The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law seeks to actively integrate the on-the-ground experience of social entrepreneurs from around the world with cutting-edge academic research at Stanford University. Building a tangible bridge between academia and practice, the Program exposes students to new models of social change through innovative courses and provides practitioners the opportunity to build their individual and personal capacities as social change leaders.

Human trafficking is a global phenomenon that each year forces millions into lives as prostitutes, laborers, child soldiers, and domestic servants. Traffickers prey on the weak and vulnerable, targeting young victims with promises of a better life. This modern form of slavery impacts every continent and type of economy, while the industry continues to grow with global profits reaching nearly $32 billion annually. In spite of these mounting figures, prosecution and conviction rates are not increasing relative to the surge in these crimes. According to the U.S. State Department, for every 800 people trafficked in 2006, only one person was convicted.

As the size and scope of human trafficking increase, less is known about the root causes of human trafficking on this new scale. A better understanding of the conditions that give rise to human trafficking – income inequality, rural poor populations, cultural norms, and gender disparities – will bring the international community closer to curbing the growth of this criminal industry. Understanding how multi-lateral institutions – from the World Bank to the United Nations – may unwittingly encourage the industry will lead to more informed policies for its eradication.

The Program on Human Rights (PHR) at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law is launching a new research initiative on human trafficking to address these challenges and generate new knowledge on this issue of international concern. Working in collaboration with Stanford faculty and students, this project will draw on research underway across the university to create a forum on human trafficking. The goal is to produce collaborative research and policy recommendations to better address the multiple dimensions of human trafficking.

"This research collaborative will shift the agenda on human trafficking from one that has adopted a criminal-legal paradigm to one that focuses on all the pre-conditions for trafficking," said Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights. "Interdisciplinary tools drawing on law, health, gender, and psychology will introduce an integrated approach to this critical area of study."

The speaker series will begin Dec. 12 at a private research workshop featuring Madeleine Rees, the United Nation's representative in post-genocide Bosnia, and Laryssa Kondracki, director of The Whistleblower. Rees is known for her efforts to expose the U.N. for its failure to shut down brothels in Bosnia where they were actively used for human trafficking. The Whistleblower documents this story and helped ignite a debate at the U.N. over this problem.

The Dec. 12 workshop will bring together a multidisciplinary group of Stanford faculty, researchers, and students working on aspects of human trafficking in preparation for the launch of the 2012 speakers series offered in the winter quarter. The 2012 roster of speakers represent a diverse group of those advancing research, policy and activism on human trafficking.

Participants include: Rosi Orozco, Mexican congressional representative and anti-trafficking leader; Bradley Myles, executive director and CEO of Polaris-USA; and Dr. Mohammed Mattar, executive director of the Protection project at Johns Hopkins Univeristy. Stanford researchers will be paired with speakers to pursue original research on the causal factors impacting this field of study. 

The 2012 Human Trafficking is Global Slavery speakers series is funded by Diana Jenkins, founder of the Sanela Diana Jenkins Foundation for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The series is free and open to the public. It will meet on Tuesdays from Jan. 10 to Mar. 13 at the Bechtel Conference Center at Encina Hall, Stanford. It is available to Stanford students as a 1-unit course cross-listed under INTNLREL 110, IPS 271, and POLISCI204.

Danny O'Brien led the Nov. 10  Liberation Technology seminar on the topic, “Reports from the Bleeding Edge: What Journalism in Syria, China and Iran tell us about Silicon Valley's Future”. O'Brien is the Internet Advocacy Coordinator at Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which was founded in New York in 1981 with the aim of defending individual journalists worldwide.

O'Brien argued in the seminar that after focusing on mainstream journalists for more than a decade, CPJ started its Internet program based on the realization that a considerable number of people who are jailed for their journalistic work worldwide are online journalists. CPJ’s Internet program is aimed at protecting them through their involvement in their individual cases, research and lobbying. Through these efforts CPJ hopes to create an online ecosystem that is generally safe for most users, and for journalists who use the online medium.

This wide-ranging talk took us through different kinds of threats that journalists face in the online space including attacks against their websites, lack of legal protections, and physical dangers that journalists face based on the available information about themselves and their sources. O'Brien argued that while there are tools being developed to protect activists that could potentially be used by journalists, such tools are rarely used since journalists do not think of the threats to their work until they actually get into trouble. CPJ is committed to making the online environment safe for all journalists, rather than just providing training to journalists on precautionary measures.

He discussed some of the issues that CPJ has been advocating among large internet corporations and governments, and the strategy of enabling journalists themselves to meet with such agencies to make a persuasive case.

Paul Kim, the assistant dean for technology & CTO at Stanford University's School of Education, led the Nov. 3 Liberation Technology Seminar Series on “Global Inequalities, Achievement Gaps, and Mobile Innovations.” Kim has been reconceptualizing the whole education system, with a particular focus on the education of children in deprived areas.

Kim firmly believes that education, as is expressed in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, is a basic human right that should be available to all children, but the fact is that a large number of children are out of school, and many receive a poor quality of education. In this context, technology could enable the realization of the right to education.

Kim argues that donation of computers in a large scale was the main mode of introducing technology in education, but this model has its problems. Often computers are donated to schools but are not used either because people do not know how to use them or there is no access to electricity. Kim emphasized the importance of creating tools that are simple and likely to work in highly challenging conditions. With this in mind, he has started focusing on the use of mobile phones as a learning tool, given their low power consumption, low cost, ubiquitous availability and increasing capabilities.

He also pointed out that there have been many initiatives such as one laptop per child, where even the distribution of 110,000 in a place like Rwanda has not made a major contribution to educational achievements. He argued that such projects are detached from curriculum, and are focused on technology. In order to be successful, you have to understand the ecosystem, not just particular pieces of technology. You have to understand the value perceptions of everybody in the ecosystem: teachers, parents and students and make sure that all of the values are aligned. Otherwise the project will not succeed.

Kim further suggested that there is often a block at the teacher training stage and that there is a problem of pedagogy. Kim suggested that we should focus more on student centered exploration based learning because if you merely teach, the students switch off. However, if you engage with them, they will be more responsive. He suggested that instead of using words such as ‘teaching’ and ‘students’, we should use words such as ‘coaching’ and ‘agents’ and Kim’s own innovations follow are based on the philosophy of enabling student-led learning with the teachers playing a supportive role.

When using technical devices, Kim argued, it is incredibly important to empower the children themselves to learn how to use them rather than just telling them what to do. Students will express their creativity and extensive knowledge when they are given the opportunity to do so.