The International Labour Organization estimates that 20.9 million people around the world are currently held in forced labor and servitude. Human trafficking is constantly in the headlines in the United States, but it can be hard to separate fact from fiction. Martina Vandenberg will debunk the myths and examine concrete case studies compiled in her work combating trafficking in the United States and abroad.

 

Martina Vandenberg, founder and president of The Human Trafficking Pro Bono Legal Center in Washington, D.C., has spent nearly two decades fighting human trafficking, forced labor, rape as a war crime, and violence against women. She has represented victims of human trafficking pro bono in immigration, criminal, and civil cases. Widely regarded as an expert on an array of human rights issues, she has testified before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, the Helsinki Commission, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Armed Services Committee. During her four years as a Human Rights Watch researcher, she authored two reports on forced prostitution and rape in Bosnia and Kosovo. A Rhodes and a Truman Scholar, Vandenberg received the Paul and Sheila Wellstone Award from the Freedom Network USA (2012) and the Joseph E. Stevens Award for Public Interest Law from the Truman Foundation (2013).