Co-production · The Lancet / Freedom Fund, with survivor leaders, researchers and anti-trafficking partners internationally
Lancet Series on Human Trafficking and Health
““Evaluating engagement is less a question of participation and more a question of influence, recognition, and accountability.” — project reflection”
The challenge
Anti-trafficking research can discuss lived experience while academics still control authorship, resources and authority
The field increasingly promotes survivor involvement, but participation can remain concentrated in advisory meetings while decisions about questions, authorship, interpretation, publication and money stay with academic teams. A major international journal series offered an opportunity to test whether survivor expertise could be embedded more deeply in the infrastructure of knowledge production.
What we did
Survivor leaders were brought into authorship, review, coordination and editorial decision-making across the series
Sohail Jannesari is co-editing the Lancet Human Trafficking and Health Series and leads its engagement work. With Freedom Fund support, the project appointed Research Engagement Coordinators with lived experience to the leadership team, paid advisers and co-authors for their expertise, supported childcare, equipment and data costs, involved survivor contributors in conceptualisation and validation workshops, and created routes into co-authorship and leadership of commentary outputs. Each paper was developed with survivor co-leadership, alongside mentoring and accessible guidance for contributors.
What changed
The series is testing a publishing model where lived experience shapes both the content and the rules of participation
The work tries to move evaluation beyond counting who attended towards examining influence, recognition, compensation, decision-making and whose knowledge is treated as authoritative. It has also generated methodological learning about trauma-informed collaboration, payment systems, flexible working, authorship and the institutional barriers that can undermine lived-experience roles even when those roles exist formally.
Outputs
Currently four papers under peer review and three viewpoints written.
A recorded roundtable with survivor co-authors commenting on the series.