With modern-day slavery reaching unparalleled heights, governments and international organizations have increased their resolve to finally end this human rights crisis. Many have initiated new anti-slavery programs, with a first-of-its-kind approach: placing survivors at the center of the slavery solution.
At the start of 2017, the United Nations (UN) renewed its commitment to prevent sexual exploitation and trafficking “as a matter of urgency” by forming a high-level task force. In late August, the UN Secretary General appointed Jane Connors, the current International Advocacy Director of Law and Policy for Amnesty International, as the first United Nations advocate for the rights of victims of sexual exploitation. This move comes at a time in which many others are placing the rights of victims at the forefront of survivor-restoration measures and using their experiences as invaluable tools to improve preventative response.
This more holistic approach to tackling the human trafficking epidemic echoes the anti-slavery initiatives introduced under the Obama Administration by means of the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (TVTA) of 2015. Under then President Obama, the first U.S Advisory Council on Human Trafficking was convened, comprised of 11 human trafficking survivors (including UC Berkeley graduate Minh Dang) appointed to make recommendations on federal anti-trafficking policies. This approach helps ground such policy in light of the experiences of those who were, at one point, most intimately impacted by them.
This model is now being adopted by policymakers in Canada. Ontario – a province responsible for almost 70% of the country’s police-reported trafficking cases in 2015 – is set to form an advisory group of 8 former trafficking victims later this year, as a group of experts who can “close the knowledge gap between survivors and authorities.”
These initiatives provide a more holistic approach to solving the modern-day slavery crisis, ensuring equal attention is paid to both victims’ suffering to make programs available for an efficient path to recovery and survivors’ experiences for prevention. York University Professor Kamala Kempadoo hopes that the policies which come about as a result of these initiatives do not simply address the criminal nature of human trafficking but also emphasize its root causes.
It is my hope that these survivors’ testimonies will bring about effective anti-slavery legislation, placing modern-day slavery on its way to extinction. I, too, hope their stories will make this crisis of immense human cost more accessible to those unaware of this exploitative injustice, for often times unless we have experienced something ourselves, it does not seem to exist to us.
