01 March 2009
Katherine Chon and Derek Ellerman: Fighting Human Trafficking
This article appears in the March 2009 issue of eJournal USA, Nonviolent Paths to Social Change (PDF, 783 KB).
What began with a dinner conversation among students in 2001 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has today become one of the largest organizations in the United States and Japan fighting human trafficking.
Katherine Chon was discussing the historical abolition of slavery in the United States with her classmate Derek Ellerman when the talk veered to modern-day slavery. Soon after, the local newspaper published a piece about six South Korean women who had been forced to work in a brothel in Providence, and Chen had an “aha” moment.
“It hit hard when I read they were about my age and from my native country,” she said in a 2007 Women’s Health magazine article.
As a result, Chon and Ellerman founded the Polaris Project, named for the North Star, which guided slaves from the U.S. South northward to freedom along what was called the Underground Railroad in the years before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865).
The two developed a business plan for a Web site that would offer immediate, practical help to victims of human trafficking, and they submitted their idea to Brown University’s annual entrepreneurship competition. Despite its nonprofit status, the project won the $12,500 second prize. Chon and Ellerman moved to Washington, D.C., in 2003 to establish an office.
Their challenge is a daunting one. "The anti-trafficking movement is young and is tackling criminal organizations that are supported by some of the most intractable societal ills," Ellerman has written.
The United Nations estimates that 12.3 million people are in forced labor, bonded labor, forced child labor, and sexual servitude at any given time. Other estimates range widely from 4 million to 27 million.
The Polaris Project attacks the problem on many fronts. It conducts direct outreach and victim identification, including multilingual crisis hotlines, and offers social services and transitional housing to victims. Polaris operates the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, which serves as the central national hotline on human trafficking in the United States.
The organization also advocates stronger state and federal anti-trafficking legislation and engages community members in local and national grassroots efforts. Polaris has a professional staff of more than 30, with offices in Washington; Newark, New Jersey; Denver, Colorado; and Tokyo.
Although there are a number of active anti-trafficking organizations, Polaris is one of the few that works to attack the criminal industry directly through strengthened law enforcement, and not just treat victims.
Since criminals often regard trafficking as a relatively low-risk, high-profit activity, according to Ellerman, "a focused strategy that introduces obstacles to profit, combined with more prosecutions and convictions, is the most efficient approach to undermining the industry." Ellerman also works on human trafficking issues with Ashoka, an association dedicated to social entrepreneurship.
In the coming year, Polaris plans to strengthen its national policy program, which includes model anti-trafficking legislation for states. Chon and Ellerman also hope to strengthen Polaris's national hotline, which tripled in volume to 6,000 calls last year and identified 2,300 potential victims of trafficking.
"The center allows us to have eyes and ears on the ground, in the community," Chon says. "The calls help us to identify more victims, refer them to services, and to build cases against traffickers."
She cites the example of a teacher who, after receiving training in spotting trafficking victims, called about two Latino girls missing from an after-school program. The girls were later found and a case brought against the traffickers.
Chon also hopes to build broader regional partnerships with organizations in other countries. "We want to crack down on very specific markets and particular types of criminal networks — Asian massage parlors or trafficking in Latino women and children — each of which has its own market dynamic," she says.
Ellerman and Chon believe in both their cause and their ability to create meaningful change.
“I believe that individuals can make a difference,” Chon said in a magazine interview. "Follow whatever you are passionate about, embrace it, and don’t be afraid to accept the challenge."
"The good news is that this fight can be won," Ellerman has written. "And skilled, visionary, and yet pragmatic organizations and leaders are at the heart of this effort."
The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government.
