Ending Human Trafficking

Zahra Nader joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss why, for nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested, and how a newsroom of journalists writing under pseudonyms is building the record no one else is keeping.Chapters(00:00) - Why Afghanistan Is the Battleground for Women's Rights (02:07) - Founding a Newsroom in Exile (08:23) - How Zan Times Protects Its Journalists (11:59) - Child Marriage and the Laws That Enable It (19:22) - The Collapse of Maternity Care (24:53) - Afghanistan as a Global Bellwether (29:20) - Femicide, Impunity, and the Zan Times Fellowship (31:35) - What Listeners Can Do About Zahra NaderZahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a women-led newsroom in exile reporting on human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011, and in 2016 joined the New York Times bureau there, becoming the first Afghan woman to work with mainstream Western media inside the country. She moved to Canada in 2017 for graduate study and was still a doctoral student in gender and women's studies at York University when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021. She founded Zan Times in August 2022 with $30,000 she had saved to build a home in Kabul, and now runs it from Edmonton alongside a network of journalists who report from inside Afghanistan under pseudonyms. She briefed the UN Security Council in October 2022, and was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied sustainable funding models for exiled newsrooms.Key Points• Five years of Afghan women losing basic rights with no international consequence lowers the floor for what can be denied to women anywhere. International law has not prevented it, and that is the precedent that travels.• A newsroom reporting under an authoritarian regime protects people by compartmenting them. Zan Times journalists inside Afghanistan publish under pseudonyms, connect only to an editor, and do not know each other, so one arrest cannot expose the rest.• The Taliban's Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses removes any minimum marriage age. A father or grandfather can give a child into marriage without her consent, at any age.• School was the brake on early marriage, and it is gone. Parents used to defer marriage until a daughter finished school; with girls out of classrooms, Zan Times found families selling one-year-olds and two-year-olds for future marriage to settle debts.• The penalties encode the asymmetry. A man who beats his wife to visible injury, a broken bone, serves 15 days if she can prove it in court. A woman who goes to her parents and refuses to return, along with her parents, serves 3 months. Sandie converts it on air: 90 days against 15.• The 2025 US funding cut closed 445 clinics and hospitals and cut more than 3 million people off from healthcare. Rural women lost the mobile teams that were their only access to a midwife or a blood pressure check.• Restrictions push women out of healthcare even where they are still permitted to work. A Kandahar midwife supporting three children and a paralyzed father paid half her salary to a distant relative to pose as her brother, then stopped going in when the Taliban started asking for ID.• The countermeasure is documentation. Zan Times' femicide investigation across 10 provinces found roughly one arrest for every five women killed by a family member, with deaths certified as suicide despite visible signs of abuse. Subscribing to the newsletter at zantimes.com is the step the episode asks for.Resources• Zan Times• 'When she turns eight they will take her': rising number of Afghan girls being sold into child marriage• 'I don't know how to save my daughter from her husband': the brutal reality of the Taliban's new marriage law• Inside the deadly collapse of maternity care in Afghanistan• 'Her face was beaten in': how Taliban rule ushered in a new era of women being killed• Statement by Zahra Nader at the UN Security Council Open Debate on Women, Peace and Security (NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security)

Cecilia Gonzalez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to talk about the ten years she spent in an abusive relationship that started at fourteen, and how she now teaches teens to catch the first yellow flag before it happens to them.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (03:20) - Why Love Has to Start at Home (07:15) - Control That Looked Like Protection (10:42) - Jealousy, La Tóxica, and the Stages of Love (14:29) - The Wrong Bus: Love Bombing and the Phone Cycle (17:56) - Blame, Eggshells, and "I Can Fix It" (24:01) - The Music Video That Made Her Leave (27:51) - Three Skills: Communication, Equality, Rights About Cecilia GonzalezCecilia Gonzalez is the Human Trafficking Prevention Coordinator at Higher Ground Youth and Family Services in Orange County. Her students know her as Ceci. She is part of a team that delivers near peer prevention in local middle and high schools, teaching from lived experience rather than from a textbook, and she builds her presentations around quotes and stories that teens recognize from their own lives. She entered an abusive relationship at fourteen with an older partner and stayed in it for ten years, a decade she now uses to show students how control can arrive disguised as protection. She left at twenty-four, when her oldest daughter was two months old. Today she is raising three daughters, and she talks with students about la tóxica, love bombing, the silent treatment, and the rights every young person has: to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.Key Points• Control often arrives in the language of protection, which is why it survives the first look. Ceci's partner came to her soccer practices to walk her home safely, and that became the reason she should stop playing.• The silent treatment is the first flag most teens miss. Someone who cares will have the conversation about what went wrong; withholding it is a punishment, and it shows up long before anything physical does.• An apology that arrives as a gift is one more turn of the cycle. He broke her phone whenever he got angry and replaced it within hours with one her parents could not have afforded, which made the next break easier to absorb.• Time in the wrong relationship is the cost that compounds. Ceci tells students, "If you get on the wrong bus, make sure you get off on the first stop," because she stayed on from fourteen to twenty-four.• Blame does its damage by moving the rules off the record. Once she was reading his face for permission he never had to forbid anything out loud, and she started deciding for herself not to see her friends.• A teen's playlist is a way in, and calling it bad music closes the door. Ceci wanted her mother to ask why she loved the sad, heartbroken songs she played loud enough to get told to turn them down.• Home sets the first model of love, so prevention starts before any relationship does. Ceci grew up without a picture of what affection looks like and assembled one from television, the same gap she now watches teens fill with Euphoria.• Teens act on rights before they act on warning signs. Ceci says the first two skills would have been lost on her at fourteen, but "Hey, Ceci, you have rights" would have landed: the right to feel safe at home, to be a kid, and to be loved in a healthy way.Resources• Higher Ground Youth & Family Services• Higher Ground's Human Trafficking Prevention Program (HTPP)• Global Center for Women and Justice• Safe Communities, Safe Kids (GCWJ, Samueli Foundation grant)• Lil Wayne, "How to Love" (official music video)

Leanne McCallum Desselle joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore what happens when a hurricane knocks out the very systems built to catch trafficking — from a child abuse hotline down for three weeks after Hurricane Ida to the disaster recovery jobs where exploitation quietly takes hold.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (01:39) - An International Lens on a Uniquely American Blind Spot (04:17) - The Signal International Case After Katrina (07:36) - From the Ground in Louisiana to a Researcher's Path (11:13) - Why Research Doesn't Reach the People Who Need It (14:50) - Who Disasters Make Vulnerable to Trafficking (20:18) - Responding in the First Days — and How to Prepare Before the Storm (25:22) - Creative Partnerships That Kept Services Running (28:27) - Turning Research Into Policy and Practice (34:32) - Advice for Researchers Entering This Space About Leanne McCallum DesselleLeanne McCallum Desselle is a Research Analyst and Training & Technical Assistance Provider at RTI International, a role she has held since August 2022. She spent nearly a decade in frontline anti-trafficking work in Louisiana, coordinating the Greater New Orleans Human Trafficking Task Force for more than three years and later managing a statewide child and youth trafficking initiative for the Louisiana Alliance of Children's Advocacy Centers. In 2018 she was appointed Chair of the Labor Trafficking Committee for the Louisiana Governor's Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board. At RTI, she leads technical assistance for a U.S. Office for Victims of Crime initiative on child and youth trafficking outcomes and contributes to research on labor trafficking prosecutions and the effects of disasters on trafficking vulnerability. She holds a Master of Arts in International Studies, concentrating in Human Rights and Human Trafficking, from the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from Linfield University.Key Points• Hurricane Katrina's Signal International case, in which hundreds of Indian guest workers were defrauded and trafficked into labor repairing Gulf oil rigs, became one of the largest labor trafficking settlements at the time and helped drive Louisiana's first designated federal anti-trafficking funding in 2007-2008.• Housing instability is one of the biggest drivers of post-disaster trafficking risk — when people lose their community, school, and church, they become far more vulnerable to someone who says, "Don't worry, I'll take care of everything. I'll get you a job."• Disasters disproportionately hit communities already made vulnerable by redlining, the historical practice of confining people of color and poor families to lower-lying land that's more exposed to flooding and severe weather.• In interviews with 46 disaster and trafficking responders, foreign national day laborers doing disaster recovery work and isolated children in disrupted households emerged as two of the populations most vulnerable to exploitation after a storm.• After Hurricane Ida, Louisiana's child abuse hotline — the mandated channel for reporting child trafficking — was down for at least three weeks, leaving responders with no way to report what they saw.• Preparation has to happen before a disaster, not during one: without a plan already tested and rehearsed, coordinating a trafficking response becomes nearly impossible once phones, power, and staff are all unreachable at once.• Louisiana responders found creative workarounds under pressure, from standing up a mobile forensic interview unit in a neighboring parish within 24 hours to running child trafficking response operations out of a partner's building after their own offices were destroyed.• Leanne and her RTI colleagues sent their findings directly to the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board, which is now recommending changes to state labor procurement practices to help prevent forced labor.Resources• RTI International• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters (RTI research project page)• Human Trafficking in the Wake of Natural Disasters: A Case Study of Preparedness and Response in Louisiana (Violence and Victims, 2026)• The Intersection of Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters: A Scoping Review (Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, 2024)• Advancing the Field: Human Trafficking and Natural Disasters — Recommendations for the Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board• Labor Trafficking in Construction During the Recovery and Reconstruction from a Natural Disaster (OPRE Report, Barrick & Pfeffer)• Louisiana Human Trafficking Prevention Commission and Advisory Board• David, et al. v. Signal International, LLC, et al. (ACLU case page)

Dr. Xanthe Scharff joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explore how displacement, missing documents, and unequal citizenship laws quietly raise the risk of trafficking, and why prevention starts long before a child is ever exploited.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction (00:55) - Xanthe's Path and the Freedom Fund's Frontline Model (06:08) - The Women's Refugee Commission: Listening to Women (10:19) - How Birth Certificates Prevent Trafficking in Bangladesh (13:17) - Citizenship, Statelessness, and Life in the Shadows (19:13) - Conflict, Trauma, and Women Rebuilding After Displacement (23:46) - Girls' Education and the Story of Anesi (28:14) - Prevention Over Rescue: What the Field Still Misunderstands About Dr. Xanthe ScharffDr. Xanthe Scharff is President and CEO of the Women's Refugee Commission, which she joined in June 2026 after more than two decades spanning humanitarian action, women's rights, journalism, philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership. She previously served as Managing Director for External Affairs and Editor-at-Large at The Freedom Fund, a global collaborative working to end modern slavery, where she helped elevate the work of hundreds of frontline anti-slavery organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Earlier, she co-founded The Fuller Project, a global newsroom reporting on women, served as Associate Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and founded Advancing Girls' Education in Africa. She has raised more than $200 million for social-impact organizations and reported on Syrian refugees in Turkey, with earlier roles at CARE, Save the Children, the United Nations, and the World Bank.Key Points• The Freedom Fund gets money directly to the front lines, granting to almost 200 frontline organizations, and this past year 47% of them were led by survivors.• Birth certificates are a frontline prevention tool: in Bangladesh, mothers believed they couldn't register children without the father's signature, until Freedom Fund's partners socialized a legal provision and registered over 400 children in about six months.• Twenty-four countries still bar mothers from passing citizenship to their children on equal terms with fathers, and Syria's law can leave a returning mother's child stateless and more vulnerable to exploitation.• When people lack legal status, they have no one to report abuse to, and fear of deportation keeps exploited workers silent even when wages are stolen or they are assaulted.• Immigration and refugee are not synonyms; asylum seekers are specifically people seeking protection, a distinction that gets blurred as legal pathways narrow.• Before larger plans, women's groups like Women of the Sun in Gaza and the West Bank made addressing trauma and supporting one another their first priority.• A scholarship alone did not change Anesi's future; without cultural support structures, she left school for marriage after one year and later regretted it, showing that prevention takes more than money.• Xanthe urges the field to listen to survivors: "Alternative livelihood activities in our community is what's going to protect our children," and "we don't need to wait until the children have been trafficked to do an intervention."Resources• Women's Refugee Commission• At What Cost? Women-Led Organizations, Funding Cuts, and the Price of Survival (WRC & Refugees International report)• Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights• The Freedom Fund• Refugees International• The Fuller Project• AGE Africa (Advancing Girls' Education in Africa)

Nina Alvarez joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to unpack a question raised after The New York Times published images from Figueroa Street: was legal consent enough to prevent harm? Together they explore the ethical duty of care journalists owe survivors, the lasting life of images, and why covering trafficking responsibly takes more than good intentions.Chapters(00:00) - Introduction: welcoming journalist Nina Alvarez (03:46) - What "ethical duty of care" means for journalists (06:00) - Consent, trauma, and the limits of a release form (16:42) - Why "rescue" is the wrong word for trafficking recovery (22:14) - What editors and organizations should ask before publishing (28:44) - Power, images, and protecting sources long after publication (38:03) - Media narratives, public misunderstanding, and what needs to change (43:14) - Closing thoughts and how to get involved About Nina AlvarezNina Alvarez is a journalist, documentarian, video photographer, and the CBS Assistant Professor of International Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. She has spent more than twenty-five years reporting breaking news, feature stories, radio reports, broadcast segments, and long-form documentaries around the world.Alvarez began her career at ABC News, working on the documentary series Turning Point before covering the southeast U.S. and Latin America from ABC's Miami Bureau and helping establish the network's Mexico City Bureau in 1997. Her work has aired on World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Good Morning America, Nightline, and 20/20, earning three national Emmy Awards.Since 2001, she has reported and produced for Univision, NBC, CNN, NPR, MTV News, and Al Jazeera, with work spanning the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She produced, directed, and photographed Very Young Girls, a Showtime documentary following New York City girls who had been sexually exploited and trafficked domestically, and was a producer on the Oscar-nominated Which Way Home.Key Points• Nina Alvarez explains that the ethical duty of care means weighing the lasting impact a story will have on the person in it, since a published story is permanent and the subject may not fully grasp what that means when they agree to participate.• Consent is not the same as a signed release form; Alvarez describes consent as an ongoing process that journalists have to revisit before, during, and after a story is published.• Alvarez points out that turning 18 makes someone legally able to consent, but it doesn't erase the effects of years of trauma, so journalists still have to weigh whether a survivor's "yes" is solid.• Morgan and Alvarez agree that "rescue" is the wrong frame for trafficking recovery, since most survivors leave and return to their situations multiple times before they're fully out.• Alvarez explains that rescue-centered narratives draw more funding and legislative attention toward policing, while recovery-centered approaches that give survivors housing and health resources get less support.• Alvarez says editors should be asking why minors' first names and identifying details were included in a story at all, and whether a survivor understood that their words to police would end up published nationally.• Alvarez encourages organizations to set ground rules with journalists, including reviewing the story and images in advance, and warns that survivors who depend on an organization for access may feel pressure to say yes.• Alvarez reflects that Very Young Girls, made in 2007, didn't anticipate how permanently images would circulate online, and the women in that documentary now say they can never fully escape those images.Resources• Figueroa Street and the Ethical Duty of Care (Columbia Journalism Review)• Very Young Girls (documentary)• GEMS (Girls Educational and Mentoring Services)• Humanitarian Initiative Bridges• Columbia Journalism School