Ending Human Trafficking | Institute for Social Concerns

YEAR IN REVIEW

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER AS PRACTITIONER-IN-RESIDENCE

Ending Human Trafficking

Every morning, Monalisa arrives at Geddes Hall, thanks her office and the Notre Dame campus, meditates, and sketches pictures to center herself. Then she gets to work. Her goal: the end of human trafficking.

As an international human rights lawyer and graduate of Notre Dame Law School’s LL.M. in International Human Rights Law, Monalisa has advocated for some of humanity’s most vulnerable victims. She has represented survivors and has prosecuted criminals in cases of war crimes, terrorism, gender-based violence, child sex abuse, and human trafficking in five countries. It’s heavy work that could challenge anyone’s faith in humanity, but Monalisa finds that she’s continually inspired by her clients—the victims, the survivors.

Partnering with the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience, the Institute welcomed Monalisa as its first practitioner-in-residence, to bring her lived experience, scholarly knowledge, and practitioner wisdom to bear on questions of human trafficking.

Monalisa’s research at the Institute focused on preventing child sex trafficking and specifically how companies in the hospitality sector can ensure they aren’t complicit in those crimes. Her research was part of a working group of Notre Dame faculty who are coming together to consider questions of trafficking from different perspectives— business, engineering, the social sciences, and the humanities. In February, she gave a keynote on her research at the Pathways to Prevention Conference of the Alliance to End Human Trafficking in Baltimore.

“The Institute for Social Concerns is an oasis in so many ways. This is where I’ve heard the most intellectually sound and practical ideas about making the world a better place—be it the work the Institute is doing with people who are in prison, people experiencing homelessness, or partnerships with the community. It’s such a wonderful, vibrant space.”
– MONALISA, international human rights lawyer

In the spring, Monalisa led an interdisciplinary workshop on human rights advocacy. The course gave students a blueprint to identify rights-based issues with precision, contrast them with competing claims, and propose creative solutions. Students then applied that blueprint to multiple case studies of human rights violations, with a focus on remedying the role of social media and artificial intelligence (AI) in child sex trafficking.

This summer, Monalisa worked with Notre Dame students in Oxford to look at case law data of convicted child sex traffickers and examined whether they have Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) related offences also brought against them. While CSAM has proliferated online, there is little evidence demonstrating its relation to the trafficking of children. Monalisa’s research project explored the hypothesis that virtual abuse contributes to physical abuse of children, including by contributing to child trafficking. It thus shed light on the link between online and offline threats children currently face.

Monalisa returns to the Institute this fall to continue her research, as the Justice Labs expand to add a Human Trafficking Interdisciplinary Research Lab. The Institute and the Initiative of Race and Resilience will co-host the practitioner-in-residence position annually to focus on a project of mutual interest to both units. Through this collaboration and residency, the Institute is developing evidence-based research to tackle the most pressing issues of our time.