“I Created a God That Was Like a Good Parent”: Survivors’ Strategies to Address Spiritual Struggles, Religious Trauma, and Harmful Faith-Based Services to Maintain Resilience During and After Sex Trafficking

Abstract

This study fills a research gap regarding the risks that religion, spirituality, and faith (RSF) pose to resilience in survivors of sex trafficking. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was conducted on data from 44 interviews with 38 survivors of sex trafficking drawn from a larger qualitative study to develop a constructivist grounded theory of resilience during and after trafficking. Twenty-three (58%) identified as Christian, with the remaining participants (n = 15; 42%) identifying with non-mainstream or individualized spiritualities. Participants named religious struggles, spiritual bypassing, exclusionary and oppressive religious beliefs, and injurious behaviors from Christian communities and service providers as sources of harm. The core phenomena of personal agency amidst divine intervention and spiritual power, and the indestructibility of faith and hope, enabled participants to nonetheless benefit from RSF as a source of resilience. Participants’ enumeration of strategies for managing, overcoming, and preventing the harms of RSF notably occurred primarily in the privacy of their personal religious practices, with neither secular nor faith-based service providers being helpful. Their insights and experiences call for service providers and faith actors to be equipped to support survivors’ spiritual strengths and address spiritual trauma and religious struggles, and to advance church culture and traditions for autonomy-affirming spiritual support and care.

1. Introduction

Sex trafficking is the inducement of individuals over the age of 18 by force, fraud, or coercion, and the inducement of individuals under 18 by any means, into commercial sex (United States Department of State 2020). A wide range of risk factors render people vulnerable to trafficking. These include disability, domestic violence, child abuse, substance misuse (Gerassi and Howard 2018), and social inequities such as ableism, sexism, racism, and religious oppression (Egyes 2016; Nichols and Heil 2022). Events that disrupt traditional networks of support, diminish access to resources, or destroy infrastructure such as wars, natural disasters, and migration can also increase vulnerability, particularly for already marginalized groups (Palumbo 2023; McAlpine et al. 2016). Survivors have commonly reported abusive control tactics by traffickers, such as violence, limited access to basic needs such as food and sleep, street drugs, threats to family members, isolation and/or captivity (psychological or literal), and confiscation of legal or identity documents. Coercion to recruit or perpetrate against other victims is another traumatizing control strategy used by some traffickers (Hopper and Hidalgo 2006). After trafficking, stigma and criminal records create barriers to employment, housing, and services (Dalla and Kreimer 2017; Wilson and Butler 2014). Survivors often re-enter the same risk-filled and under-resourced environment that had first engendered vulnerability to trafficking (Gerassi and Nichols 2018). The combination of complex trauma, cumulative adversity, multiple vulnerabilities, and lack of services means that negative physical, mental, social, and financial outcomes are common (Oram et al. 2012).

1.1. Resilience in Survivors of Sex Trafficking

Nonetheless, individuals who have been sex trafficked are much more than just ‘victims’; they demonstrate resilience. Resilience has no standardized definition but generally refers to the ability to attain or sustain wellness during or after adversity (Luthar and Cicchetti 2000). It denies that negative outcomes are categorically the primary or governing result of adversity (Saleebey 1996) and emphasizes human agency over pain, sorrow, disease, abuse, trauma, lack, and other troubles. Survivors have shared experiences such as making quick assessments, constant negotiations, and adjustments to survive or access scarce resources in the face of dramatically limited and high-stakes choices (e.g., Knight et al. 2022; Williams 2010). Many have discussed drawing on a deep inner resolve, core values, and spirituality to preserve their sense of self and purpose and carry them through trafficking situations (e.g., Gianesini 2018, Pertek 2022b). Powerfully displaying how they are more than victims, survivors have also related giving and receiving help from other survivors even under violent and coercive traffickers (Cojocaru 2016; Knight and Waldrop 2025). Post-trafficking, survivors learn new skills and leverage old skills learned during trafficking in preferred ways, engaging in business, advocacy, or other personally meaningful activities (Knight and Yoon 2024; Preble et al. 2023). Survivors have worked to inform research, policies, healthcare, and social services, and to educate the public (Preble et al. 2023; United States Department of State 2020). They have produced visual and performing arts pieces that not only tell their stories from their own perspectives, but critique prevailing trafficking and service narratives (e.g., Lockyer and Koenig 2022; Suarez et al. 2023; Cordisco Tsai 2023). In short, survivors can strategize and create resources to navigate a broad array of inequalities, and structures of power, control, and signification (e.g., Cojocaru 2016; O’Neil 2001, Karandikar et al. 2021; Knight et al. 2023), to help themselves and others.

1.2. The Role of Religion, Faith, and Spirituality in Resilience

Resilience has been studied as a trait or capacity, a process, an outcome, or a combination of these (Luthar and Zelazo 2003; Ungar et al. 2013). Certain commonalities emerge across these broad approaches: the importance of resilience-promoting skills, traits, and internal assets such as self-regulation and persistence (e.g., Liebenberg and Moore 2018; Masten 2014); the importance of resilience-promoting external assets and resources such as culturally appropriate healthcare, education and social services, and a welcoming and supportive community (e.g., Gerassi and Nichols 2018; Panter-Brick et al. 2018); and the differing impact of types, timing, intensity, duration, and dosage of adversity (e.g., Gee 2021; Hsieh et al. 2024; Malhi et al. 2019). As a whole, the research to date shows that resilience is shaped by a dynamic complex of biological, psychological, social, economic, and ecological factors.

Religions, spirituality, and faith (RSF) are factors that can impact resilience in both positive and adverse ways (Pargament et al. 2000). Religion is a system of beliefs and practices observed by a group to acknowledge, worship, or communicate with any form of the divine, sacred, or transcendent truth or reality (Koenig 2008). Spirituality is defined as how “individuals seek and express meaning and purpose and the way they experience their connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred” (Puchalski et al. 2009, p. 887). Religion is one way that spirituality is expressed (Victor and Treschuk 2020). Faith relates to religion, but is more personal and subjective, focusing on a relationship with the divine, and one may prioritize this relationship over participation in the organized forms of the associated religion (Booth 2012). Terms used to describe the impact of RSF on wellbeing include ‘faith resilience’ (Ögtem-Young 2018) and ‘religious coping’ (‘efforts to understand and deal with life stressors in ways related to the sacred’) (Pargament et al. 2011, p. 52). Religious coping can be ‘positive’ (beliefs and practices relating to a trustworthy or benevolent spirituality in ways that decrease distress) or ‘negative’ (beliefs and practices relating to an untrustworthy or ominous spirituality in ways that increase distress) (Pargament et al. 1998); how RSF impacts wellbeing depends on specific coping methods (Pargament et al. 1998).

RSF is multidimensional, with aspects that are spiritually, psychologically, socially, and behaviorally focused (Lefevor et al. 2023). It promotes resilience by offering two broad categories of assets, namely (1) inner strength through values, beliefs, and practices that promote a sense of personal coherence, meaning, significance, positive emotions, and the ability to persist in a preferred direction through ongoing challenges (e.g., Knight et al. 2023) and (2) belonging to a community of like-minded people who provide spiritual and social support and, often, social capital and material support (e.g., Gozdziak and Shandy 2002). For instance, the Tibetan Buddhism practice principle of “do not do all evil, pursue all good, and regulate the nature of the heart” helped youth adherents to develop kindness, compassion, and joy, which increased their resilience via increased happiness and self-acceptance (Wang et al. 2024). Religious communities deepened resilience-enhancing faith values and protective cultural identities for refugees and immigrants, and provided material assistance (e.g., Mitha and Adatia 2016; Valčová and Valčo 2023). Congregations and religious or spiritual online groups foster resilience in sexual and gender minorities facing minority stress via social and spiritual support (Etengoff et al. 2022; Rodriguez et al. 2016).

At the same time, RSF may undermine resilience when it restricts access to internal or external assets, or when it becomes a source of distress or trauma. Religious and spiritual struggles—such as internal conflict, guilt, fear, or perceived abandonment by the divine—have been associated with poorer mental health outcomes in longitudinal research (Bockrath et al. 2022). Interpretations of suffering as divine punishment (e.g., “God is punishing me for my sin”) may intensify shame and inhibit adaptive coping (Brewer-Smyth and Koenig 2014). Prohibitions against particular emotions within some religious traditions can contribute to depression, anxiety, guilt, or compulsive behaviors (Stone 2013), while rigid doctrinal frameworks may constrain cognitive flexibility and creative problem-solving (Stone 2013)—capacities closely associated with resilient adaptation. Community-level expressions of RSF may also impede resilience when they obstruct access to healthcare or education (Jozaghi et al. 2016; Mpofu et al. 2011), or when they function as contexts of interpersonal rejection, prejudice, coercion, or violence (Barka 2006; McKinley 2023). In such cases, RSF may become not a resource but a site of harm.

To clarify analytic distinctions within this complex terrain, we differentiate several related but conceptually distinct constructs. Religious struggle refers to intrapsychic or relational conflict involving one’s beliefs about or relationship with the divine (e.g., anger at God, theological doubt, perceived abandonment) (Stauner et al. 2020). Spiritual bypassing refers to the use of spiritual beliefs or practices to avoid emotional processing, relational repair, or psychological growth (Picciotto and Fox 2018). Religious trauma refers to psychological or emotional injury resulting from harmful teachings, practices, or institutional betrayal within religious contexts (Stone 2013). Harms from faith-based services refer to material, interpersonal, or structural injuries occurring within religiously affiliated service settings. Although these phenomena may overlap in lived experience, distinguishing them analytically enables greater conceptual precision in examining how RSF can both sustain and undermine resilience.

1.3. Religion, Spirituality, and Faith in the Resilience of Survivors of Sex Trafficking

The wider literature provides ample evidence regarding the critical role of religion, faith, and spirituality for resilience during personal and humanitarian crises. These findings are relevant to survivors of sex trafficking, as their lives often intersect with troubles such as intimate partner violence, racism, poverty, forced migration, and gender-based violence. For some survivors living through extreme conditions with no apparent recourse of escape or betterment (e.g., forced migrants under the control of sex traffickers), faith may be the one thing that sustains them psychologically and shows them how to reimagine an alternative future (e.g., believing that God is with them and will help them escape soon) (Pertek 2022a). Nonetheless, research on the role of RSF for resilience during and after sex trafficking itself remains scant (Pertek 2022a; Nguyen et al. 2014).

The existent literature on RSF on survivors’ resilience reflects findings in the broader literature. Trafficking survivors (n = 158) in Christian faith-based residential programs frequently cited the spiritual community belonging, forgiveness, spiritual identity formation, and renewed spirituality afforded by these programs as key contributors to their healing (Allert 2025). These findings are echoed in Hodge’s (2020) study where 76% of the male survivors (n = 16) trafficked into the USA reported they coped with the aftermath of trafficking through faith and spirituality. Pertek’s (2022b) study on the relationship between resilience, gender-based violence, and RSF in Muslim (n = 4) and Christian (n = 11) forced migrants from Turkey and Tunisia, eight of whom were also trafficking victims, found that the women cited prayers and direct relationships with God, more than any other resource, as helping them to survive unspeakable hardships and finally escape. In a 2021 study, survivors in seven of the 18 reviewed studies indicated that RSF was an important aspect of their resilience, as it facilitated self-forgiveness, meaning-making, trauma healing, positive emotions, emotional comfort, purpose, and belonging to a community providing spiritual, social, and material resources. These benefits applied across a range of situations, including sex trafficking as part of international forced migration (Gianesini 2018), adult domestic sex trafficking in the USA and Indonesia (Borualogo 2018; Herdiana et al. 2019; Hickle 2017), and domestic minor sex trafficking in the USA (O’Brien 2018).

Notably, in terms of trafficking survivors’ own relationship with the divine, research on how religious struggles might impact resilience is especially scant. Pertek’s (2022a) exploration of faith resilience pathways in Muslim and Christian women survivors of forced migration and sex trafficking serves as one example. She noted that spiritual struggles adversely affected the mental health of some of the women she talked to, and that “despite tenacious faith, many were left with unresolved feelings, sometimes of guilt (over their faith struggles), abandonment (by God), and questioning God” (p. 210). She observes that the lack of support for these religious needs generated emotional and spiritual suffering not accounted for by service providers. Pertek (2022a) thus emphasized the need for service providers to be aware of the importance of RSF to survivors’ wellbeing, facilitate spiritual care, and meet survivors’ spiritual and religious needs, including the need to resolve or find closure for these spiritual struggles.

The majority of the literature discussing religion as a risk focuses on the broader harms of religiously motivated anti-trafficking discourses (e.g., Campbell and Zimmerman 2017) and religiously motivated social services (e.g., Knight et al. 2023). Dominant counter-trafficking paradigms propagated to a great part by Christian counter-traffickers perpetuate melodramatic heteropatriarchal narratives of victimhood, freedom, and rescue (e.g., Barrows 2017; Bernstein 2018). These starkly fail to reflect the complexity of violence and exploitation that survivors must navigate, as well as the strengths and resources survivors use to navigate these circumstances (Campbell and Zimmerman 2014; Knight and Waldrop 2025). The covert stigma and inappropriate services informed by such reductive narratives constitutes more adversity for survivors (Cojocaru 2016; Preble et al. 2023; Suchland 2013). Concerns about faith-based services include proselytization (Allert 2025; Twis and Praetorius 2021), discrimination against survivors from gender and sexual minorities, and religious trauma (Ahrens et al. 2010; Hodge 2020). Arguments have been made that religious anti-trafficking services take public funding that would otherwise have been granted to more competent secular ones (Graw Leary 2018). As trauma-informed, competent, non-discriminatory services promote survivors’ resilience and the converse services hinder resilience (Knight and Waldrop 2025), these issues indeed deserve much critical attention due to the heavy involvement of religious (primarily Christian) organizations in anti-trafficking work.

Even more scant is the research on the darkest sides of RSF with regard to sex trafficking—RSF as a motivator and facilitator of trafficking. Examples include child marriages for religious reasons (e.g., Itebiye 2016; Le Roux and Palm 2018) and trafficking for ritual sex where perpetrators believe that such sex brings benefits such as spiritual power and/or physical vitality or healing (e.g., Meel 2003; Sarson and MacDonald 2008). RSF as protection for traffickers include the use of oaths and rituals based on African traditional religious beliefs by traffickers to ensure victims’ immediate and long-term compliance and non-disclosure to authorities (Chisholm et al. 2024; Ikeora 2016). Survivors of sex trafficking as part of ritual abuse in ‘Western, developed’ contexts such as the U.S.A., U.K., and Australia have disclosed similar oaths and spiritual tactics of control used by their abuser networks (e.g., Schröder et al. 2020). The occult belief systems in ritual abuse are often syncretic, featuring elements of Satanism, paganism, Christianity, and so on, with different abuser networks using different interpretations of these elements to intimidate and silence victims (Salter 2012). Skepticism regarding the existence of ritual abuse also provides an additional layer of protection to traffickers, as victims may be concerned about being accused of false memory syndrome, confabulation, malingering, or delusional disorders, and law enforcement may not be versed in investigating the ritual aspects of crime (Noblitt and Noblitt 2014; Salter 2019). Religious leaders, such as imams and pastors involved in trafficking, have been protected by their respective institutions (Cherti et al. 2011; Simpson 2025). The status afforded by their roles as religious leaders have also made it difficult for victims to disclose or be heard. While these studies do not explicitly discuss how the malignant trafficking-related applications of RSF affects survivors’ resilience, it stands to reason that the institutional and social betrayals and the resulting spiritual or religious struggles, stigma, and other negative outcomes could have a negative impact.

1.4. Addressing Gaps in Research on RSF in the Resilience of Survivors of Sex Trafficking

The majority of the literature reflects positive religious coping and how RSF promoted survivors’ resilience. Thus, there remains a need to explore RSF struggles and other ways that RSF may pose risks to resilience. We seek to begin addressing this gap through data extracted from a larger survivor-led, community-engaged qualitative study to develop a critical constructivist grounded theory of survivors’ resilience during and after sex trafficking. The theory was developed through open-ended, in-depth interviews with survivors where they defined resilience and shared their experiences and explanations of resilience (see Knight and Waldrop 2025 for a full description of study methodology and the grounded theory). Many participants (n = 38; 88%) spontaneously described faith, religion, or spirituality as the very cornerstone of their resilience, as major sources of damage to their resilience, or as having both positive and negative impacts on their resilience. These accounts of RSF, thus, are naturally set within their own understandings and narratives of resilience, providing vital information on the RSF-related behaviors, emotions, relationships, and cognitions (Pargament et al. 2011) involved in their resilience, as well as how these change with time, context, and circumstances. In other words, the goal of this study was to obtain a contextual and multidimensional understanding of how RSF impacts resilience during and after sex trafficking that is embedded in and informed by survivors’ own conceptualizations of resilience and their own critical views of society.

2. Methods and Materials

2.1. Participants

We provide information on all study participants (n = 44) from the larger study instead of being specific to the 38 individuals in this study, as we did not keep records of which set of information belonged to which participant to maximize privacy. Recruitment was conducted through email flyers sent to the mailing lists of trafficking research and advocacy groups. Participants were English-speaking, above 18 years old, located in the USA, had exited trafficking, did not perceive risk of harm for participation, and had support if participation caused distress. They had an average age of 42 years (range: 21 years to 76 years) and an average duration of trafficking of 10 years (Range: 2 months–30 years) that had started at an average age of 13 years (Range: 0–40 years). The average time after trafficking was 12 years (Range: 1–37 years).

Table 1. Participants’ demographics.

Race and Ethnicity	N	Gender	N	Sexuality	N
Multiracial Hispanic Asian Black White	3 (6.8%) 3 (6.8%) 3 (6.8%) 6 (13.6%) 29 (65.9%)	Nonbinary Male Female	2 (4.5%) 5 (11.4%) 37 (84.0%)	Bi Gay Lesbian Straight	2 (4.5%) 2 (4.5%) 6 (13.6%) 34 (77.3%)

and

Table 2. Participants’ current job- and education-related details.

Jobs	N	Education	N
Fulltime anti-trafficking advocate Social worker Leader of own antitrafficking nonprofit Self-employed (not antitrafficking nonprofit) Clergy Software engineer Nurse Psychologist Teacher Accountant Real estate agent	10 (23.0%) 6 (13.6%) 5 (11.4%) 5 (11.4%) 3 (6.8%) 3 (6.8%) 2 (4.5%) 1 (2.3%) 1 (2.3%) 1 (2.3%) 1 (2.3%)	Doctoral student Master’s student Undergraduate student GED Vocational training (e.g., studying to be a beauty technician)	4 (9.0%) 3 (6.8%) 2 (4.5%) 2 (4.5%) 2 (4.5%)

summarizes participants’ demographic and employment details respectively. Several participants held more than one job or were working while being a student or trainee. Four (9.0%) were unemployed and two retired (4.5%). The sharing of these details was optional.

2.2. Data Collection and Analysis

2.2.1. Data Collection

In the original study, interviews included open-ended questions such as, “What does the word ‘resilience’ mean to you?” and “What makes it easier for you to be resilient?” and functioned as starting points for dialogue. As the study progressed, interviews focused on discussing (1) participants’ resilience-related insights, resources, and strategies from across earlier interviews, (2) the developing grounded theory, (3) the questions we had regarding its development, in order to maximize the input of many survivors in knowledge production. Sixty-five of the 77 interviews were transcribed according to participant consent and anonymized. Author 3 excerpted portions with any mention of faith, religion, or spirituality, covering participants’ intrapersonal experiences of RSF, reflections and views on RSF, and experiences with religious people or communities and faith-based services. The dataset was extracted from 46 interviews (71%) with 38 participants (88%) and comprised 146 pages.

2.2.2. Positionality of Data Analysts

Like the participants in this study, Author 3 and I are survivors of sex trafficking, and Author 2 is a survivor of violent crime. Faith, spirituality, and religion (FSR) have been significant to each of our resilience processes. Author 3 and I identify as Christian, while Author 2 identifies as spiritual. All three of us intentionally engage in positive religious, spiritual, and faith-based coping as part of our daily lives and have navigated personal journeys of religious struggle, including harms associated with organized religions (Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, and Jainism), such as the use of FSR to justify gender-based violence and control. Drawing on our collective experience in faith-based anti-trafficking and violence-response work, we view organized Christianity and Christian faith communities as potential sources of both substantial support and harm for survivors. We share foundational commitments to the inherent value of all human beings and to social justice as both a practice and an outcome. Accordingly, our analysis is guided by a commitment to generating knowledge that supports service providers, faith communities, and other allies in centering survivors’ own wisdom, preferences, and pathways to resilience. Our analytical partnership is further shaped by generational differences and diverse racial, national, educational, and social backgrounds. As women born, raised, and immigrated across different regions (the United States, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), we bring distinct perspectives on faith, spirituality, and related phenomena, informed by culturally specific FSR practices and our individual responses to them.

2.2.3. Data Analysis

Data analysis was guided by the phenomenological question of ‘What is the meaning, structure and essence of the lived experience of this phenomenon for this person or group of people?’ (Patton 2015, p. 115). More specifically, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used for an investigation of survivors’ lived experiences with regard to RSF and resilience that acknowledges both participants’ own meaning-making and the researchers’ attempts to understand that meaning through an inherent interpretive lens (Cohen et al. 2000; Smith and Osborn 2015).

All authors read the RSF dataset and made memos that reflected on our emotional and intellectual responses, similarities, and distinctions between participants’ experiences and our own and between different participants and connections to larger social and RSF discourses and to the current literature. I (the first author) used in vivo and descriptive coding iteratively twice to ground the analysis in the participants’ own interpretations of RSF in their resilience. I collated and condensed the list and, following this, organized codes into broader categories and created potential themes by postulating relationships between these categories (Miles and Huberman 1994). Then, I reviewed the potential themes and codes with quotes to identify the essence or core phenomena.

The code list with exemplars, and the themes and phenomena with exemplar quotes, were discussed with Author 2 and Author 3 until we reached a consensus. We discussed our original memos and reflexivity notes and the ones I had made during analysis and made new ones to clarify and access how our own related lived experience and standing personal, theoretical, and epistemological commitments were shaping our analysis (Braun and Clarke 2021; van Manen 1990). For instance, given our own commitments to faith and experiences of religious resilience, we were attentive to the possibility of privileging redemptive interpretations of religious struggle. To mitigate this risk, as a team, we examined my coding and thematic development to see if accounts of harm, disillusionment, rupture, and rejection of religion were being overlooked or paid less attention to than accounts of positive experiences with RSF or religious institutions. The themes were then reviewed with respect to the grounded theory of resilience developed in the original study. No further revisions were needed. Finally, we revised the wording of each theme for clarity and brevity. Coding was done by hand. The ongoing reflexive dialogue enabled us to distinguish participants’ interpretations from our own theological commitments and to remain accountable to the complexity of survivors’ narratives.

3. Results

In this section, we describe the broad types of RSF that participants identified and provide a brief note on its salience, followed by the themes regarding participants’ insights and experiences of risk and harm of RSF. We also provide counts for several patterns, not to quantify qualitative data but to give concrete demonstrations of the diversity of experiences and viewpoints, i.e., to illustrate variation rather than to quantify prevalence.

3.1. Participants’ Identified Religions, Spiritualities, and Faiths

We identified participants’ RSF through their stories and comments regarding RSF in their interviews. Participants’ identified RSFs reflect three broad categories: known religions; personalized spiritualities involving external spiritual resources; and personalized spiritualities that connected them with spiritual resources deep within themselves. The majority identified as Christian (n = 23; 58%). One identified as pagan (2.5%) and another as relying on Mother Earth (2.5%). Several participants referenced an outward-facing RSF that involved an external divine, sacred, spiritual, or transcendent source of strength, love, wisdom, and protection that was apart from a specific religion—God (n = 4; 10%); a higher power (n = 3; 7.5%); spirituality (n = 2; 5%); the universe (n = 1; 2.5%); something bigger than yourself (n = 1; 2.5%); the power that created us (n = 1; 2.5%); and paradise (n = 1; 2.5%). Others emphasized a transcendent source from within: a higher self (n = 1; 2.5%), an infinite energy within or source energy (n = 1; 2.5%), an inner wisdom that sits inside your cells. (n = 1; 2.5%), and LSD-facilitated transcendence (n = 1; 2.5%). None of the participants described an RSF that syncretized two or more of these major categories. One participant (2.5%) did not explicitly identify with any form of RSF but acknowledged it as a resilience factor.

3.2. The Salience of Religion, Faith, and Spirituality in Participants’ Resilience

RSF’s salience in participants’ resilience was displayed vibrantly through intensity, where they took very strong stances on matters of faith, as indexed by intense emotions and illustrated by vivid stories. This held true, whether they were referring to traditional organized religions or to more individual or unique expressions of spirituality. Zoe, a survivor of decades of sex trafficking since infancy to sadistic abusers, for instance, attributed her survival and resilience to a ‘presence’ she had first met as a toddler left alone for days with the body of her murdered caregiver. She shared several stories about the presence, including,

I did have a therapist one time who was with me. It was the craziest thing. She doesn’t believe in God, she doesn’t believe in anything. But I was at a really crucial point in my journey, and that presence filled the room. She was in tears, and I was in tears, and we just existed in that place of knowing we were both loved by that presence. Then the appointment ended, and she didn’t have to do anything, she didn’t have to control anything. It was like it was okay just to for us to both be together and not have to have the answers.

The depth of emotion experienced in the encounter and its retelling, and the profound reality of the presence such that even a ‘non-believer’ experienced not just love but also transcendence of her duty to be the one helping the client, is just one example of the many in the dataset showing how real and how vital RSF is to participants.

3.3. Themes

We developed two simple topical themes: (1) the benefits and blessings and (2) the risks and harms. Two essential phenomena unify participants’ diverse views and experiences: (1) the ultimate place of personal agency amidst divine intervention or spiritual power and (2) the indestructible nature of faith and hope. In response to the research gap, we focus on the second theme and phenomenon while providing a summary of the first theme and phenomena for context.

3.3.1. Theme 1: The Benefits and Blessings

The benefits and blessings of RSF constituted a wide range of resilience-promoting skills, beliefs, experiences, and resources, including love, joy, peace, self-forgiveness, clarity of purpose, re-narration of trauma, restored relationships, safe housing, job opportunities, and many more. Two distinct ways of relating to the divine or spiritual were described: (1) human beings as limited and thus in need of generous divine help and (2) human beings as limitless and only needing faith to activate the superlative power within them, or to flow with the superlative power surrounding them. Despite their seeming differences, both ways were founded on same need for connecting to something ‘bigger’ or ‘higher’ than one’s ordinary self. Participants explained that this connection was invaluable because it brought about miracles and because God or spiritual sources were always available. The ultimate place of participants’ personal agency was evidenced in how receiving miracles and accessing God’s presence or spiritual resources depended on their faith and their alignment with their life’s purpose and with religious or spiritual values. While RSF was uniquely available and miraculous, most participants unequivocally stated that it alone was insufficient; other resources and practices such as therapy, recreation, human relationships, good nutrition, exercise, and safe shelter were necessary as well.

3.3.2. Theme 2: Risks and Harms of RSF

Participants problematized their experiences of risks and harms from RSF in three ways: (1) religious struggle, (2) risks and harms from the participant’s personal religious practices and beliefs, and (3) risks and harms from other people’s religious practices and beliefs. These risks and harms were embedded in the essential phenomenon of the indestructible nature of faith and hope, an indestructability that sprang from two sources: (1) its inherent, mysterious indestructibility and (2) the strategies individuals used to address the risks and harms.

3.3.2.1. An Essential Phenomenon: The Indestructible Nature of Faith and Hope 

Woven through participants’ accounts of RSF was the indestructible nature of faith and hope; i.e., faith and hope could not be destroyed by pain, doubt, despair, betrayal, disappointment, shame, trauma, oppression, or the bad behaviors of religious individuals and communities. Several participants, for example, described possessing an inherently invulnerable faith, either in something larger than themselves or in something deep within themselves. This meant that the participants could continue to receive the benefits of RSF no matter the circumstances. Yselt’s experience of comfort and hope exemplifies this aspect of resilience.

I always remembered when I was locked in the closet, or locked in a room or being beaten, the only thing I could do was talk to God, and I knew that one day he was gonna take that big, long arm of His, and pull me up out…That was the only thing I had close to me, the only thing I had that was comforting to me when I prayed or talked to God.

Participants described their faith and hope as ultimately enduring despite profound injury. We use the term “indestructible” phenomenologically to reflect participants’ retrospective narration of durability. This term does not imply inevitability or diminish survivor agency; rather, it highlights how participants actively wrestled with, revised, and reconstructed their faith over time. Furthermore, for some participants, such faith emerged spontaneously under duress and led to extraordinary strength in the face of extreme adversity. Lynnette, as an example, recalled telling her father, who was her trafficker, when threatened with being kicked out of their home as a child,

“Oh, it’s okay. Mother Earth will take care of me.” He got confused. I’m like, “Yeah, of course. My earth will provide me with food from wherever it has to.” I was so little and I had no understanding of what am I trying to say that time. Then he did kick me out of the house, and he thought that I’ll come back after two days. I did not. I was sleeping on the streets, on bus stands, but I was like, “No, I’m not going to do what you’re telling me to do. I’ve had enough. I can’t do this anymore.”

Her faith in a benevolent spiritual source gave her the strength to defy her trafficker, risk abandonment, and to be resourceful and survive on the streets. This meant that she was able to be true to her soul’s viewpoint that she was not dependent on her father for care, and to resist his coercion. Several participants also shared stories about how RSF gave them the power to remain kind in situations during and after trafficking where such kindness brought little reward. Tim, for instance, described connecting with a transcendent power deep inside as a young boy in the hands of vicious men and women,

When you’re pushed to a point where you have no one to turn to and you’re literally facing death. You don’t know what you’re going experience on a daily basis. You don’t know when the person is coming back, and when they do what’s going to happen, where you’re going to go to. And so, when you’re in that state of having nothing around you—I was in a cage tied up—what do you do? Well, you look within… I was forced at a very young age to look within, and that’s where all the answers are, all the questions we have in life are within us. We come from the place where the answers are delivered.

Their abuse could not disconnect him from the power that gave him the strength to enact the only resistance available to him with traffickers and clients who used cages, shock collars, and other brutal methods of control: moral resistance manifested as altruism towards another victim.

I had to go within and I felt almost this transcendent type experience where I became resilient in the sense that on one particular occasion, I remember being at a woman’s house, and she had a young boy there. I was young, but he was probably a few years younger than me, two or three years younger…she was hitting him …I didn’t want to see someone that was younger than me especially get hurt. It would hurt me to see this person hurt. So, I told the woman, “Do it to me instead. Don’t do it to him”.

In other words, participants described their enduring faith and hope as empowering them to enact altruism, authenticity, resistance of evil, and other preferred virtues or values even under the harshest conditions. This is noteworthy because in the grounded theory of resilience developed in our previous study, altruism and other modes of moral resistance, such as striving to remain one’s authentic self and to refuse to do wrong, were prime indicators as well as engines of survivors’ resilience.

3.3.2.2. Religious Struggles 

Nonetheless, while several participants did indeed describe a remarkably robust faith and hope, the majority indicated that their faith and hope could be wounded. Many participants described religious struggle, i.e., times when their RSF became a source of pain and confusion due to an incongruence between their expectations or views of a benevolent and powerful God and the abuse or disappointments they were facing. Brenda’s quote illustrates how such incongruence creates religious struggle,

I lost my children. I lost a child, but then it got even worse. I also got pregnant again during that extreme trafficking situation. And the courts did the same thing. I tried to put my child up for adoption at that point, and I also pleaded to get out of my situation, and they didn’t even want to help me out. But I did find a way out, but then they came against me again, and were pointing out all these terrible things, trying to terminate my rights, and then they gave the child to the perpetrator again. It was during that whole time, from the time I knew I was pregnant, and I was being beaten and raped repeatedly, and drugs… it was just so much… I was just angry. I’ve always been a believer or wanted to believe in God, but I was angry because I’m like, “If there’s a God, why is this stuff happening?”

In general, the traumas inflicted by traffickers, buyers, and abusive family members and institutions, and the disappointments faced when trying to survive or leave trafficking, led to questions regarding God’s existence and his benevolence. Laura, for example, asked similarly to Brenda, “I don’t believe in God anymore because why would this happen to me? This isn’t what God would want. If God is real, why is this happening to me? Why am I going through this pain?” Wendy’s blunt statement to God after numerous disappointments and setbacks when trying to get sober and stay out of the life, “You just hate me because all this keeps happening to me, and I keep trying”, is a clear example of questioning God’s benevolence. Xan, sex trafficked as a very young child, concluded, “Even God doesn’t love me,” because she would wake up every day despite having asked God to take her during the night.

Notably, all participants who attributed a portion of their religious struggles to the injurious behaviors and cultures of religious systems or individuals noted that their personal RSF was harmed because those systems or individuals represented God; i.e., mistreatment by religious people, especially religious leaders, felt like mistreatment by God. Yvette observed, for instance, after sharing how destructive religious patriarchy and racism would have been for her if she had submitted to it, “The message in the world was hard enough. I didn’t need that same hateful, hard message from the church, from God. But I didn’t know how to separate the two either back then. To me, the church was a representation of God”.

3.3.2.3. Strategies for Overcoming Religious Struggles 

Some of the most poignant examples of profoundly injured yet robust faith and hope were given by Zoe, Diane, and Fiona. As adults, they had been trafficked by pastors when seeking safety and support for prior experiences of sex trafficking. Zoe had also been trafficked by pastors since very early childhood. They described these betrayals as spiritually and emotionally shattering. Zoe, for instance, shared she felt “…that connection to God and that connection to goodness snapped. It just did something to my heart, and I knew it was almost like that hope snapped.” In addition to despair and rage at God, the catastrophic spiritual fallout included feeling “tricked by God” and “the whole universe and God conspiring against me’ (Zoe); abandoned by God, and extremely shamed and humiliated (Diane); and hating God, and hated by God and unworthy (Fiona).

All three women, however, narrated persistence in resisting disconnection with God where they poured out their pain and questions to him. This was ubiquitous across the dataset, i.e., participants’ primary strategy for addressing religious or spiritual struggles was raw conversations and confrontations with their divine source. The outcomes over time were cognitive reappraisals or revised narratives that brought an acceptable degree of resolution to the struggles. Typically, the resolutions were organized around three concepts: (1) God was present and caring throughout the calamity; (2) It was not God’s nor the participant’s fault; and (3) God would bring good out of the pain endured. For instance, Diane confronted God with the questions “Where are you?” and “Why did you allow it?” Over many confrontations, she found peace through an inexplicable faith that he was there all along and was the one who enabled her to escape, that he had never wanted her to suffer, and that he would work it all out for good.

Participants usually narrated the resolutions to their religious or spiritual struggles with strong experiential evidence of God’s goodness. Fiona, for example, asked questions that were similar to Diane’s, and attributed her escape from her increasingly violent and dangerous pastor-trafficker and subsequent healing to continued prayers. For Zoe, God restored not only her trust in him but also a fundamental developmental trust,

I got to this place where I just poured out my anger towards God… and I felt like God was inviting me to trust him really for the first time… I said, God, you have five minutes of me trusting you because that’s all I have…” So, I gave him five minutes. Within an hour I was out of that house, never had to go back, and I have not been assaulted since physically, and it’s been five years. So, what I understand happened in that moment…I had never learned trust versus mistrust, and I needed that first attachment and bonding before I could progress in anything, before I could heal…More than safety, I needed to learn trust. So, God orchestrated a circumstance, and the moment he got that trust, I felt like I was pulled out of there and then my real healing began.

Zoe’s account of how five minutes of ‘experimental’ trust with God ended a 13-year desperate cycle of re-trafficking, and the preferred changes described by Fiona and Diane illustrate participants’ views of the transformative power of genuine trust and blessings accrued through engaging with God over hard questions about his care.

The second common strategy addressing religious or spiritual struggles leading to robust faith or spirituality was acceptance of the questions and pain that were still unresolved; i.e., participants accepted carrying both faith and hurt as part of life in a broken world and did not view religious struggle as being inimical to their positions as religious or spiritual individuals. Stacey’s description of her deep relationship with God that was still intertwined with pain is a clear example of carrying this tension.

I had experienced a lot of spiritual trauma within my trafficking. There was a lot of ways that faith had been used in traumatic ways, even at the safe house, because the safe house said, “We’ll kick you out if you don’t go to church with us.” Not only did my biological family use faith in hurtful ways, but then the safe house began to (as well). Faith has also had a lot of healing elements to it. There has been a level of resilience that has come through spirituality in my relationship with God… I would define myself as being a religious person and having a deep relationship with my God. I would say that it’s powerful, and it’s been so healing for me. It’s also just because it has had so many layers of trauma attached to it. It’s still something that I’m trying to understand.

Cognitions that contributed to participants’ capacity to live with unresolved spiritual struggles typically included at least one of the following: (1) their understanding of their life circumstances and the world is limited in comparison to God’s, so it is reasonable if they still do not understand; (2) human beings have the free will to hurt other people, so bad things are not God’s fault but rather other people’s; (3) God permits or orchestrates hardships to create opportunities for something much better, so he is not uncaring or malicious, and there is hope; and (4) healing takes time and God understands, so there is no shame over the religious struggle. These cognitions, in combination with the benefits from RSF, were sufficient to maintain faith and hope.

Only two participants noted that their religious leaders had been helpful with their religious struggles. Similarly, few participants had secular therapists (n = 2) or faith-based counselors (n = 2) that were helpful. Others related stories of harm from religious leaders, faith-based counselors, or faith communities. Two attributed meeting genuine Christians to their ability to return to God. Undine, for instance, shared that without meeting several genuinely kind, joyful, and nonjudgmental Christian girls when she was a college student, she would have “shut out the idea (of God) forever.” The vast majority of participants, however, confronted God or otherwise addressed their religious struggles in the privacy of their personal relationship with God.

3.3.2.4. The Outcome of Religious Struggle: A Stronger Faith, Deeper Spirituality, and Greater Resilience 

For participants who continued to identify with religion or spirituality, past or ongoing religious struggles were described as resulting in a strengthened or transformed faith; temporary loss of RSF as a resilience resource was experienced not as permanent abandonment but as part of an evolving process of reconstruction. Such durability of faith and hope applied whether participants chose the same organized religion that had a role in precipitating their religious struggles, a different denomination or interpretation of that religion, or a new RSF. Laura, for instance, who had shared about her loss of faith in all forms of RSF, is the same person who stated emphatically, after concluding a description of how she found her way back to God (Christianity), “There’s still obstacles along the way, but my actual faith just skyrocketed from there” and “For me, I truly feel like it’s a miracle that I’m here today, and I don’t think that I would be here if it wasn’t for Jesus.”

Furthermore, a stronger faith and deeper spirituality translated into greater strength and resilience for life. Valerie gave one of the many examples of this in her narrative,

I was like, “God, why did this to happen to me? I don’t understand. Why did you allow this to happen to me? If you love me so much, why did you allow this to happen to me? …Then He, afterwards gave me the revelation of why things happen to people like that, and the reason that those specific things happened to me and all these other things. I was able to be like, “Okay”. And knowing that he was with me every step of the way, and that he protected me from so many things and just looking at it and being like, “Okay, if I’ve been through that I can do anything. I can do anything.

As a parallel account from an individualized humanistic spirituality, Felix, who was struggling deeply with depression, and cut off from his inner strength, related the following experience and subsequent transformation after six hours of LSD-facilitated meditation,

I had a moment where I suddenly realized that there has never been anything fundamentally wrong with me for my entire life…That I had complete control to make decisions from that point forward… I also stopped doing drugs after that, and I never did it again because I realized I’d found what I needed, which was less shame… I have not had a single major depressive episode ever since.

3.3.2.5. Risks and Harms from RSF 

Even as participants identified as deeply spiritual or religious individuals, they highlighted the risks and harms of RSF. Their narratives and reflections pointed at three main types: (1) spiritual bypassing, (2) risks and harms inherent to religion, and (3) risks and harms from members of organized religion.

Spiritual Bypassing

Three participants pointed out that RSF causes harm when individuals use it to ‘bypass’ the acquisition of critical life skills or avoid attending to difficult emotions or trauma. Carrie, for instance, acknowledged that having God as an attachment figure was a “really protective factor” while observing that it could result in diminished opportunity for developing essential social skills,

It almost can keep people stuck because that attachment figure that isn’t a physical being right in front of you. There’s a really important piece of relationship that doesn’t exist with a God, with a church: that is that that person can have a bad day and still come back to you. That person can be sick and not return your phone call and still care about you. That you can get angry at them, and you can have an argument and a disagreement, and you can work through it and be okay. It is still really one-sided. It’s not a multi-faceted relationship. It can make someone feel good and feel connected and find worth and hope, and all of those things. But it’s not actually going to teach how to maintain and create those coping skills for managing relationships and everyday life.

Xan and Janice also shared various ways that religious values such as forgiveness and service can become avoidance strategies. Xan for example, shared that she is careful to check that religious clients who want to forgive are not “jumping to forgiveness” motivated by an underlying belief, “Oh, if I go to forgiveness, then I don’t have to do all this middle work (to process my emotions).” Janice similarly shared that when survivors who are not healed “jump out to start a ministry”, it is “medicating”, “keeping you (the survivor) from feeling all those intense emotions”.

Carrie, Xan, and Janice raised notable concerns, as inner healing, emotional regulation, emotional self-awareness, and the capacity for maintaining healthy social connections are all vital components of resilience; anything that hinders survivors’ acquisition or growth in these areas could impact resilience and broader wellbeing. As mental health professionals, they were able to share stories of how spiritual bypassing resulted in significant emotional and material harm to survivors. As Janice put it, “It’s horrible. It’s so toxic.” They also observed that spiritual bypassing was a particularly insidious risk because its manifestations (forgiveness, service, one’s relationship with God being first in everything, etc.) mimicked valued discourses and practices in survivors’ respective faith communities. The affirmation that survivors receive from their faith communities impede its identification and reinforce these unhealthy mindsets and behaviors.

Risks and Harms Inherent to RSF

A few participants described risks and harms inherent to RSF. Two problematized all forms of traditional organized religion as inherently harmful due to their exclusionary or restrictive teachings and worldviews. Tim, for instance, stated, “I think that religion divides people. I believe that if everyone has a god, and there’s only one God, well, how do you pick, right?” and Patricia observed that different religions have fragmented the understanding of a singular divine being to everyone’s loss and harm, stating, “All religions lie to you in one way or another, because mankind took a piece of it (that one God), and decided they wanted to go and do this and that.”

Both Tim and Patricia emphasize “love and peace and acceptance and equity” (Tim) as the solution to religion’s divisive aspects, exemplifying this through accounts of how they drew spiritual resources from a spread of different religions and created their unique and syncretic personal spiritual practices. Also illustrating how exclusionary practices of faith can justify and motivate harm, two participants who disclosed a history of sex trafficking in the context of familial satanic ritual abuse had shared about how they were attacked by their respective groups for wanting to subscribe to a different religion (Christianity). They were coerced through literal torture and threats to family members into recanting Christianity and avowing lifelong loyalty to their group’s practice and interpretation of satanism.

Besides division or exclusion, restricted views of what it means to practice religion or spirituality can create misapprehensions or medicalization of survivors’ RSF. Tim, for instance, realized that if he fully shared how he was finding hope through connecting with ‘the power that created us all’, he risked being labelled as schizophrenic or having a psychotic episode when he was undergoing inpatient care for mental health issues. Other survivors similarly mentioned refraining from sharing the breadth and depth of how RSF contributed to their wellbeing with healthcare or mental health providers in-outpatient settings for fear of being misunderstood.

Risks and Harm from Members of Organized Religion

The accounts of harm from others were attributed to religious people identifying as Christian. The majority of the participants (18 out of 22; 81%) who recounted harm from Christians or Christian religious worldviews themselves identified as Christians. Harm was sustained in these contexts: abusive familial relationships, informal interpersonal interactions with Christians, service interactions with Christian faith-based providers, and church culture. Participants described several conditions under which these interactions injured them. These include when Christians are (1) hypocritical or self-serving; (2) patriarchal, sexist, and/or racist; (3) judgmental, presumptuous, or ignorant about trauma and trafficking; (4) coercive or controlling; and (5) setting conditions for services. The following quotes illustrate the latter four conditions in the participants’ own words.

Patriarchy, Sexism, and/or Racism

I grew up in Christian traditions that were patriarchal, and that were misogynistic, and they told women to stand down, they told women to be quiet. This particular God was white, and Jesus was white, and the angels were white. Everybody was white, and I was woman, and I was a black woman, and I was an unholy woman…Here I am living in the United States as a black woman, a poor woman, a prostitute, one of the lowest substrate of our society…Then when I went to churches and they told me that I need to submit to men, and I need to keep my mouth closed, well, I was already disempowered in real life. Then the church is telling me that I am disempowered, and you can’t do both ‘cause you’ll kill me.

—Yvette

Judgmentalism or Presumption

I would talk about wanting to go back, and they’d be, “Oh, why would you want that?” “That’s your abusers.” They don’t realize that was the people I loved. They didn’t get it. So maybe give a little grace that sometimes people miss the people they loved. I don’t care if they were evil, awful or terrible according to the Christian worldview, you’re gonna miss them when you first decide to step away. Even if it was messed up it was still a relationship. So, for me to talk about the guy I was with and to be met with horror made me feel I couldn’t really talk about him…So I had to decide to heal that grief on my own and then not talk about it much. It was almost like my missing him made me evil was the feeling I got…They made it sound like I was missing crack or something. It’s not that, but this is the only love I’d had… Yeah, if you miss the only person who’s told you they love you, how are you gonna get through it if you’re being judged (for that)?

—Anna

Coercion or Control

In a trafficking situation you’re controlled and then back then especially, you’re criminalized, right? And you’re controlled in that criminalized situation, too. Right? I don’t know how I’m sure you’ve talked to other people, but going to jail? I mean that’s just the same thing, when to get up, when to eat, what to eat, where to go, what to say, what not to say, how to behave… Your life is just all about somebody else making choices for you and regulating what you do. Even there was one time that I did call one of those numbers, and I went into some Christian house I didn’t stay there because it was so regimented. Here’s the house rules, and this is the time you get up, and then we’re going to go to prayer, and then we’re going to eat this, and then we’re going to do that, and you can’t smoke, and you can’t wear these clothes, and you can’t talk a certain way, and you can’t listen to music that’s not Christian. You’ve gotta follow all these rules, well, and I was like, “Hell no, I’m out of here”. I was out of there so fast because it’s like I’m going to go from one rule’s house to another rule’s house. It was crazy.

—Quest

Conditions for Services

A lot of organizations that like to help sex trafficking victims, they oftentimes have savior complexes. When they come from religious-based organizations where they believe that they have an appointment from God to tell people what they need to be better… I think that that’s a huge issue because homosexual, queer identified, non-binary, transgendered individuals, they’re often outright rejected from having places to stay. They’re required to receive services, they may have to listen to or take part in faith-based activities which, in many cases, can retraumatize individuals… I’m a huge fan of faith-based support, but oftentimes it comes with a lot of strings, and it is entirely inaccessible to queer people, or even if they are allowed to be present, they still have to defy a lot of aspects of themselves…They had to give up a core part of their identity and their soul in exchange for food and shelter, which is the same thing as being trafficked

—Felix

The conditions noted above by Yvette, Anna, Quest, and Felix increased survivors’ vulnerability to re-trafficking and reduced their access to resources and support. Across the dataset, participants’ accounts likewise typically involved significantmaterial and/or emotional harm. Other examples include Natalie, who experienced physical and sexual abuse in the church she grew up in, noting that these experiences contributed to her vulnerability to sex trafficking. Undine’s church leaders came to court to support her father after she exposed him in her mid-teens for sexual exploitation, and her father did not even attend church. The betrayal she felt resulted in great religious struggle for years. Anna had to give her earnings from a minimum wage job to the Christian shelter she was at and fundraise for them on weekends; this exploitation was re-traumatizing. One survivor related being told to leave her church after disclosing that she was sex trafficked and ritually abused as a child. Many participants described feeling judged when they disclosed their history of trafficking, or when they shared or sought support for post-traumatic stress, depression, and other troubles related to trauma.

Overall, participants attributed the harmful behaviors and culture of Christians to four main causes: (1) oppressive social norms naturalized into church culture, e.g., patriarchy, racism, sexism, classism, etc.; (2) oppressive religious doctrines and traditions or interpretations of scriptures, e.g., monotheism leading to divisive or exclusionary religious worldviews; claiming that the Bible categorizes gender or sexual diversity as sin; requiring minor children to ‘forgive’ their sexually abusive parent, etc.; (3) moral and spiritual failure, e.g., greed, selfishness, the need to control others, the need to look good to others to feel better about one’s self, inability to allow the Holy Spirit to lead one’s service efforts, a savior complex, etc.; and (4) a lack of education and training about trauma, sex trafficking, and other topics vital to providing services to vulnerable populations.

Strategies for Addressing Harm from Members of Organized Religion

Participants described several strategies for preventing, minimizing, or repairing harm from Christians. For their personal practice of RSF, these included (1) reframing God and re-interpreting scripture; (2) avoiding inauthentic Christians and churches, and developing connections with genuinely kind and welcoming Christians and churches; (3) independently practicing Christianity; and (4) embracing a different religion or spirituality. For preventing harm from faith-based providers and churches, they recommended that (1) Christians live up to their touted religious and moral values and (2) education and training be provided for faith-based service providers and churches.

Addressing Harm through Personal Practice of RSF

Several participants reframed God and re-interpreted scripture to reclaim Christianity for themselves. Yvette, who has a doctorate in divinity, for instance, shared how she rejected the churches’ stern racist and patriarchal tropes of God to embrace a loving, tender father,

I created a God that was like a good parent, and this God started telling me, “I love you. I’ve never been angry with you, I’ve never been disappointed with you. I saw you when you cried at night when your sibling came in your room. I saw you when you cried out when your uncle came in your room. I have been with you every step of the way, and I love you, and you do not have to be quiet. Your brown skin does not make you any less valuable to me, I love you. Your gender, I created you. It’s because of you that children come into the world. It’s because of the female body, so I don’t know why you have been cast down in this society. Before me, you are my daughter, you’re my child.” I started silencing that other God, that angry, white, patriarchal, hierarchical God, I silenced that God… Whenever I was angry, or whenever I was hurting, or whenever I was trying to do the work of unpacking my trauma, I had this God that was like the best parent in the world if you can envision. I could just crawl up in that God’s lap, and just cry, and celebrate, and that’s how my life began to change.

Yvette’s journey of reclamation started with her own intense study of Christian scriptures,

I got a Bachelor’s in Religion, I got a Master’s in Divinity. I started studying the scriptures, and I started understanding that as sacred as the text is, it was written during a time when women were property, and it was written during a time when culturally, and within its history, a woman was no more than a piece of cattle.

Her strategy of using the Bible to correctly re-establish the fundamental views of God, self, and scriptures away from abusive and oppressive ones was used by several Christian participants. Fiona provides another example of this strategy in a more informal context,

I do read the Bible, and I do follow the practices of the Bible. I tend to kind of get away from the religiosity of it, and really learn about what it means to have God, and have faith, through the actual Bible versus a lot of the organized traditions of faith that people just really hurt people with, you know?

Christian participants were also careful to not expose themselves to harmful Christians and congregations. A few participants avoided organized Christianity altogether and practiced a very private faith. For example, Yselt stated, “I don’t go to church. I don’t do a whole big thing in church. I’m not going to someone to pray with them and do all that. I do my own prayer.” Most, however, wanted to participate in the faith community and emphasized careful interactions with other Christians as a primary strategy. This usually comprised “finding the right church for you in the right community” (Laura), “eating the chicken and spitting out the bones” (Irene) and “going in with a bit of thick skin” (Irene), moving on to a different church when one was no longer suitable, and taking the time to discern whether a Christian or church’s practice of faith was genuine. Diana, for instance, shared the importance of seeing whether church leaders could ‘walk the talk and “look(ing) and see(ing)” the fruit they bear’.

For Preventing Harm from Faith-based Providers and Churches

To prevent faith-based services and congregations from harming survivors, participants emphasized both the true expression of Christian values and training and education in trafficking and trauma. Janice, a survivor who provides both secular and faith-based services, illustrates this dual focus on authentic Christianity and the criticality of understanding survivors’ trauma in her statement, as well as non-coercive approaches,

We, as believers, need to be so conscious of their (survivors’) pain, and where they’re at that we allow Holy Spirit to really direct our conversations and love toward them, rather than force anything on those girls… and jump all over them with a Christian answer.

Diane similarly underscores the importance of both in her statement below where she highlights formal training, experience, and humility to serve the needs of survivors,

Just because you’re a pastor does not mean that you are qualified to work with survivors of human trafficking…Do you have a pastoral counseling license? What is your experience working with human trafficking victims?…Say you’ve got a safe house, and you’re a pastor. Are you willing to take off that title, and get in there with the regular workers?… If a survivor coming in needs a sandwich made, are you able to get in there and make them their sandwich? Are you going to stay up and help them through those flashbacks in the middle of night? Get up and walk them through it?

According to participants’ accounts, the importance of both to prevent harm cannot be overstated. Several examples of harmful services in addition to the examples already quoted demonstrates this. Anna was at a Christian shelter that required residents to work for at least eight hours a day, regardless of mental or physical health, and give all their earnings to the shelter. Beyond a bed, breakfast, and showers, no other resources or services were provided. Cora described being made to study the Bible for eight hours a day at a residential treatment program; no other ‘services’ were provided. In yet another Christian rehabilitation house, one participant described the daily routine as “Get up at 6:00. Make breakfast, scrub the floor, go to church, scrub the floor, go back to church, go to bed, get up. Oh my god.” Two participants in a residential setting related being told to practice “Christian living” in ways that were nothing short of spiritual abuse. For instance, residents were told by staff to not ‘gossip’ and ‘create disunity’ and ‘learn to submit to authority’, and they were directed to relevant Bible verses whenever they tried to express concerns or objected to the expectations placed on them.

4. Discussion and Implications

As a dynamic, multi-valent, and deeply meaningful part of their lives, participants vividly recounted how RSF was a source of benefits and blessings and of risks and harms. Notably, many accounts of the internal, interpersonal, and institutional religious benefits and harm that participants shared were situated within Christian contexts. This reflects both the demographic composition of the sample (58% identified as Christians, with the remainder identifying with diverse spiritual orientations; none of the participants identified with other monotheistic faiths or organized religions such as Islam or Judaism) and the predominance of Christian faith-based anti-trafficking services in the United States (Institute for Survivor Care 2024). Accordingly, our findings related to these benefits and harms should be interpreted within this scope rather than generalized across Christian congregations and Christian faith-based services in all localities, or across different RSFs.

Overall, the ultimate place of personal agency amidst divine intervention or spiritual power and the indestructible nature of faith and hope were the core phenomena undergirding participants’ experiences of resilience through RSF. Across the different RSFs that participants identified with, personal agency was central in how miracles and other spiritual resources required active faith and intentional alignment with purpose and values. It was similarly displayed in the strategies used to work through spiritual struggles, manage risks, prevent further harm, and emerge with a stronger faith and greater resilience. Simultaneously, the indestructible nature of their faith and hope meant that even in the most extreme adversity and deprivation, miracles and a connection to something ‘bigger’ or ‘higher’ were possible.

Participants’ narratives thus indicate that resilience is not merely strengthened or weakened by RSF but is strongly shaped and mediated by religious frameworks. The ever-accessible benevolent divine presence or spiritual power, the robust hope, and the explicit system of values and expectations created a consistent ‘safe harbor’ with clear moral boundaries in which to explore identity, re-narrate trauma, weather setbacks, understand the world, and make decisions with hopefulness and less fear. In many of these accounts, RSF thus appears to provide unique encouragement and resources for self-regulation, agency, autonomy, and identity formation that participants often seemed to not be able to access through other means. For independent spiritualities, participants themselves formulated values and moral obligations, e.g., Rachel’s, Tim’s, and Patricia’s emphasis on self-awareness, love, and unity. For Christianity, participants applied their own interpretations of Christian scripture and practices, e.g., Yvette’s reframing of God as a loving father who celebrated her gender and skin color. Miracles experienced through independent spiritualities and Christianity also provided the resources that family, community, and professionals failed to. In this way, participants re-parented and resourced themselves through diverse forms of RSF and filled voids left by the failures of human relationships and institutions.

Simultaneously, participants did not portray RSF as conferring moral perfection or unwavering strength. Rather, experiences of religious trauma and religious struggle meant that the resilience that came through RSF emerged as uneven, relational, contextual, and evolving. The majority of accounts of religious or spiritual struggles were from participants who identified as Christian, with their struggle emerging from the dissonance between their experiences and the concept of a benevolent and all-powerful God, or the ominous beliefs that their pain was somehow deserved or divinely ordained. Working through religious struggles for these participants encompassed exerting spiritual self-leadership, redefining spiritual values, and finding in God a source of co-regulation (e.g., God was present in past pain and understands their current pain) rather than as a signifier of divine displeasure or betrayal. Parallel spiritual struggles from participants who subscribed to non-mainstream or independent spiritualities involved the loss of confidence or belief in the self’s potential or ability to connect with higher powers due to the exhaustion of cumulative trauma and chronic stress. Overcoming spiritual struggles thus began with reviving one’s self-worth and self-belief.

That is, across the different traditional and non-traditional faiths and spiritualities that participants identified with, a restoration of autonomy and agency over matters of faith was key to resolving spiritual struggles. These accounts challenge portrayals of RSF, often forwarded by faith actors or other sectors, as being either inherently helpful or harmful to survivors of trauma (e.g., Twis and Praetorius 2021). In addition, participants’ complex journeys challenge the binary framings that cast survivors as either irreparably damaged or heroically transcendent (Knight and Yoon 2024). We note too that, as with all qualitative research, these findings reflect the perspectives of individuals who were willing and able to discuss RSF in relation to resilience. Survivors who permanently rejected religion or spirituality may be underrepresented. Therefore, strengthened faith should not be interpreted as an inevitable outcome of religious struggle.

Notably, most participants who identified meaningfully with Christianity had been introduced to the faith very young. Teachings about God from childhood or youth were often a sustaining factor during trafficking and other adversities, and participants were able to draw substantial strengths from their faith during or after addressing religious struggles. This suggests that participants’ strategies for overcoming religious struggles, i.e., the raw confrontations with God, the ability to carry faith even with unresolved questions, the cognitions that make such robust faith possible amidst injustice and pain, if introduced to minors in church, may be a potential means of promoting their resilience over their lifetime. Similarly, the strategies of participants who identified with independent faiths and spiritualities may constitute potential means of informing the resilience of others who share similar approaches or views of RSF.

We would highlight that the very features of RSF that make it such a powerful source and enhancer of survivors’ resilience, i.e., the clarity of values and communal identity, and the explicit transactional codes for invoking blessings and miracles, in addition to the hierarchal structures or paternalism in churches, ironically means that survivors of complex trauma are particularly vulnerable to spiritual bypassing. We foreground spiritual bypassing because of its unique potential to turn a source of great resilience into a source of significant harm unnoticed by the survivor and their supporters, and the scant attention it has received from both faith actors and the therapeutic community. Participants who discussed spiritual bypassing observed that long-standing traditions of honoring self-sacrificial service and normalizing heroic efforts to live up to spiritual values often render this problem invisible. A likely starting place for addressing this problem would therefore be equipping survivors, faith communities, and service providers to recognize it. For instance, pastors should be equipped to recognize when ‘surrender to God’ and ‘submission to authority’ might be a trauma-based response of fawning to earn love or to avoid rejection or punishment or when a survivor’s efforts to ‘put her relationship with God first’ might be a substitution for codependency. Similarly, they must be equipped to recognize when a survivor’s quick journey of healing and service to others might be due to continued dissociation and conformity, rather than miraculous healing and transformation by God’s love.

Aside from the potential of organized religion to do harm through exclusionary traditions and/or facilitating spiritual bypassing, the participants attributed religious risks and harms to the moral failure of faith actors, i.e., when they treat others badly due to hypocrisy; self-serving agendas; presumption regarding trafficking; judgmental, coercive, and controlling paradigms, etc. The participants not only emphasized that faith actors needed proper training to serve survivors but that ending harm required authentically living up to their own stated righteous values. The latter highlights the criticality of reflexivity and accountability for faith leaders and communities. For instance, Diane’s questions to pastors interested in anti-trafficking work demonstrate the importance of being asked ‘the hard questions’ by the survivor community.

Questions that may serve Christians and faith actors from other religious or spiritual traditions to ask as individuals and as a community in dialogue with survivors and other sectors include, “Is our engagement in anti-trafficking to defend our influence or defend the vulnerable?”; “Whose interests are most served by our definitions of justice, safety, recovery or salvation?”; “How do we uncover and address sexism, racism, gender discrimination, etc., is shaping our services to the vulnerable?”; “Am I willing to listen when survivors find that our programs and philosophies are not contributing to their autonomy, community building, etc.?”; and “As a foundation for service, how do we build a ‘care-based morality’ based on shared values with others that is still congruent with our particular religious values and beliefs?”

The vulnerability of survivors to trafficking by faith leaders, accounts of sexual and physical abuse, and the many stories of judgmental, coercive, and controlling behaviors by faith leaders and members point to a very strong need for churches to equip children and other church members to protect themselves from predatory faith representatives and oppression within the church. Ideally, the syllabi to teach children and others in church about spiritually-oriented resilience strategies, spiritual abuse, honoring one’s own internal resources, critical thinking, emotional literacy, assertiveness, and autonomy would be collaboratively developed by faith leaders, survivors of trafficking and other forms of violence, social workers, therapists, and members of law enforcement.

Constituting further harm, two acts of justice are starkly absent in the narratives. First, none of the participants mentioned that their churches reported traffickers and abusers within their congregations to the police or made any efforts to protect or support the victimized. It is evident that this needs to change. Second, no participant who experienced incompetent and/or abusive faith-based services, including in residential settings, mentioned any sort of accountability or feedback mechanism; the participants’ only option was to end the use of these services, usually with few or no other services in sight. This is extremely alarming, as a 2024 survey indicated that 63% of the 216 nationwide residential service providers for sex trafficking survivors identified as faith-based and primarily Christian (Institute for Survivor Care 2024).

Both gaps illustrate the urgent need for cultural and policy change in the church and stronger regulatory oversight for faith-based services. With regard to these gaps and the current lack of accountability, it may be helpful to equip survivors to identify, reject, and find substitutions for harmful faith communities and to report unethical faith-based services to relevant agencies. It may also be helpful for stories of unethical services and the harm engendered by them to be made known to the church at large and the public in order to provide civic accountability and an impetus for change. A more comprehensive and accessible network of quality services is also necessary to decrease survivors’ vulnerability to terrible services, be they faith-motivated or not.

The remarkable sparseness of accounts of secular therapists partnering with participants’ spiritual strengths and supporting them in addressing religious abuse and religious struggles reflect Pertek’s (2022a, 2022b) research indicating a lack of spiritual competence among service providers. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that participants too reported much harm and very little support for religious struggles from religious leaders and faith-based counselors. This raises serious questions as to the type and quality of training and education that pastors, faith-based counselors, prayer ministers, and other religious helpers receive for helping survivors of cumulative and complex trauma. Also troubling was survivors’ reluctance to share with healthcare providers how RSF was a source of strength and comfort for fear of being dismissed, misunderstood, mislabeled, misdiagnosed, or ridiculed, indicating providers’ lack of spiritual competence.

4.1. Implications

The participants’ narratives strongly indicate that religious or spiritual strengths, religious or spiritual coping, religious struggles, religious abuse, religious trauma, and the use of spirituality or religion to facilitate trafficking are not adequately addressed across multiple sectors involved in helping survivors—churches, faith leaders, faith-based counselors, and secular service and healthcare providers. The anti-trafficking field is known to have ‘strange bedfellows’ as partners (e.g., radical feminists and conservative Christian groups) with regard to advocacy and policy making (Jackson et al. 2017). It seems as though there are also ‘strange bedfellows’ regarding the inability to support survivors’ spiritual strengths, attend to their spiritual wounds, and prevent religious traumatization.

These service gaps call for improved training for service providers and faith actors in terms of spiritual competence as concerns work with vulnerable populations, including the provision of agency-affirming spiritual support. Furthermore, our findings underscore the importance of nuanced religious literacy among both secular and faith-based providers; RSF cannot be assumed to be either uniformly protective or uniformly harmful. For some survivors, local congregations were sources of profound belonging, material assistance, and spiritual strength; for others, congregational environments were retraumatizing due to doctrinal rigidity, coercion, or lack of trauma awareness. Providers therefore require training not only in trauma-informed care but also in understanding how RSF may function as internal, interpersonal, and institutional sources of resilience and sites of harm. Such training should be informed by survivors’ own insights into how structural inequities impact RSF as a resource and their strategies for benefiting from RSF, overcoming spiritual and religious struggles, and protecting themselves from religious harm. Other components of training and education could include (1) empirical research on RSF; (2) theoretical explanations for strengths conferred by RSF; (3) spiritual trauma and abusive or exploitative uses of religion; (4) RSF traditions and diversity in a population; (5) spiritual bypassing, value conflicts, and ethical dilemmas faced by spiritual or religious individuals; (6) spiritually-based interventions; (7) assessment and operationalization; and (8) the rights of spiritual believers (Hodge 2020, p. 87).

Overall, survivors’ personal agency is the crux of a safe and beneficial RSF that promotes resilience. Thus, it is critical that the training, education, and interventions for faith leaders, service providers, survivors, and faith community members be embedded within this larger agenda: a tangible cultural change in faith communities towards a spiritual ethos of care and way of being that centers individuals’ agency, dignity, and meaning-making, and is inimical to faith as justification for control and exclusion. Strengthening partnerships between survivor advocacy networks and justice-oriented religious practitioners may be one means of promoting such change and preventing re-traumatization.

Survivors seeking to remain within religious traditions may benefit from access to trauma-informed clergy, pastoral counselors, and scholars who engage critically and compassionately with sacred texts. Such intermediaries can help surface life-affirming theological resources that may not be readily accessible within local congregational settings. Several participants demonstrated that religious traditions contain internal resources capable of supporting renewed narratives of God grounded in solidarity, compassion, justice, and dignity rather than punishment or patriarchal control. This suggests that doctrinal renewal centered on these values and the reframing of relationships with God may offer pathways for change within faith communities seeking to prevent re-traumatization. In addition, it may be important for survivors, faith leaders, and secular service providers to come together to explore and develop guidelines for identifying the varied manifestations of spiritual bypassing, and create models of healthy spiritual practices and spiritually-motivated altruism for individuals who have experienced complex trauma.

We note too that not all participants maintained or returned to organized religion following religious trauma or struggle, instead locating resilience in individualized spirituality, nature-based practices, humanistic frameworks, or internal sources of transcendence. Supporting survivors, thus, may include facilitating access to secular meaning-making resources, non-institutional spiritual practices, or trauma-informed spiritual care practitioners who can explore alternative religious narratives without coercion.

Sex trafficking is complex. Its genesis and perpetuation involve elements of deviant and criminal behaviors, market responses to supply and demand, and so on, and it emerges at the intersections of social and economic injustice. We believe that faith actors collaborating with survivors and other sectors to build a social foundation of personal autonomy, respect, and unconditional, non-coercive care will go some of the distance towards reducing the vulnerability of individuals to trafficking, and weakening the structures that sustain its many forms. Such efforts would also, as Yvette exemplifies, entail transforming the religious and cultural beliefs around sex, privilege, masculinity, and entitlement and transforming the valuing of women primarily through sexual and economic lenses. This also necessitates addressing social inequities and providing services and resources without spiritual or moral gatekeeping.

Finally, we note that recounting RSF experiences may evoke not only deeply meaningful transcendent moments but also betrayal trauma, spiritual dissonance, and grief and anger at religious communities, not only for participants but also for researchers. The deeply emotional and personal nature of RSF entails the need for research to be conducted through socially just and trauma-informed methodologies, with research designs equitably informed by diverse survivors (Vickers 2002).

4.2. Future Research

The findings suggest several directions for further survivor-centered, survivor-led research into how faith, religion, and spiritualty interact with trauma, agency, and social inequity over the lifespan. These include extending the research to more non-mainstream, non-Western, Indigenous, and non-institutional spiritualities that survivors engage in. Future research could also include investigating risks and harm posed by other mainstream religions, and in other countries, increasing knowledge on how religious frameworks, culture, and sociopolitical contexts interact. It would also be important to explore the insights and experiences of specific demographics, e.g., male survivors, neurodiverse survivors, gender and sexual minorities, older survivors, etc., and in specific trafficked populations, e.g., familial sex trafficking, ritual abuse, labor trafficking in the agricultural industry, etc.

While this study was framed broadly around religion, spirituality, and faith (RSF), institutional harms described by participants were overwhelmingly located within Christian communities and faith-based services. These findings reflect dynamics within particular Christian cultural and institutional contexts in the United States, as well as the composition of the participants. Future research should therefore explore whether similar or distinct patterns emerge in other religious traditions and geographic regions.

Additionally, participants in this study reported overcoming their religious struggles or carrying these struggles well, and that they received miracles and other blessings as a result. It is therefore critical to explore the experiences of those who perceive themselves as not having overcome religious struggles, who did not experience attendant blessings from trying to overcome these struggles, and who choose not to engage in any form of FSR as a result. Such research may further reveal how religious frameworks, personality, and social inequities impact RSF as a resource for resilience, providing religious helpers and social justice purveyors with more insight for strategizing change and support. The extraordinary lack of spiritual competence in both secular and faith-based service providers also calls for research on the availability and quality of relevant training and education for these actors and the institutional factors that create barriers and facilitators to spiritually competent services and a culture of genuine, sensitive care.

5. Strengths and Limitations

The strengths of this study included the fact that data analysis was conducted by a team of diverse survivor researchers from the academy and community, minimizing the risk of a single dominant worldview shaping the findings, as well as integrating survivor perspectives equitably into knowledge production regarding trafficking. Peer debriefing and reflexive practices were also conducted throughout the analytic and writing processes, promoting the credibility and trustworthiness of the results. Several limitations warrant consideration. These included the limited spiritual diversity among the participants and the lack of data from individuals who did not perceive themselves as having overcome religious struggles. Participants were English-speaking survivors located in the United States, limiting cultural transferability. These findings therefore illuminate one set of spiritual trajectories rather than the full range of possible religious outcomes for survivors. The analysis was not conducted collaboratively with the participants, thus missing their additional insights or alternative interpretations significant to the issue. The dataset also lacked clarity regarding the participants’ demographics and personal details, which places constraints on the interpretations of how larger social discourses and phenomena might have shaped their RSF narratives. We thus offer these results as a starting point to address research gaps, and as starting points for consideration and further research.