“No voice or vote:” trauma-coerced attachment in victims of sex trafficking

ABSTRACT

Trauma-coerced attachment (TCA)—often referred to as trauma bonding— has been noted and documented across various abusive contexts. TCA involves a powerful emotional dependency on the abusive partner and a shift in world- and self- view, which can result in feelings of gratitude or loyalty toward the abuser and denial or minimization of the coercion and abuse. The current study investigated TCA in a sex-trafficking context. Former victims of sex trafficking (N = 14) were interviewed for approximately 2–4 h using a semi-structured interview guide. An adaptation of grounded theory was utilized to code the interview transcripts for coercive control tactics, intermittent reward and punishment, and self-reported feelings, responses, and resistance/compliance toward the abuser. Coercive control tactics were present in all 14 narratives; intermittent reward and punishment was present in 10; and TCA emerged in varying severities (i.e., a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, of attachment). In addition to these findings, the current work proposes a systematic framework from which to study TCA, separating the processes involved in the formation of the traumatic attachment (i.e., implementation of coercive control tactics) from the outcomes of those tactics (i.e., dependency and adoption of abuser’s worldview).

KEYWORDS:

• Coercive control
• prostitution
• qualitative
• trafficking
• trauma bond
• trauma-coerced attachment

Notes

¹ Under The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (V-TVPA) of 2000 (P.L. 106–386), sex trafficking is defined as “a commercial sex act induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age” or as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.”

² Trauma-coerced attachment (TCA) is a reconceptualization of the phenomenon from its alternative name (i.e., trauma bond). Raghavan and Doychak (2015) argued that the term “trauma bonding” inadequately portrayed the abuser’s deliberate use of control tactics and suggests that the victim has reliable agency within the relationship dynamic; the word bond can also mislead the reader into thinking that the relationship is marked by authentic emotional connection.

³ Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) involves the core elements of PTSD (i.e., intrusion, hyperarousal, and constriction), but extends to include deficits in affective regulation, self-concept, and interpersonal relationships. These difficulties are organized into five categories: emotion regulation difficulties, disturbances in relational capacities, alterations in attention and consciousness (i.e., dissociation), adversely affected belief systems, and somatic distress or somatization (Herman, 1992, 1992b; Resick et al., 2012). TCA theory attempts to extend and deepen the understanding of a particular and poorly understood traumatic response beyond what is contained in CPTSD with an explicit anchoring to putative causative processes.

⁴ For example, existing structural barriers and/or vulnerabilities may impact the way in which the trafficked person functions in relation to the trafficker. However, as the relationship continues, the control and abuse tactics implemented to induce compliance influence the development of TCA and thus, the relationship can be maintained through the dependency and without structural barriers.

⁵ Panel discussions spanned over the course of 1 year. They included experts in the fields of psychology, social work, and law, as well as professionals in the subfields of coercive control, trafficking, and domestic violence.