The Intersection of Rights and Risks: a Public Health Response to Human Trafficking

Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program Undergraduate Seminar, Spring 2023

This course is an interdisciplinary seminar exploring the historical, political, social, cultural, and economic factors contributing to current experiences and responses to human trafficking. The focus will be on the public health response and human rights framework with special consideration given to displaced and im/migrant communities in the Americas (largely Latina/o/x) and along the U.S./Mexico border. The primary objective of the course is to provide a comprehensive understanding of domestic and global human trafficking from a critical public health perspective and to engage students in thinking through the intersecting policies, systems of oppression, social determinants of health, responses in the human trafficking movement, and the need for victim-centered safety and interventions. Students will gain knowledge for beginning to integrate human trafficking policy and advocacy into practice and explore ways and processes in how to best incorporate these understandings into their varied communities and disciplines.

Course Instructor

Melissa I. M. Torres, PhD, MSW, GLC Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery, January—May 2023

Global Health Scholar & Researcher, Global Mental Health Division (Anti-Trafficking Program and the Clinic for International Trauma Survivors); Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Baylor College of Medicine
Project: “The Intersection of Rights and Risks: A Public Health Response to Human Trafficking”