{"id":581318,"date":"2010-05-27T08:00:33","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T12:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=46976"},"modified":"2010-05-27T08:00:33","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T12:00:33","slug":"fighting-modern-slave-trade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/581318","title":{"rendered":"Fighting modern slave trade"},"content":{"rendered":"

The day after graduating from Brown University<\/a>, Katherine Chon and a friend packed a U-Haul trailer and moved to Washington, D.C. It was the summer of 2002, and they were on a mission: to take on the modern slave trade.<\/p>\n

It seemed like a mission impossible. Human trafficking was the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the world eight years ago. Today, only arms sales and drugs bring in more money worldwide. \u201cIt\u2019s highly profitable \u2014 in the billions,\u201d said Chon, who graduates today (May 27) from the Harvard Kennedy School<\/a> with a midcareer master\u2019s degree in public administration.<\/p>\n

Definitions are difficult, she said, though slavery generally means confining people for labor or the sex trade by means of force, fraud, or coercion. Fighting it means taking up the cause of 21st century abolition. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about basic freedoms, what it means to be human,\u201d said Chon.<\/p>\n

Commencement marks the end of a yearlong hiatus for the Brown graduate, who for close to a decade has been toiling in the trenches in a largely hidden universe of misery. Worldwide, she said, 27 million humans are in some sort of bondage, and that\u2019s a conservative estimate.<\/p>\n

Chon is president and co-founder (with Derek Ellerman) of the Polaris Project<\/a>, a nonprofit named after the North Star that once guided American slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. It\u2019s one of the largest anti-slavery operations in the United States and Japan.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur main objective is to create a world without slavery through social change,\u201d said Chon, whose group has offices in Washington, D.C., Tokyo, and in Newark, N.J. \u201cIt\u2019s important for us to begin by impacting individual lives.\u201d That involves working with and training police officers, teachers, emergency room doctors, and community partners to identify, rescue, and help victims of slavery.<\/p>\n

On the national level, Polaris has helped to steer policy, pass three federal laws, and persuade 35 states to pass protective laws.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s such a dark issue,\u201d said Chon. \u201cI came here very burnt-out from the weight of it. But it was a very healing year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harvard\u2019s sense of community helped, she said, and the academic work did too. Chon praised her courses on adaptive leadership, as well as a Harvard Business School<\/a> course that opened her eyes to the for-profit world.<\/p>\n

Chon also praised Marshall Ganz<\/a>\u2019s public narrative class, \u201con how to build and engage and grow a movement,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s what we need right now. We\u2019re at the very beginning of a social justice movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most human trafficking occurs in developing countries, she said, but the United States is not exempt. About 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into the country every year. An estimated 100,000 American citizens are enslaved every year too, and that\u2019s just in the sex trade.<\/p>\n

Modern-day American slavery is not confined to cities. A few weeks ago, a multistate federal raid of massage parlors included slavery operations in affluent suburban Massachusetts \u2014 in Newton, Watertown, and Wellesley.<\/p>\n

It was a similar raid, a few miles from where she lived in Providence, R.I., that inspired Chon \u2014 shocked her \u2014 into taking on what she calls the biggest human rights issue of the century. Six Korean women had been living like slaves in a massage parlor.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir stories resonated,\u201d said the Korea-born Chon. \u201cI thought: That could have been me.\u201d<\/p>\n

She grew up in quiet Salem, N.H., where such trafficking seemed as remote as the moon. But slavery was one of the issues that came up in her senior year at Brown, when her classmates \u2014 shaken by the 9\/11 terrorist attacks \u2014 fell into fervent conversations about the state of the world. \u201cI was aware of the needs of the community, but I barely read the newspaper, or understood what was going on in the world,\u201d said Chon of the days before 9\/11. \u201cIt had an awakening effect.\u201d<\/p>\n

There were earlier awakenings too. In the spring of her senior year in high school, Chon was in an English class where listless students had lapsed into silence while discussing a social issue. Suddenly, her frustrated teacher shouted: \u201cWhat is your outrage? There are so many things happening in the world, and if you\u2019re not outraged about something, you\u2019re not paying attention.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a question that haunted Chon, but feeling outrage was elusive, she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t until I heard about human trafficking that I thought: This is it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The day after graduating from Brown University, Katherine Chon and a friend packed a U-Haul trailer and moved to Washington, D.C. It was the summer of 2002, and they were on a mission: to take on the modern slave trade. It seemed like a mission impossible. Human trafficking was the fastest-growing criminal enterprise in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-581318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=581318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}