Over the past nine months, the International Human Rights Clinic at Santa Clara Law has engaged in fact-finding and research to investigate local responses to human trafficking in the California Bay Area, focusing on Santa Clara and Alameda Counties. Our research has focused on actors in the three key sectors of legal aid, law enforcement, and victim services agencies.
Through this work, we have gained insight into the problem of human trafficking in the BayArea and how the different actors are working together to combat the problem and serve victims.
This research, which the Clinic will publish later this year as part of a comprehensive report, forms the basis for our comments to the US Department of Health and Human Services on its Federal Strategic Plan for Services to Human Trafficking Victims. The Clinics comments reflect the recommendations and expertise gathered through dozens of interviews with local actors who regularly interact with human trafficking victims. Because the Bay Area is a national hot spot for human trafficking activity, we hope that the lessons we have learned from actors here will prove useful on a national level as well.
The Federal Strategic Action Plan on Services for Victims of Human Trafficking in the UnitedStates can be downloaded here.
The Clinics submission to the federal government can be downloaded here.
The following Santa Clara Law students have worked on the Clinics upcoming report on human trafficking in the Bay Area: April Peth, Bernadette Valdellon, Cristina Figueroa Cortes, Elizabeth Maushart, Gloria Lee, Jacqueline Judson, Jaqueline Ramirez, Jessica Chan, Katherine Krassilnikoff, Scott Idiart, and Sophia Areias.
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