Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative (ASHTI)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1808/11111

The Anti-Slavery and Human Trafficking Initiative (ASHTI) is led by a working group of KU faculty, staff, and students that are engaged in scholarship and advocacy related to addressing contemporary slavery and human trafficking. This site is to become an online repository of KU research and data related to human trafficking domestically and internationally.

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‘Now More Than Ever, Survivors Need Us’: Essential labouring and increased precarity during COVID-19
(Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW), 2023-09-29) Schwarz, Corinne; Britton, Hannah; Nay, Eden D. E.; Holland, Christie
During the earliest waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, much media and public discourse focused on the effects of increasing precarity on already vulnerable populations. As in-person work added a layer of viral risk and unemployment drastically exacerbated economic precariousness, the category of ‘essential worker’ gained new prominence in these conversations. In this paper, we focus on the complicated relationship between two groups of workers depicted as marginalised and exploited to different degrees during COVID-19: trafficked persons and anti-trafficking service providers. Though media coverage did not conflate these groups, it applied a capacious understanding of precarious labour and structural inequalities that encapsulated different types of essential work. We draw on media produced by frontline anti-trafficking and sex workers’ rights organisations between March and May 2020. Even with renewed attention to macro-level harms, many publications still emphasised individualism over collectivity. This emphasis on singular organisational representatives—frontline workers—as heroic rescuers mirrored larger, normative anti-trafficking discourses. At the point at which the ‘new normal’ was nowhere in sight, COVID-19 served as a flashpoint to reconsider current intervention strategies and instead emphasise a critique of precarious labour along multiple vectors.
Understanding Risk and Prevention in Midwestern Antitrafficking Efforts: Service Providers' Perspectives
(Reading Room, 2020-06-22) Britton, Hannah E.
Since the 2000 passage of both the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) and the U.N.’s Palermo Protocols, human trafficking has gained a notable global presence as a human rights concern. Community organizations, nonprofits, scholars, policymakers, and service providers have developed programs to identify and address human trafficking. Despite these efforts, finding reliable methods to document and quantify the instances of human trafficking continues to challenge researchers. Moreover, many believe trafficking is a problem primarily located in urban areas or along national borders. Drawing from seven years of interviews with service providers who work in this sector, combined with survey results from an additional 722 service providers, this project adds to the growing body of research on human trafficking, specifically in the Midwestern United States. The findings of this study indicate that place and location matter in antitrafficking, especially with regard to availability of and access to resources across urban and rural areas. However, these service providers also identify similar concerns across regions with regards to trafficking warning signs and risk factors—for both sex and labor trafficking—as well as community resources that could prevent trafficking or alleviate vulnerability. These findings point toward the benefit of research that is geographically focused and involves both qualitative and quantitative research. Additionally, this research has uncovered unexpected groups of community members that may be vital in the identification and prevention of human trafficking. Though there is a growing body of research about the role of medical practitioners, law enforcement, foster care workers, and social workers in the struggle to address trafficking, there are other groups that also have important insight into the risks their communities face. Interviews revealed that firefighters have particular relationships with the communities they serve and may be ideally positioned to address human trafficking, exploitation, and vulnerability because of these relationships.
Aligned Across Difference: Structural Injustice, Sex Work, and Human Trafficking
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) Schwarz, Corinne; Kennedy, Emily J.; Britton, Hannah E.
Feminist scholars and activists engage in meaningful, contentious debates about the relationships among sex, gender, power, and society. One of the most recent iterations of these arguments reinscribes the pleasure of sex positivity and danger of patriarchal exploitation onto new subjects: sex work and human trafficking. This paper brings together two separate empirically based research projects, one working with sex workers and the other working with members of the anti-trafficking community. As scholars working across these topics, we provide new normative propositions that may bridge these different approaches to resilience, survival, danger, and risk. We find that the real threat identified by our participants was the wide reach of the carceral state onto migrating, working, and trafficked bodies. Our projects find unexpected commonality in shared perceptions of pleasure, agency, and danger among sex workers, human trafficking survivors, and service providers working with trafficked persons. Current debates ignore the lived experiences of our participants, who attempt to find pleasure in context-specific agency and survival, and who locate danger in the looming forces of the security state, criminality, and structural inequalities.
Human Trafficking in the Midwest: Service Providers’ Perspectives on Sex and Labor Trafficking
(Anti, 2017-04) Schwarz, Corinne
This report covers the findings of ASHTI’s two-state survey to gather information from service providers working with vulnerable persons in the Midwest. Based on previous ASHTI interviews, the research team created a survey for a broad range of service providers who worked with vulnerable or trafficked persons. These service providers were selected because of their system-wide perspective on exploitation and vulnerability as well as their in-depth knowledge of individual client cases. This survey asked a range of questions to address: 1. If service providers believe they have encountered human trafficking? 2. What markers of physical or mental health are used to identify trafficked persons? 3. Which social factors can increase the risk of exploitation or trafficking? 4. What community resources can protect against the risk of trafficking?
Human Trafficking Indentification and Service Provision in the Medical and Social Service Sectors
(Harvard School of Public Health, 2016-06) Schwarz, Corinne; Unruh, Erik; Cronin, Katie; Evans-Simpson, Sarah; Britton, Hannah E.; Ramaswamy, Megha
The medical sector presents a unique opportunity for identification and service to victims of human trafficking. In this article, we describe local and site-specific efforts to develop an intervention tool to be used in an urban hospital’s emergency department in the midwestern United States. In the development of our tool, we focused on both identification and intervention to assist rafficked persons, through a largely collaborative process in which we engaged local stakeholders for developing site-specific points of intervention. In the process of developing our intervention, we highlight the importance of using existing resources and services in a specific community to address critical gaps in coverage for trafficked persons. For example, we focus on those who are victims of labor trafficking, in addition to those who are victims of sex trafficking. We offer a framework informed by rights-based approaches to anti-trafficking efforts that addresses the practical challenges of human trafficking victim identification while simultaneously working to provide resources and disseminate services to those victims.
Queering the Support for Trafficked Persons: LGBTQ Communities and Human Trafficking in the Heartland
(Cogitatio, 2015-02-23) Schwarz, Corinne; Britton, Hannah E.
Human trafficking justice centers on the “Three Ps” model of prevention, protection, and prosecution. While protection and prosecution efforts have been moderately successful, prevention remains elusive, as “upstream” structural fac-tors—class, gender, and sexuality inequalities—remain difficult to target. Individuals who are affected by these factors are not fully served within linear service frameworks. Based on a 12-month study in Kansas City, we find that service providers recognize the limitations of a “one-size-fits all” approach. Using a public health model, our research team con-ducted a public health surveillance, explored risk and protective factors, and facilitated organizational self-assessments of services. Our findings support a prevention approach that supports a survivor-centered model, which creates new, non-linear or queered avenues of agency and community for trafficking survivors. This model allows survivors to make use of services in moments of vulnerability and opt out of others in moments of resilience. Given the systematic cuts in funding that have affected service providers, this research contends that prevention is cheaper, more effective, and more ethical than relying on prosecutions to curb trafficking. Developing a model that fosters survivor empowerment is a key step toward individual justice and survivor resilience for vulnerable and marginalized populations.
Policy Responses to Human Trafficking in Southern Africa: Domesticating International Norms
(Springer Verlag, 2014) Britton, Hannah E.; Dean, Laura A.
Human trafficking is increasingly recognized as an outcome of economic insecurity, gender inequality, and conflict, all significant factors in the region of southern Africa. This paper examines policy responses to human trafficking in southern Africa and finds that there has been a diffusion of international norms to the regional and domestic levels. This paper finds that policy change is most notable in the strategies and approaches that differ at each level: international and regional agreements emphasize prevention measures and survivor assistance, but national policies emphasize prosecution measures. Leaders across the region have adapted these policy norms to fit regionally specific conditions, including HIV/AIDS, conflict, traditional leaders, and prostitution. Yet, national policies often fail to incorporate preventative solutions to address gender inequality, human rights, and economic development. Until appropriate funding and preventative measures are introduced, the underlying issues that foster human trafficking will continue.

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