Human Trafficking Clinic to Publish Labor Trafficking Toolkit
Students and faculty collaborated on toolkit for the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.
Boston University School of Law’s Human Trafficking Clinic (HTC) has produced a comprehensive toolkit—the first of its kind nationally—for employees at the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) to identify and provide trauma-informed services to child labor trafficking victims. This effort is in collaboration with a five-year federally funded program to establish multi-disciplinary teams (MDTs) throughout Massachusetts in response to child trafficking. MDTs have been established in Suffolk, Hampden, Bristol and Barnstable/Dukes Counties, with additional counties initiating teams in 2018.
The labor trafficking toolkit, scheduled to be published in spring 2017, provides guidance to DCF employees about a 2011 state trafficking law that requires mandated reporters to file a report of an abused or neglected child if they believe he or she was a victim of labor or sex trafficking. Julie Dahlstrom, director of the Human Trafficking Clinic, also hopes the toolkit will outline best practices concerning labor trafficking cases and how to build a multidisciplinary team to combat child labor trafficking.
The project began in the fall of 2015, when HTC students worked to shape the toolkit. Christina Tousignant-Miller (’17), the student leading the effort, jumped at the chance to join the team. She had studied child sex trafficking and was eager to learn more about child labor trafficking cases. “I came to BU Law because it’s one of the two schools in the nation with a Human Trafficking Clinic,” Tousignant-Miller said. “And when I got to the clinic, it was important for me to do real work and have an impact on child trafficking cases.”
Tousignant-Miller authored the section about interviewing child victims and contributed to various aspects of the toolkit related to mandated reporting and the DCF response. Tousignant-Miller’s in-depth research revealed how underreported child labor trafficking is. “When agencies such as the DCF or the police encounter victims, there could be red flags,” she said. “If these red flags go unnoticed, the incident goes unreported. The toolkit aims to ameliorate this problem by making agencies aware of and familiar with the signs of labor trafficking.”
“It’s so important that agencies know how to assess a situation and to realize when there is trafficking going on,” Tousignant-Miller said. “Our toolkit will help those agencies, and hopefully it will be given out publicly to inform and help more organizations.”
For Dahlstrom, seeing her students learn and grow has been as rewarding as working on the toolkit itself. “It’s been really exciting for the students to have a real impact on such an important global issue,” Dahlstrom said. “They’ve been able to engage with different stakeholders who have different perspectives and learn from them, while working toward solving a pressing problem.” The review process for the toolkit is nearing its end, and the toolkit will be published in spring 2017, Dahlstrom said.
This toolkit is not the HTC’s first published report on trafficking—in 2013, the clinic collaborated with the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Offices and WilmerHale on a manual entitled “Representing Victims of Human Trafficking in Massachusetts,” which guides attorneys through the process of identifying and assisting victims of human trafficking. The clinic is also currently working on a report in partnership with Google, Demand Abolition, and Thorn that will guide prosecutors in cases of commercial child exploitation.
Reported by Johanna Gruber (CAS’16).