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May 2008
Elliott School Professor, Students Address Human Trafficking
By Julia Parmley Michele Clark, part-time faculty in GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs, was a researcher, advocate, and teacher in the area of immigration until a picnic on a warm Saturday afternoon in 1998 changed the course of her life forever. Clark was in Israel teaching in a specialized program for new immigrants at the University of Haifa when she joined a few of her friends for a picnic on a local beach. One of her friends introduced Clark to a Russian woman named Olga, who had left her parents and young children to come to Israel after a stranger promised her a better job that could earn money for her family. Instead, Olga was forced into prostitution, forcibly addicted to drugs, and not allowed to leave the country until a fake debt was paid. Clark remembers feeling that “there appeared to be something terribly wrong with a world that would allow this practice to take place.” Clark soon found that Olga’s story was not unique. Human trafficking—recruitment, transportation, harboring, or receipt of people by fraudulent, coercive or forceful means for the purpose of exploitation—was on the rise, and Clark knew she wanted to help. “I was deeply troubled that this was going on under our noses,” she says. “It was one of those pivotal moments when your life changes and you don’t even know it.” Since then, Clark has worked to combat and raise awareness of human trafficking in the United States and around the world. And she can now add the 38 undergraduate GW students in her human trafficking class to the list. She and her students have examined U.S. policies on human trafficking, efforts of the U.S. and international governments to combat the crime, and the different prosecution and prevention measures around the world. Clark supplements class activities and readings with guest speakers, including Amb. Mark Lagon, director of the U.S. Department of State’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, and Andrew Kline, special litigation counsel for the human trafficking prosecution unit of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. “The students are very engaged,” Clark says. “They really want to learn about this issue, and I commend the University for making this topic a formal part of the curriculum.” Sophomore Jordanna Sussman says the class has opened her eyes to the far-reaching effects of human trafficking. “I had no idea of the scope of human trafficking,” she says. “It’s everywhere. Students especially need to be aware to prevent this from happening in the future. It affects every country in the world.” As a result of her experience in Clark’s class, Sussman plans to intern at “Free the Slaves,” an organization dedicated to eradicating global human trafficking. Since her revelation 10 years ago, Clark has become an expert on the issue. From 2001 to 2005, she worked as co-director of the Protection Project, a human rights research institute based at the Foreign Policy Institute at The Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. In that position, she traveled around the world to countries such as Ecuador, Peru, Cyprus, and the Dominican Republic to gather facts and information on human trafficking through interviews with trafficked persons and government officials, and visits to brothels and businesses. Her organization was one of the first in the United States to organize public education and training seminars in communities around this country on human trafficking, how to identify victims, and services available to victims. From 2005 to 2007, Clark worked as the head of human trafficking at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, where she assisted 56 member States to develop and implement their own anti-trafficking policies and programs. In fall 2007, Clark returned to the United States to work as an independent consultant on the issue and joined the adjunct faculty of the Elliott School. She also has testified before Congress seven times about human trafficking. “Many persons are trafficked not because they did anything wrong, or even because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because they are looking for a better life,” she says. “They see a possibility overseas, and they go. They may have been naХve; they were certainly uninformed. They are not criminals. They are victims of a horrible wrong. “We can do a lot to prevent human trafficking if we start to recognize what is not normal in our own environment in terms of abnormal behavior or practices,” she says. “Some say human trafficking is ‘hidden in plain sight’ and that is true in a large part because we choose to be naХve. But there now is one group of students who won’t be, and who are ready and willing to play a role in bringing the problem to an end.”
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