Dr. Rebecca Macy, the School of Social Work’s L. Richardson Preyer Distinguished Chair for Strengthening Families, spent three days in September with an anti-human trafficking organization in New York City, called Restore NYC.
Restore NYC has been using some of Macy’s research to inform their service delivery, especially for their safe house. They called upon Macy to discuss evaluating their services to ensure that they are helpful to victims of human trafficking.
During the visit, she learned about their programs and their staff, provided consultation to Restore on their work, and began developing plans for a collaborative evaluation.
In October, Macy participated in an interdisciplinary “Roundtable on Human Trafficking” at The Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University as a scholar and expert on human trafficking. The roundtable was held as part of Dr. Anne Gallagher’s visit to the Center. Gallagher, a visiting human rights fellow at the Kenan Institute, is an attorney, a former United Nations official and was the adviser on trafficking and migrant smuggling to Mary Robinson, the UN high commissioner for Human Rights from 1998-02. Currently, Gallagher has leadership roles in intergovernmental initiatives that strengthen legislative and criminal justice responses to human trafficking in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Other university participants at the roundtable were from Cornell, Duke, Georgetown and UNC, representing a variety of disciplines including anthropology, history, journalism, philosophy, political science and sociology.
