We are just beginning to recognize the link between gang activity and human trafficking crimes. Sandra Morgan, the Director of the Global Center for Women & Justice and Dave Stachowiak, one of the Center's board members, interview Dr. Laura Lederer from Global Centurion on her work to better understand the connection between gangs and trafficking. Key Points

Dr. Laura Lederer founded and directing The Protection Project. Those who were trafficking young women and children are usually involved in street gangs. There is a triangle of activity: Supply, demand, and distribution. Demand side: Who are the buyers, what motivates them to buy, learn more about demand.

Resources

Global Centurion Demand Reduction

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Contact us with questions, comments, or suggestions at feedback@endinghumantrafficking.org. Transcript Dave: Sandie, we have today, a very special guest with us who is someone who has just been a tremendous leader in the fight against human trafficking (HT), not only here domestically but around the globe and I am going to give you an opportunity to tell our audience who we have here today.

Sandie: I’m very exciting because probably the most significant teacher/mentor for me learning about HT when I first started is Dr. Laura Letter. When I met her, she was working for the state department.  Now she is the founder and president of Global Centurion. We’re going to talk to her today about the link between street gangs and HT. Dave, why don’t you give us a little bio on her background?

Dave: I’d be happy to. Laura Lederer founded and directed the protection project at Harvard University’s JFK school of government and from 2001 until 2009 she served as the senior advisor on trafficking of persons under secretary of state for democracy and global affairs who was Paula Dobranksy at the time.  And then Senior Director of global projects in the office to monitor and combat at the US Department of state. In addition to that, from 2001-2009, she was the executive director of the senior policy operating group on trafficking in persons which was a high level inter-agency group that staffed the president’s cabinet level interagency task force in tip. She has her B.A. manga cum laude at the University of Michigan which is not easy to get magna cum laude from so that’s very cool. After 10 years in philanthropy at a private found. She con. And received her doctorate In June 1994 I could go on literally for about 10min

Sandie: Thank you, yes. It just goes without saying that she has impacted this issue globally. We’ve travelled together to Greece and Iraq and she’s been out her at vu at the GCWJ. So were going to dive right in Laura and talk about the connection between street gangs and ht.  Do you want to frame that for us?

Laura: Let me just give you a little background first on how we came to make the link between street gangs and HT, Sandie. We were collecting case law; this is an anchor project of global centurion. Collecting the case law worldwide that addresses HT, pulling data points from the case law, it’s part of the work that were doing to understand the demand for HT. one of the data points that kept coming up was that those who were trafficking young women and children were involved also in street gangs, and after we found about 20 or 30 cases, I actually added a data point so we could, anywhere in the world, where a street gang was involved in HT, we could then identify that very quickly as a part of the coding. It was through that we came to know that there was this connection. So far, we have over 200 cases in North America alone of street gangs involved in mostly sex trafficking, but in HT.

Sandie: Wow.