“Survivors remain underrepresented as researchers or experts in trafficking,” said Dr. Knight, who joined the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare as an assistant professor in 2024. “They have rarely been involved in investigating human trafficking or intervention design, even though they are the ones who actually know what life is like before, during and after human trafficking.”    

Dr. Knight chose KU because of the university’s support and value of this qualitative work. She said survivor-led research isn’t necessarily the norm in research around human trafficking, and that often in social work there are gaps in strategies to support survivors that aren’t filled.   

“The lack of survivor involvement is a huge problem because it leaves us ‘researchers’ and ‘interventionists’ not really knowing what we are doing,” Knight said. “Survivors are already doing their best in whatever circumstance they are in. They are resilient.”  

This resilience is displayed through their strength and knowledge, which matters when putting together strategies to help survivors better their lives.   

“Interventions must leverage and partner with the strategies that people already are using to build their best lives,” Dr. Knight said. “Otherwise, we risk creating interventions that are meaningless or unhelpful, fail to synergize with their existing strategies, or at worst, conflict with those strategies.”    

Altruism was one such strategy that emerged from her two-year study of resilience with 44 survivors of sex trafficking. These individuals shared that helping others gave them purpose, hope and self-confidence, and countered the negative messages from abusers and society. Altruism could be as simple as sharing their food with another survivor while still being trafficked or taking more time, such as studying to become a lawyer or counselor to help others after trafficking.    

Funded by the New Faculty Research Development Grant, Dr. Knight is now working with other survivors to further investigate altruism as a means of healing and thriving, and to design an intervention to support survivors’ altruism.    

For Dr. Knight, the important thing is to continue creating alliances and spaces where survivors are leaders and equitable partners in research.   

“Social workers dream big,” Dr. Knight said. “We want to change the world, right? We want to be agents of authentic social change. We want to make things better. We cannot do this alone, and we cannot do this if we exclude the people who really know and understand an issue just because they don’t have three degrees or some other qualifier that we’re familiar with.” 

Establishing the first endowed professorship for the school is one of the School of Social Welfare’s priorities in the current campus fundraising campaign with KU Endowment. For information on how you can help support the School of Social Welfare, please contact Amy Gray, Social Welfare Development, at KU Endowment (785-832-7421).