The Research Gaze: Invisibilization, Disability, and Epistemological Violence in Anti-Trafficking Work
Jarrett Davis, MA (he/him) & Wendy Stiver, RN, CCN, BCM, MA (she/her) | September 23 | 1:45-2:45 pm EDT
Topic: Research, Conceptual | Knowledge Level: Advanced
Despite genuine commitments to survivor inclusion, anti-trafficking research shows striking patterns in whose experiences get studied and whose do not. The field has not simply adopted a limited lens it can swap out; it occupies a structural position that shapes what becomes visible and to whom. Males comprise 40% of detected trafficking victims globally. Street-connected children and young people, trans and gender-diverse people, disabled people, and neurodivergent people are present in the harm and largely absent from the research; for neurodivergent populations, no dedicated peer-reviewed research exists at all. These are not isolated gaps. This presentation introduces the research gaze, drawing on Foucault, Fanon, and Mulvey, to examine the structural mechanisms that produce them: how the conceptual collapse of “trafficking” into “sex trafficking of women and girls” shapes what gets funded and studied; how methodological reliance on convenience samples and detection data generates findings that confirm the paradigm producing them; how 72% of publications originate from the Global North while the regions with the highest prevalence contribute the least; how major databases’ failure to record disability, orientation, or neurodiversity makes intersectional experiences structurally uncountable; and how meaning is lost as data passes from collection to analysis to write-up. The presentation opens with an auto-ethnographic reflection grounding this analysis in lived experience, and both presenters return to it at the close. Attendees will work through a self-assessment framework for examining how these mechanisms operate in their own research and practice.
Presentation Objectives:
• Introduce the “research gaze” as an analytical framework for understanding how anti-trafficking knowledge production systematically determines whose experiences count as data, and distinguish it from commonly used metaphors of perspective and lens
• Present empirical evidence of how the gaze produces paradoxical visibility (highly visible as a category, absent as a people) across five populations
• Examine the structural mechanisms (conceptual constriction, methodological dependency, geographic concentration, categorical collapse, and analytical attrition) through which the field’s knowledge architecture filters and interprets survivor experiences
• Equip attendees with a self-assessment framework for identifying how these mechanisms operate in their own research, practice, and organizational contexts—and what genuine reorientation might look like