Lennon Wong/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Emergency rooms, social security offices, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement outposts consigned into strip malls: places that manage to be dreary and fluorescent at the same time. A decade ago, on any given day of the week, I’d be bringing an abused domestic worker through some new round of administrative hoop-jumping in one of these places so she could be classified and serviced as a ‘victim of human trafficking’. But was any of this really making a difference? It took me a few years on the job to figure it out.
Before ‘anti-trafficking’ was a thing
I started work at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank in Washington DC, as an intern in 2003 and again as a full-time employee a few years later. I wanted to help women workers claim dignity on the job. Several years before this, in 1997, colleagues started the Break The Chain Campaign (BTCC) to combat the deafening silence surrounding trafficked domestic workers in diplomatic households in the Washington DC area. They (now we) wanted to bring attention to the issue and demand change on the part of these governments and the US State Department.
