University of San Francisco School of Law Anti-pornography: Awards and recognitions: Laura J. Lederer (born 1951) is a pioneer in the work to stop human trafficking.
Lederer is founder of The Protection Project, a legal research institute at Johns Hopkins University devoted to combating trafficking in persons.
[9][10] She was born into a multifaith household, with a Jewish father and Lutheran mother who were practicing Unitarian Universalists, and studied comparative religion as an undergraduate at University of Michigan.
She founded and directed The Protection Project, a legal research and human rights institute at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997.
There, she collected and translated foreign national law on involuntary servitude, slavery, trafficking in persons and related issues and created an international database housing over 3,000 statutes from 190 countries.
In 2000, she moved The Protection Project to Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), where it is housed today.
During the drafting of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, from 1998 to 2000, she served as a witness in hearings held by Representatives Chris Smith and Sam Gjendenson in the House of Representatives International Subcommittee on Human Rights and the late Senator Paul Wellstone and Sam Brownback in the Senate, testifying on the global nature and scope of the problem of trafficking in persons.
From 2002 to 2007, she served as Senior Advisor on Trafficking in Persons to Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Paula J. Dobriansky.
In that capacity she advised the Under Secretary on policy formulation and development, program creation and implementation, and long-range planning for the Office for Global Affairs.
[17] She also organized educational tours of pornographic businesses in San Francisco's red light districts, a tactic later emulated by Women Against Pornography.
[18] Lederer worked closely with then-Supervisor Dianne Feinstein on a San Francisco anti-pornography zoning ordinance targeting sex-related businesses.
Lederer was aided in this effort by the fact that her father, in the role of Building Commissioner in Detroit, had worked vigorously for shaping and enforcing a similar zoning ordinance in that city.
The conference drew many well known feminist speakers, notably Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Phyllis Chesler, Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.
The final event of the conference was the first Take Back the Night march, which converged on the Broadway red light district.
[20] The talks given during the event were later collected in the anthology Take Back the Night—a work which was compiled and edited by Lederer and would go on to stand as a key document in the emerging feminist anti-pornography movement.
[21] In 1994, Lederer founded The Protection Project, a legal research institute dedicated to tracking and combating human trafficking.
There, she created a database of foreign national law on involuntary servitude, slavery, trafficking in persons and related issues.
In 1998 Lederer oversaw the project's transition to the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she remained for three years (1998–2001).
In that capacity she advised the Under Secretary on policy formulation and development, program creation and implementation, and long-range planning for the Office for Global Affairs.
[33]We started by bringing trafficking victims from Russia, the Ukraine, Nepal, India, and Mexico to the U.S. House and Senate to testify at Congressional hearings, because we knew that if American citizens heard their terrible stories we would be successful in passing a new law.
And, perhaps most important, we dared to challenge a subtext in the mainstream human rights movement, a subtext that said, "If we can only get AIDS, STDs, violence, exploitation and rape, drug addiction and drug trafficking, international organized crime and other horrible elements out of prostitution, then it could be a legitimate career option for young women.
Finally, the health implications of sex trafficking extend not only to victims and their children, but also to the customers/users, who can be infected or become carriers and transmitters of these diseases.
Around the world, the definition of a child varies so widely as to make it impossible to have a cooperative effort protecting children from sexual exploitation.
As much as possible, nations should regularize these definitions, taking into account what we already know about the universal physical, psychological and emotional development of a human being.