to a commodity, a spiritual connection provides an interior sanctuary that cannot be taken, becoming the quiet, unshakeable core of self that abuse cannot reach.
Advice To Friends/Family/Colleagues (On Effective Ways To Assist/Support)
Critically, when a survivor faces a threat from a perpetrator, the neurobiology of trauma responses must be understood by every professional, family member, and friend who encounters a victim. According to data published by Rape Crisis England and Wales in 2024, sexual violence triggers involuntary biological trauma reactions, including survival responses like fight, flight, freezing, or fawning. 9 In a fight response, a survivor might physically resist, scream, or verbally push back against their attacker, abuser, perpetrator, or trafficker. In cases of Gender Based Violence (GBV), some perpetrators may weaponize this flight response by claiming the survivor was the aggressor. Advocacy frameworks make clear that resistance is a survival mechanism, not a justification for abuse. 10 Freeze is a powerful biological defence mechanism that helps to reduce injury. Survivors frequently describe being unable to scream and feeling paralysed, unable to move during an act of sexual violence. It is a completely involuntary response and must not be misinterpreted as consent. 11 The Fawn response is when a survivor flatters, appeases, or complies with the abuser’s sexual demands. This behaviour helps to de-escalate a highly volatile and unpredictable situation, requiring the survivor to subconsciously use appeasement to prevent physical violence from worsening, not evidence of willingness or complicity. 12
These neurobiological responses are involuntary adaptations that act as defence mechanisms, enhancing a victim’s chance of survival, and the research is unequivocal that the nervous system selects the path of the highest viability in any given moment . 13
Understanding normalisation is equally key to reducing victim blame. It is common to have trust issues or emotional dysregulation, and trauma bonding, an emotional attachment between the victim and the trafficker, when a victim becomes subordinate to their trafficker and submits to exploitation as a means of survival. Victims and survivors may experience missing the perpetrator or becoming highly defensive of them. These reactions are normal responses to relational betrayals, documented globally among trafficking survivors. 14
Herman observed that these responses are pathological; they are rational adaptations to irrational circumstances. 15
For friends, family, and colleagues, understanding these trauma responses is essential to providing effective support. Survivors may question their own reactions or face judgment from others who misunderstand why they did not resist, escape, or disclose immediately. Supporters can help by recognising that these responses were survival mechanisms, not choices. Creating an environment of safety, belief, and compassion allows survivors to regain a sense of control and autonomy that trauma often takes away.
What Organisations Can Do to Deal with the Crisis of Gender Based Violence
The Crisis of Gender Based Violence remain systemic. Organisations present gender based violence as one of the most pervasive human rights violations of our time. The World Organisation estimates that approximately one in three women worldwide has experienced sexual violence in her lifetime. 16 Sex trafficking, a particularly severe form of GBV, affects an estimated 4.8 million people globally, disproportionately affecting women and girls .17 Each number represents a person whose dignity was violated, whose voice was suppressed, and whose recovery was made harder by the failure of systems designed to protect them. Organisations must embed trauma-informed practice not as an optional training module but as an organisational philosophy that is reflected in policy, procedures, and professional interactions. Judith Hermans foundational work established that recovery from complex trauma requires, above all else, safety, trustworthiness and empowerment. 18
Yet survivors report that their first encounter with statutory organisations such as the police, social services, health care providers, and legal services retraumatises rather than supports them. Lederer and Wetzel found that trafficked women who sought help from health care providers frequently encountered scepticism, judgment, and procedural responses that prioritised institutional processes over human need 19.
Trauma-informed practice requires organisations to understand that a survivor who appears hostile, disengaged, or inconsistent is not being difficult; they may be responding adaptively to a nervous system conditioned by prolonged exposure to threat. Every frontline worker and legal professional who encounters survivors must be trained not only in what trauma is, but also in how it presents, how it affects memory and disclosure, and how institutional responses can either support healing or inadvertently cause further harm. The legal system must, therefore, become a place of justice rather than a source of retraumatisation.
Organisations must address the intersections of poverty, housing and safety. Gender Based Violence does not happen in a vacuum; it is sustained and enabled by poverty, housing insecurity, immigration status and social isolation. Organisations must advocate for policy changes that address these structural drivers. Survivor leadership must move from tokenism to genuine power. Survivors are invited to advisory panels, asked to share their stories at conferences and cited in funding applications as evidence of lived experience.
My Role With Women Ascension
I have been serving on the Advisory Board of Women Ascension since August 2025. Women Ascension is a global non-profit promoting gender equality. I leverage my expertise in survivor advocacy, forensic psychology, and international policy to advance the Sustainable Development Goals. I am committed to ethical engagement, prioritising inclusion of survivor voices and women’s organisations through meaningful participation. As a mentor for Women's Ascension, I focus on the impact of GBV and empowerment initiatives, and I promote monthly webinars that provide professionals, advocates, and community leaders with trauma-informed frameworks and evidence-based approaches to address gender-based violence. This engagement fosters safer environments and strengthens support systems for GBV survivors. It emphasises trauma informed care across mental and physical health services, the development of specialised educational protocols for practitioners, the promotion of gender parity, and the reduction of systemic disparities.
I have personally walked the path described in this article, not just in theory but through my lived experience. Addressing gender-based violence cannot rely on awareness alone. It requires real, structural change: organisations must commit to reform, legal systems must prioritise justice over procedure, and survivor leadership must be recognised as expertise rather than tokenism. Understanding how survivors respond in crucial moments can either open a door to healing or slam it shut forever. The research on this is unequivocal, and the moral imperative is undeniable. What is needed now is the political will, from both institutions and governments, to act to uphold the human rights and dignity of every survivor.
References
¹ Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (North Atlantic Books 2010)
² United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2024 (UNODC 2024)
³ Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Basic Books 1992) 133
⁴ Elena C Reimer, 'Invisible at the Intersection: Identity and Education for Women Exiting Prostitution' (2010) 37 Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 113, 121
⁵ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Routledge 2020) 374
⁶ Richard G Tedeschi and Lawrence G Calhoun, 'Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence' (2004) 15(1) Psychological Inquiry 1
⁷ Andrea Danese and Bruce S McEwen, 'Adverse Childhood Experiences, Allostasis, Allostatic Load, and Age-Related Disease' (2012) 106(1) Physiology & Behavior 29
⁸ David R Hodge, 'Assessing Spirituality and Religion in the Context of Counseling and Psychotherapy' (2013) — (please supply journal name, volume, and page numbers to complete this citation)
⁹ Rape Crisis England and Wales, Understanding Trauma Responses (Rape Crisis England and Wales 2024) https://rapecrisis.org.uk accessed 1 June 2026
¹⁰ ibid
¹¹ ibid
¹² ibid
¹³ Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Viking 2014) 14
¹⁴ Herman (n 3) 92
¹⁵ ibid 96
¹⁶ World Health Organisation, Global and Regional Estimates of Violence Against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Violence and Non-Partner Sexual Violence (WHO 2013) 2
¹⁷ International Labour Organisation, Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage (ILO 2022) 9
¹⁸ ibid
¹⁹ Laura J Lederer and Christopher A Wetzel, 'The Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking and Their Implications for Identifying Victims in Healthcare Facilities' (2014) 23(1) Annals of Health Law and Life Sciences 61
²⁰ Cathy Zimmerman and others, 'The Health of Trafficked Women: A Survey of Women Entering Post-Trafficking Services in Europe' (2008) 98(1) American Journal of Public Health 55
Petrina Montrose
Survivor Leader
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petrina-montrose-10bb31148/
June 26