In the Spring Quarter of 2018, I had the privilege to take a class on human trafficking from Professor Kirsten Foot, a wonderful and engaging instructor who I would recommend to anyone thinking about taking a class from her. It was truly a valuable experience during that time of my school career. The previous quarter, I had just taken a class on human rights in Latin America from Angelina Godoy, and found the two classes to be extremely related and incredibly interesting and important. I entered this class, knowing little to nothing about modern slavery and exploitation, but this class really opened my eyes. We discussed the issue from all sides, and counter-trafficking efforts from every sector, from law enforcement, to private victim service providers, to advocacy groups and investment advocates. We had guests from every sector, such as the current head of the Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network who once served on President Obama's anti-trafficking council, and a pair of law enforcement partners: a Seattle Detective partnered with a Homeland Security Investigator. This class also gave me the opportunity to do valuable community service by volunteering with Seattle Against Slavery, a local advocacy group (See the Experiential Learning Section). I learned so much in this class and I feel like I am a more conscious citizen and more deliberate consumer after having taken this class.
Report on the Current State of Human Trafficking in Serbia
This assignment served as a quasi-midterm paper for the class, but was in fact a far more engaging experience than it sounds. Our spring quarter just happened to coincide with an international summit on human trafficking hosted by the US State Department. This was not the first time that this summit occurred, but this year marked unprecedented international attendance, with experts coming from over 20 countries from around the world. My professor saw the opportunity to turn this assignment into an incredibly valuable learning experience. She assigned each of us to do a report on a country that would be represented in the summit (the ratio of experts attending to students in the class was nearly 1:1). I was assigned to research the current state of human trafficking in Serbia. After we completed the reports, Professor Foot sent them to the experts attending the summit, and invited them to hear about her ongoing research, as well as talk to us about their work and our reports. I met with a man who used to work on human trafficking prevention in Serbia, but at the time I met him, worked for the UN in Vienna, working on human trafficking prevention for the entire Baltic region. It was an exciting honor to talk with him, and I learned a lot about the nuances that influence trafficking and counter-trafficking efforts that I missed in my report, such as political unrest in turkey greatly affecting migration through the Baltic region, greatly taxing the governments and exposing many vulnerable people to danger.
Final Paper on Negative Impacts of Fair Trade Labels on Anti-Trafficking Efforts
This served as my final paper for the class, with the intent of analyzing how one trafficking and counter-trafficking efforts in one industry impacted the state of trafficking and the industry. I decided to write my paper on the Fair Trade movement, a popular movement against labor exploitation that allows first-world consumers to purchase goods without feeling like they are contributing to global exploitation of vulnerable peoples. However, I found that the system could be a overly simplistic tool to solve a very complex problem, leading to cases where fair trade certification processes actually perpetuated exploitation.