“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

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.