Faculty Spotlight

By Stacey Schultz

An Academic Advocates for Those on the Margins of Society

For two decades, UW Bothell Associate Professor Kari Lerum has been drawn to those on the margins of mainstream society. Analyzing and addressing social inequality is at the heart of her academic research, collaborative efforts, and activism, which often centers on people involved in various forms of sexual commerce.

In November 2010, Lerum and her colleagues from the Best Practices Policy Project and the Desiree Alliance realized they had an unprecedented opportunity. A United Nations review of human rights violations in the United States identified sex workers in a long list of issues spanning the death penalty, racial profiling, immigration policy, and the rights of indigenous peoples.

Specifically the report, known as the Universal Periodic Review, recommended that the U.S. “ensure access to public services paying attention to the special vulnerability of [sex] workers to violence and human rights abuses.”

“That was the first time that the United Nations Human Rights Council had recognized people in the sex trade outside of typical discourse, which frames sex workers as either criminals or assumes that they need to be reformed or rescued,” she says. “This shift allows for social justice and human rights approaches which prioritize collaboration, respect for individual rights, and collective empowerment.”

Together, scholars and activists from around the country created a group called “Human Rights for All” and for the next three-and-a-half months the group worked around the clock. “We had an enormous organizing effort,” she says. “To this day, it’s still hard to believe we actually pulled it off.”

In that short time the group garnered support from highprofile leaders in the fields of health, criminology, and women’s rights; created an educational campaign to inform congressional leaders about the critical issues sex workers face; and they developed a policy brief tailored to the U.S. government, including a refined set of policy-amenable recommendations.

Lerum had an important role in this flurry of activity: She was asked to be the lead in writing the policy brief. After consulting with policy experts from around the country including UW Bothell colleague Bruce Kochis, Lerum designed a succinct but comprehensive document. When her colleagues had an in-person meeting in February 2011 with Harold Koh, Legal Advisor for the U.S. Department of State in Washington, DC they came armed with the policy brief she and her team had crafted.

In March 2011, as a direct result of these efforts, the U.S. State Department made official its new position that: “No one should face violence or discrimination in access to public services based on sexual orientation or their status as a person in prostitution.”

While the group celebrated this historic achievement, which Lerum and her colleagues describe in more detail in an article in the journal Anti-Trafficking Review, they immediately started to pursue next steps. “While this work around the UN was specifically about sex work, we quickly realized that we needed to frame, and distinguish this issue as distinct from, the conversation around human trafficking,” she says. “So the much bigger and ongoing effort here is to critically evaluate dominant approaches for eradicating human trafficking which make no distinction between consensual and coerced sex work and which often negatively impact both groups.”

In September members of the group were invited to meet with Ambassador Luis CdeBaca, who is head of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department. In addition to advocating for the voices of sex workers to be included in policies that impact them, the group pushed for higher standards in evidence-based approaches for human trafficking policies and interventions.

Lerum is currently conducting a community based research project on transgender sex workers in the Seattle region.

She has also been invited to be a speaker at a special conference at the University of Southern California in February 2013 on “Reframing Trafficking.” The work from that conference is expected to result in an edited volume of empirically driven articles that push for more accountability, accuracy, and human rights-based approaches to anti-trafficking efforts in the U.S. and abroad.