Academic

?Restoring Human Dignity: Women Lawyers Push Back Against Human Trafficking?

By Ann Bartow

That’s the title of this article, with a short excerpt below:

Every lawyer who works on the issue of human trafficking has a powerful memory of someone like Katya, whose life has been torn asunder by what is seen as a growing, if hidden, worldwide criminal enterprise. Katya is one of as many as 17,500 people who are trafficked to the United States each year, according to the U.S. Department of State; some nonprofits put the figure as high as 100,000. In 2006, the U.S. government appropriated $152 million for international and domestic anti-trafficking efforts.

For Suzanne Tomatore, director of the Immigrant Women and Children Project of the City Bar Justice Center in New York City, the enduring image is of a client in her twenties who had been trafficked from Africa at age six. Forced to work as a domestic servant, the client had never been to school, could not read or write, and had remained unseen until a neighbor called authorities.

?Human trafficking touches on so many different areas?gender issues, economic issues, education issues,? says Tomatore, who began working with immigrants after graduating from law school in 2000. ?It?s a new way of thinking of an age-old problem?slavery in general. This is a modern way of enslaving someone. You assume that this happened in the past or in some other country.?

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).