Stop Traffic!

Human trafficking and enslavement can take countless forms—from Eastern European women trafficked into Western Europe for the sex trade to domestic servants from Southeast Asia exploited in the Middle East to Brazilians enslaving their own countrymen to work in charcoal production.

Up to 27 million men, women, and children are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and no part of the world is immune, according to a U.S. State Department report on the situation.

“It’s the human rights issue of our time,” says Mohamed Mattar, executive director of The Protection Project, based at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. “Everywhere you go, it’s there. How can you ignore it?”

At a wide range of universities, faculty, staff, students, and alumni are joining in the fight against human trafficking internationally.

Students “need to understand why a young teenage girl is willing to sell herself to protect her family from the spell of voodoo if she is of African origin, or protect her neighbor from being killed by the mafia if she is from Eastern Europe, and this requires cultural awareness and a basic understanding of how things can be different in different parts of the world,” says Sheetal Agarwal-Shah, an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Webster University’s Leiden Campus in the Netherlands.

Last year, Webster created the Bijlmer Project, giving graduate counseling students pursuing master’s degrees an opportunity to work with women and men who have been