The Initiative to End Slavery (IES) is a multi-stage project designed to address the devastating effects of sex trafficking on women and girls.
The Initiative to End Slavery (IES)
Commercial sex trafficking has devastating effects on women and girls including intense psychological trauma, infectious disease (most notably HIV/AIDS), extensive physical injury, drug addiction, unwanted pregnancy and malnutrition. Sex trafficking thus not only violates human rights and contributes to harmful social and economic conditions for women, but also poses a significant public health problem. The Initiative to End Slavery (IES) is a multi-stage project designed to address this problem.
The Division’s Initiative to End Slavery’s first set of activities comprises 8 social-science research case studies on human trafficking in South America and Asia, as well as the United States and Europe—specifically on sex trafficking among women and girls. UN agencies estimate the number of individuals trafficked for “commercial sexual exploitation” as between 1 and 2 million per annum. The emphasis on sex trafficking and health has taken on urgency, because of new research demonstrating a link between sex trafficking and the spread of HIV/AIDS in parts of Asia. Given the plethora of physical and mental health problems facing sex-trafficked women and girls, understanding the health sector’s role in mitigating sex trafficking in communities is timely and important. Our selected sites will be cities in which sex trafficking is highly prevalent and the health care infrastructure is sufficient to facilitate successful interventions.
These sex trafficking case studies are designed to address three research questions: (1) How can a public health lens identify root causes of sex trafficking among women and girls?; (2) How can health systems directly intervene to assist sex-trafficked women and girls; and (3) How can health systems contribute to multi-sectoral anti-sex trafficking strategies? To our knowledge, only a few studies have targeted hospitals and other health institutions as entry points to study local sex trafficking contexts and their social determinants.
Launching this research within a division of a leading academic medical center is a major advantage. Sex trafficking is a salient hospital issue due to the well-documented adverse health effects of trafficking on its victims. As frontline providers, physicians, nurses, and other allied health workers are uniquely positioned to identify and treat trafficking victims; more awareness and research that can elucidate how sex trafficking occurs will help these providers during potential encounters with victims and/or their traffickers. Because most MGH attending physicians teach at the Harvard Medical School, the study of sex trafficking from a health perspective could lead to professional leadership emerging from medical schools and medicine residency programs, as a result of IES.
