Stop the Traffic
By Rebekah K. Murray
One alumna builds a movement to end human trafficking, a modern-day form of slavery.
Tana was 14 years old when she ran away from her abusive family in India. While on the street, she met a stranger who offered her a place to sleep for the night. When she woke up, she discovered that she had been sold to a brothel. When she tried to leave, she was beaten by the brothel keepers until she lacked the strength to resist. For the next two years, she was held in the brothel and forced to do the bidding of the customers.*
“It’s slavery, a contemporary form of slavery,” says Laura Lederer (’75), the Vice President for Policy and Planning at Global Centurion, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking. “If you take Tana’s story and multiply it by hundreds of thousands, even millions, you get an idea of the nature and scope of the problem of human trafficking.”
The U.S. Department of State calculates that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, and millions more are enslaved within national borders. Within the United States, an estimated 250,000 young people are trapped in the commercial sex industry.
It’s a global problem that Lederer, with a U-M bachelor’s in comparative religions and a J.D. from DePaul College of Law, has been researching and working to combat for the last 10 years.
It’s a calling that’s “definitely not for the faint of heart,” she says. “When you really hear the victims’ stories and begin to uncover the tremendous pain and damage that one set of people are doing to another, you have to find a way to address that.”
Shortly after finishing law school, Lederer began researching human trafficking. Her study of the foreign national laws of 194 countries and territories created the world’s first searchable database, which the U.S Congress used when drafting and passing what is now the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Lederer helped draft that act, and in 1998, she was the first to bring victims of sex trafficking to testify before Congress. Lederer also testified about the scope of the problem after the young women from Mexico, Russia, Ukraine, Nepal, and Thailand told their stories.
“I still remember it to this day,” she says of the hearing, “packed with citizens backed out the door, filled with journalists from every major media outlet, attended by dozens of legislators and their staffers. As the young women told their stories, the room was so quiet. Tears were shed as they described their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual devastation.”
This work led Lederer to accept a position with the U. S. State Department in 2001, and she served as the Senior Advisor on Trafficking in Persons to the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs. (Story continues below.)
Stop The Traffic: Six ways you can help stop human trafficking.
The United States currently funds 140 anti-trafficking programs in nearly 70 countries. There are also 42 domestic task forces to address the problem in the United States. A number of organizations, large and small, have been established to care for victims and provide shelter, job training, medical attention, global awareness, and advocacy. Since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was passed, U.S. law enforcement has been able to more effectively prosecute perpetrators and protect victims.
Still, Lederer says there is one additional side of the problem which has, so far, received little attention. “There will continually be more and more women and children in shelters unless we can figure out how to stop the demand, the buyers who are fueling this market,” she says.
That’s Lederer’s mission today at Global Centurion. Addressing the demand side is cutting-edge, she says, and includes education, social marketing campaigns, and strategies for prevention and prosecution.
Yet Lederer knows she can’t do it alone. “We need a movement,” she says. “We’re in the process of building a new global human rights movement to stop sex trafficking.”
*Tana's story courtesy of Laura Lederer and the International Justice Mission. 10/30
Laura Lederer is one of four alumni honored with a 2009 LSA Humanitarian Service Award, given for noble character, citizenship, and service to humanity. Read about award-winner Sheri Fink (’90), and watch for more stories of humanitarian service in the next edition of the LSA Wire.
