Laura Lederer

Lederer was born in the Detroit area,[8] to parents Natalie and Creighton Lederer, a civil engineer and later Detroit Commissioner of Buildings and Safety in the Coleman Young administration.[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.[11][12] As part of her undergraduate work, she spent two years studying under and working for David Noel Freedman,[12] and graduated with a BA magna cum laude in 1975.[13]

In late 1976, she accompanied a friend to a San Francisco conference on violence against women. A display at the conference included images from magazine advertising, softcore pornography, and hardcore pornography, including child pornography. Lederer stated in a later interview: "You saw the influence of the really hard-core images, back through the soft-core to the mainstream. Images were repeated. That's how I got involved. It kind of clicked."[11][15] Several participants in the conference proposed to keep meeting and form an organization devoted to protesting violent images of women. In January 1977, this organization was started, which after several name changes became Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM). Lederer signed on as the organization's national coordinator and editor of its newsletter.[16]

As coordinator of WAVPM, Lederer helped organize protests and boycotts against companies such as Max Factor and Finnair whose advertising the organization felt encouraged violence against women.[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. Lederer traveled to Detroit to research the ordinance there, and passed the results along to Feinstein. Though the zoning ordinance faced stiff opposition (notably from the San Francisco ACLU and from Harvey Milk), a milder version of this ordinance was passed in 1978.[19]

In the summer of 1978, Lederer brought on Lynn Campbell to help organize WAVPM and together they helped organize Feminist Perspectives on Pornography, the first national anti-pornography feminist conference held in San Francisco on November 17–19, 1978. The conference drew many well known feminist speakers, notably Gloria Steinem, Robin Morgan, Phyllis Chesler, Kathleen Barry, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin. This conference was significant in that it served as a galvanizing event for the anti-pornography feminist movement in the United States. 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]

Lederer engaged in designing grant programs for philanthropic organizations.[27] She served as an officer at the Skaggs Foundation beginning in 1979[13] and was a founding member of the Global Fund for Women in 1987.[28][29] In 1989, she began her legal education at University of San Francisco before transferring after one year to DePaul University College of Law, where she earned a Juris Doctor in 1994.[30][31] She served as Program Officer for Community Concerns at the L.J. and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation, during which times she created a special International Women's Program

She received her B.A. magna cum laude in comparative religions from the University of Michigan. After 10 years in philanthropy as director of community and social concerns at a private foundation, she continued her education at the University of San Francisco Law School and DePaul College of Law and received her Juris Doctor in June 1994. She received scholarships from the University of San Francisco Law School's Alumni Women's Association and was Mansfield Fellow of Law at DePaul College of Law in 1992. In 1997, she received the Gustavus Meyers Center for Study of Human Rights Annual Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights for her work on harmful speech issues. She served on the Peer Review Advisory Committee, U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention for the research project, "Sexual Exploitation and Family Violence," 1984–1986, and was the youngest member of the National Task Force on Missing Children Advisory Council, U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice, in 1985.

• 2012 Gray/Wawro Lecturer on Gender, Health, and Well-Being at Rice University's James Baker III Institute[3]
• 2009 September, recipient of the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts Humanitarian Service Award for her work to abolish human trafficking.[4]
• Recipient of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies Protection Project Human Rights Award for her "invaluable contribution to the global movement to stop human trafficking."[5]
• 1997-2001 ECPAT (End Child Prostitution and Trafficking) USA, Board of Directors
• 1997 recipient the Gustavus Meyers Center for Study of Human Rights Annual Award for Outstanding Work on Human Rights for book on hate speech, The Price We Pay.[4]
• 1995 Editor and Contributor, The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995.
• 1992 Mansfield Fellow of Law at DePaul College of Law
• 1991 recipient of scholarship from the USF Law School's Alumni Women's Association in 1991
• 1988-1992 Global Fund for Women, founding member and board of directors
• 1988-1989 Council on Foundations Program Committee
• 1985 Served on National Task Force on Missing Children Advisory Council (precursor to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children), U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice, in 1985..
• 1984-1986 served on the Peer Review Advisory Committee, U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention for the research project, "Sexual Exploitation and Family Violence,"
• 1980 Editor and contributor, Take Back the Night, published in 1980 by William and Morrow (hardcover) and Bantam Books (paperback).

I am happy to be here, on Law Day, to talk with you about human trafficking. For the past few years I have been calling human trafficking ... a contemporary form of slavery. When I first made the comparison, I took some heat. Critics said that "slavery" was too strong a term. That it referenced a particular period in our country's history ... that true slavery doesn't exist today. [However] as I examined it further, I became convinced that the comparison was apt. In a previous century, Africans labored in the tobacco fields, and slaves were bred for strength and endurance. The fields have been replaced by brothels and sex shops, and the new trade is in young women and children. Yet even with these changes, the similarities are striking:

• As were African slaves, these young women are tricked, deceived, lured, induced, kidnapped, and coerced into bondage.
• They are taken from their native homelands and moved vast distances to foreign countries.
• In these new places, they do not know the language, the culture, the laws. They are separated from family and friends. They have no identification papers, no passports, no visas. Strangers in a strange land, they have no way to escape.
• As were slaves of earlier times, they are under the complete control of the people who have enslaved them. If they don't do what they are told, they are held without food or water, beaten and raped, their families threatened.
• And perhaps most important, as were the slaves of earlier times, they are forced to do someone else's bidding for someone else's financial gain.[32]

Unlike drugs ... human beings can be sold over and over again. ... The problem has always been marginalized, but it is so great that it can't be ignored any longer.[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. We organized education and awareness campaigns on sex trafficking and labor trafficking in the U.S. and abroad. 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.[34]

In addition to the three Ps (Prevention, Prosecution, and Protection) we also need the four Rs: rescue, rehabilitation, restoration, and reintegration.[35]

Human trafficking ... must be fought on three fronts: Supply, demand, distribution. You have to address all three at one time instead of just one or the other. Preventive campaigns without interdiction, without the high penalties that make it high risk, will not work. Likewise, it is important to address the demand side: the customers who purchase trafficked humans. There is explosive growth of child prostitution worldwide, often linked to trafficking. [T]he phenomenon is fueled by Western demand, and the U.S. increasingly is addressing demand.[36]

Victims of trafficking often endure brutal conditions that result in serious physical and mental health problems. These include HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as other serious communicable diseases such as hepatitis and tuberculosis. Rape, assault, battery, and other forms of violence are also common. Victims of human trafficking also have reproductive problems such as pelvic inflammatory disease, forced abortion, and/or abortion related complications. Unwanted pregnancies are common. Many trafficking victims become addicted to alcohol or other drugs, used to numb the physical pain of long-standing abuse. 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. In the U.S., victims are being trafficked from countries as disparate as India, Thailand, Russia, Cameroon, Mexico, Honduras, and many more. Most often, they are from resource poor countries with more than their share of serious health problems. Some of these countries have a thriving sex industry make them epicenters for epidemics. And where people are being moved vast distances around the globe to do someone else's bidding for someone else's gain, the epidemics are moving with them, thereby having a direct impact on the health of the destination country.

Media reports would have us believe that commercial sexual exploitation is confined to a few poor regions of the world. But new evidence demonstrates that every country, rich or poor, North or South, produces its own child sexual abusers. Laws and law enforcement to prevent child sexual exploitation are hopelessly inadequate. 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. In Tanzania and the Philippines, the age of majority is 12; in a dozen other countries, it is 14: over 100 countries set the age of majority at 18. But these same countries have variations on age of consent to sexual relations. Thus, what may be illegal sexual relations or statutory rape in England may be legal in a Southeast Asian country. A country that prohibits child prostitution but makes the age of majority 12 has no protection for a teenage child targeted by an adult exploiter. . Countries must examine their definitions of child and the age of consent for sexual relations. 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. Only an international campaign can make cooperation among law enforcement agencies feasible."[37]

Survivors have a great deal to offer in the realm of anti-trafficking work. They are the ones who have real-life experience with trafficking. They have a knowledge and expertise that cannot be gained from any textbook or course of training. We need to make our programs more survivor-centered, not out of pity for the survivors, but because every aspect of our programs, whether prevention, prosecution, or protection, will be strengthened, and ultimately more successful, if we do incorporate survivors. For example:

• was a survivor who traced the trafficking routes in one of the first sex trafficking cases in the U.S. She identified the small town in Mexico where the recruiting took place, described the four-day walk through the Mexican desert and across the Rio Grande, told of the houses in transit cities where the traffickers harbored them, and identified the series of trailer brothels in a small rural town in Florida where she and many other young women and children were forced into prostitution through violence, threats, and intimidation. This intelligence was critical in designing interventions tailored to the problem. It could not be readily obtained in any other way.
• It was a survivor in India who returned to her trafficker with a group of anti-trafficking law enforcement officials, and led them to the brothel to which she was trafficked when she was 11, to show us the hollow wall behind which children were hidden whenever there were raids, resulting in the rescue of some fifteen more children that day.
• It is survivors who have designed the most successful rehabilitation programs for other survivors. Why? Because they know in intimate detail the physical and mental hell of slavery and can therefore shape programs that hit the mark, both for emergency shelters when victims are first rescued, and for longer term employment and education programs that can help people learn new skills for survival.[38]

• Editor and contributor, "Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography", published in 1980 by William and Morrow.
• Editor, The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995.
• Author, "Where have all the young girls gone? Female Feticide and its Impact on Human Trafficking"[39]
• Author, "The Health Consequences of Sex Trafficking and Their Implications for Identifying Victims in Healthcare Facilities", published in 2014 by Loyola University Chicago Annals of Health Laws [40]

• Bronstein, Carolyn (2011). Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976-1986. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-40039-9.
• Sides, Josh (2006). "Excavating the postwar sex district in San Francisco". Journal of Urban History. 32 (3): 355–379. doi:10.1177/0096144205282713. S2CID 144555984.

• "TCW Talks to ... Laura Lederer", interview by Camerin Courtney, Today's Christian Woman, January/February 2008.
• "Trafficking as a Law Enforcement Issue", interview by David Denton and Caroline Vasquez, The Yale Globalist, March 1, 2004. (Archived at State.gov.)
• "Alumna Works to Eradicate Sexual Trafficking" by Lawrence Arendt, Dialogue 16(1): 6, Fall/Winter 2002. (scroll down)
• "Enslaved by His Sources" by Jack Shafer, Slate, February 3, 2004.
• "Trafficking Cops" at the Wayback Machine (archived June 14, 2004) by Bob Jones, World, June 15, 2002.
• "No Sale" at the Wayback Machine (archived April 27, 2004) by Mindy Belz, World, March 25, 2000.
• "2007 Frank Church Symposium Delegates: Laura Lederer" at the Wayback Machine (archived September 29, 2007) (scroll down), International Affairs Council, Idaho State University. – Further biographical information.