The role of caseworker/case manager in assisting trafficked persons

1. Enabler role. In earlier literature of social work, this role would be described as “supportive”. The enabler encourages, motivates, and supports the client to make relevant decisions, and to take action on his/her own. In some situations, of course, typical for the initial phase of the rescue process, the case manager will have to take actions for the trafficked person, but the ideal is to maximise the persons’ involvement in the helping process.

2. Trainer role. One should expect that after a long time of abuse and deprivation from basic human rights, many trafficked persons will not have the necessary skills to make even the most elementary personal decisions, such as a decision for or against being interviewed. Training programs designed to teach various skills across the life span (e.g. survival skills such as shopping, house cleaning, using public transportation, managing money etc.), should be provided all along the case management and recovery programme not just by a single case manager but by a full team of rescue workers (Curran and Monti, 1982).

3. Referral role. The referral role represents one of the most common activities in case management. Knowledge of the formal, informal, and indigenous resources in a community where the case management is taking place is critical to the success of program planning and implementation. However, knowledge alone will not guarantee “success”. Linking and community networking are also essential functions of case management. Both ask for the caregiver’s ability to develop contacts and create close working alliances with other case managers, professionals, other potential helpers and the local authorities in the community (in some cases, for instance, a working alliance with religious community

leaders may be more promising than working with local policy makers or NGOs).

4. Mediator role. The purpose of mediation is not to create new linkages, as in the referral role, but to improve the trafficked person’s existing connections and relationships in his/her new social environment or community of origin. The ethical issue in mediation is that the case manager must stay “neutral”, or at least appear neutral to all involved, because a mediator is not an “advocate”, but should take a position between the helped person and her potential resource group.

5. Resource developer. In many cases, the focal problem is the lack of resources for reintegration. Resource development can be conceptualised at two levels: There is the largescale programme development approach which attempts to create services and resources for a large number of persons with the same experience (e.g. prevention program of re-trafficking). The other, more narrow-scoped level is focused on the development, mobilisation, or reorganisation of close interpersonal resources, such as initiating self-help/mutual aid associations at municipal or national level.

6. Advocacy role. By definition, advocacy is a partisan role. Unlike in all above listed roles, as an advocate the case manager must take a firm position with (or on behalf of) the trafficked person to address the injustice that has befallen him/her from persons or groups s/he has been (and perhaps still is) attached to. Of the many different forms of advocacy, the crucial role of case advocacy should be highlighted. This is a specific kind of reintegration help not only for individual persons, but for whole groups (or classes) of persons with trafficking experience. Case advocacy should be at the level of local communities and “natural” social support systems (“old” or “new” ones), which might otherwise socially exclude trafficked persons.. Source: IOM