Originally published at the Georgia State University News Hub, Oct. 15, 2015. Archived at https://newsarchive.gsu.edu/2015/10/15/atlantas-fight-against-modern-day-slavery/.
By Jeremy Craig
Monica Khant is still haunted by some cases she’s taken on in her 18 years of fighting human trafficking.
“We had a case where our client had to cut the grass with scissors, just to make sure she ‘knew her place,’” said Khant, executive director of the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network (GAIN). The woman had been forced into modern-day slavery as a domestic servant and endured what was tantamount to psychological torture. “She was forced to eat spoiled food, and if she threw it up, they made her eat that.”
Victims are often lured into subjugation in hopes of a better life—maybe a job or the opportunity to get an education—or, as runaway teens, just a way to survive on their own.
They find themselves forced into domestic servitude, sex work, industrial labor or toil in agriculture. And thousands of victims are trapped here in Atlanta, one of the largest epicenters of human trafficking.
One of the things that makes Atlanta prosperous—its role as a transportation and logistics hub—also makes it ripe for human trafficking. Sports events and conventions draw crowds that make the city attractive for traffickers, according to Khant, who’s teaching a course about the topic at Georgia State.
A major problem facing law enforcement, prosecutors, legislators and anti-trafficking activists is that nobody really has concrete numbers about victims.
“You can measure the number of arrests, prosecutions and convictions of traffickers, but it’s harder to measure the number of victims,” said Jonathan Todres, professor of law at the Georgia State College of Law and the Center for Law, Health and Society.
That makes it hard to evaluate the effectiveness of new initiatives and legislation designed to fight trafficking, or to make evidence-based decisions.
“We face challenges in comparing or measuring progress because we don’t have any baseline data,” said Todres, who has been part of a National Academies Institute of Medicine committee studying sex trafficking of minors. “But I think that we are beginning as a society, and different jurisdictions, to get better at identifying victims and survivors. We still have a long way to go.”
Much of the anti-trafficking work in Atlanta has focused on sex trafficking, while less is known about labor trafficking. It happens in agriculture, textiles, the service industry, construction, mining, fisheries and elsewhere, according to Todres.
But because it’s at the heart of the human trafficking crisis, Georgia has been one of the better states at fighting the trade, he said.
“One of the exciting things about Georgia,” Todres said, “is there’s an active community fighting trafficking, and there’s a community that realizes the importance of ensuring services for survivors, and starting to think about prevention.”
Khant and her colleagues advocate for victims in the legal system and connect them with organizations to get them necessities as basic as shelter.
Hearing their tragic stories day in and day out could burn someone out fast. But for Khant, the results of her work make it all worth it.
“There is a lot of cruelty, a lot of depravity, and you wonder what is going on in this world,” Khant said. “But what’s so beautiful is working with the victim, at one of their most down points in their life, and seeing the light in their eyes come back. They slowly become themselves again, and that is really the most rewarding thing to see. That’s what keeps us in this work.”