In this TEDx talk, Pardis Mahdavi argues that prevailing paradigms about human trafficking are fundamentally broken, leading to policies and outreach that often harm the very people they aim to help. She critiques the stereotypical media image of trafficking—young white women abducted by dark‑skinned men—and shows how this narrow view excludes many victims. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Dubai, she shares two detailed case studies: Ravi, a male construction worker who became an illegal migrant after injury, unpaid wages, and a workplace accident; and Meskerem, a female domestic worker who faced abusive employers, police rape, and institutional neglect. Mahdavi highlights how legal frameworks (e.g., the UN Palermo Protocol, the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act) rely on criminalization and testimony requirements that many survivors cannot meet, especially when traffickers are family members or unknown. She points out the role of informal recruitment economies, restrictive migration policies, and moralistic rescue operations that further marginalize victims. The talk calls for a paradigm shift: expanding the definition of trafficking to include all forms of force, fraud, or coercion across genders and industries, listening to lived experiences, and leveraging corporate, governmental, and grassroots pressure to design inclusive outreach and policy. By moving from a rescue‑and‑punish model to one grounded in survivor narratives, Mahdavi envisions a more effective, humane approach to social impact.
Chapters
Thank you so much, Susan. It's really great to be here. Our paradigms currently about human trafficking are broken, and we are in desperate need of a paradigm shift. Our paradigms about human trafficking are so broken, in fact, that the outreach, policies, and laws designed to help people are actually hurting the people they're designed to reach. But it doesn't have to be that way. We actually have the power to affect social change, and we have the power to change the way we conceptualize human trafficking just by shifting our paradigm. Now, when I say the phrase human trafficking, this is probably what most of you think of.
Hi, Daddy! You were supposed to call me when you left. There's someone here. What?
Oh my God, they got Amanda! Daddy, they got me.
All right, listen to me. Go to the next bedroom, under the bed. Tell me when you're there. I'm here. Now, the next part is very important. They're going to take you.
So that's from Taken with Liam Neeson. Many of you have guessed. But what if I told you that it's much more complicated than that? And in fact, the paradigm that's represented in that film is actually part of the problem. Now, that paradigm dates back over a century, namely the paradigm of a young girl, typically white or light-skinned, who's literally taken, kidnapped, tricked, dragged away by often dark-skinned men with Middle Eastern accents in this case, but fill in the blank for the villain of the moment. Right? Now, this is the paradigm we have about human trafficking, but this is the paradigm that's broken. Now, I'd like to share with you 2 stories from the fieldwork that I did in Dubai for over 5 years, and these 2 stories are going to show just how broken our paradigms about human trafficking actually are. The first story is about a young man named Ravi. Ravi was limping the first time I met him inside a makeshift clinic in a part of Dubai called Little Kerala or Little India. Ravi didn't speak much English, but the one word he did speak in perfect English, which he repeated over and over, was abscond. Abscond. You see, 3 weeks earlier, Ravi had absconded from his work as a construction worker due to a significant injury that rendered him an illegal migrant. But let me back up. At the age of 18, Ravi had made a very difficult decision in collaboration with his family. What was that decision? His father had a bit of a gambling problem, so his family had gone into significant debt, and they decided that Ravi would have to migrate to help make ends meet. They had heard from friends and family that there was an abundance of work in the construction industry for Indian migrant men. And so it was that Ravi's father contacted a recruiter and signed a contract that Ravi never saw. When Ravi arrived in Dubai, he was made to live in a labor camp. In a room with 16 other men, no running water and no facilities. He was made to work 15-hour days in 120 or 130-degree heat building those skyscrapers that we see in Dubai. To literally add insult to injury, 3 months into his time in Dubai, Ravi received a phone call from his mother saying that she had not received a single penny of his wages. Concerned about this and knowing that his parents were going into debt every single day, He approached his manager, who was also from Kerala. The manager told him to just be quiet, the wages would come in due time, and that he would just have to wait. So Ravi waited. He waited another 2 months, and still he hadn't been paid. This time when he approached his manager, his manager became angry and told him that he should know that life in Dubai is better than any life in India could be for him, and that he should go back to work. 2 days later, while Ravi was working on the 4th story of a construction site, His manager walked by and accidentally pushed Ravi. He fell from the 4th story, breaking 3 ribs and his ankle, which is why he was in the clinic when I saw him. Unable to work, Ravi was forced to abscond, but unable to afford to book passage on his way home, he was stuck in Dubai and became an illegal migrant. When I tried to get help, when I tried to raise funds for Ravi, talking about him as a survivor of trafficking, I received blank stares. But he's a man, people told me. Men are not trafficked. Men are absolutely trafficked. Let's go to the next story. The next story is of a young woman named Maskaram. Maskaram was from a village just outside of Addis Ababa, and like Ravi, made the most difficult decision of her life in collaboration with her family to leave her home in Ethiopia and migrate to Dubai to work as a domestic worker. Her father had passed away, and her mother had become very sick. And so she needed to migrate in order to make enough money to send home to help her mom get the medical treatment she needed. Now, Meskerem had heard that there was a lot of work and that she could get a contract fairly easily. So she made the journey to Addis Ababa, the capital, and approached the Ministry of Labor in order to find a placement. However, this was in 2008, about 7 years after the more recent moral panic around human trafficking. Had begun, and a lot of policies had sprung up that made it more challenging for people like Meskerem to leave. So one of the policies enacted by the Ethiopian government, similar to what had been enacted by the Philippine government in 2006, was a policy that said unmarried women or women under the age of 30 could not migrate without at least a year of training and increased bureaucracy. Sounds good, right? The idea is that if you just don't let young women leave, then they won't be vulnerable to trafficking and we'll end trafficking. Right? Wrong. These women still need to migrate to make ends meet. And so when they can't go legally and when they can't go through their governments, they become more reliant on unlicensed or shady middlemen recruiters. So Meskerm, like many of the women I met during my fieldwork, was leaving the Ministry of Labor, and lo and behold, she met an informal recruiter, or what some might call a trafficker. And he promised her that he would help her book passage, he would help her find a job, get her visa, all for the small sum of $800. Now let me pause for a moment because I'm sure this is the moment when most of you in the audience are thinking, well, that's where she went wrong. That was a stupid decision. But many of us decide to engage with the informal economy for a number of reasons, right? How many of us have ever babysat or contracted babysitting for cash? How many of us have ever sublet or have been a subletter? How many have downloaded music from Craigslist? This is all the informal economy, right? So the informal economy has an appeal because it's easy because it can be lucrative. So before we are quick to judge Meskaram for making what we might think is a stupid decision, we need to think about how we might get involved in the informal economy as well. Now, Meskaram did not make a stupid decision. She took a calculated risk. She knew that if she put her faith in this recruiter, any number of bad things might happen. But she also knew that if she stayed home, her mother would die. So she took a chance. She went with the recruiter. She was sent to Dubai and placed in the home of a Lebanese family to work as a domestic worker. A few months into her work, the female head of household began abusing her. She would put out her cigarette butts in Meskerm's arm, so she had burn marks down her arm when I met her. After that, a month later, the male head of household began making sexual advances towards her. This was the point at which Meskerm decided to run away. So one day when the, the male and female head of household were out, She ran away and ran to the police station. The first thing that happened when she arrived at the police station is she was raped by a police officer. Most of the police officers in Dubai are imported. And so we have to consider the policy that the U.S. recommends for the UAE of doubling their police officers could be doubling the problem. Second, she was thrown in jail and she was beaten and they tried to get the name of her trafficker out of her. Now, Meskrim did not remember his name. And they told her that they could not protect her if she would not produce his name. They next called her employer, who came, took her home, and locked her in a room for 3 days without food or water. Again, Meskrim ran away and tried to seek out a local shelter that said that it would provide assistance to trafficking victims. When she arrived at the shelter, they asked for the name of her trafficker. When she couldn't provide it, they turned her away. When I met Meskrim, she was living and working on the streets. Trying to make enough money to send home to her mother. Now, trafficking is about force, fraud, or coercion. That's what the policies in the United Nations Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Traffic in Persons defines human trafficking as: any instance of force, fraud, or coercion, regardless of gender, race, class, or industry that an individual is working. So the definition is broad. It's how we operationalize the definition that's the problem. It's our paradigm that's broken. You see, our paradigm about human trafficking functions kind of like a rubber band, and it stretches wide enough to encapsulate everyone in the sex industry, whether or not they were forced, frauded, or coerced, because not all of them are, right? Some people have made a difficult choice to be in the sex industry, but not by force. But then this rubber band shrinks to exclude everyone outside the sex industry, People like Ravi, people like Meskrim, people working in any number of other industries. But if we look at the fundamental definition of force, fraud, or coercion, it's much wider than that, so more people should be able to get services. Furthermore, our paradigms about human trafficking are leading to policies that are couched in a criminalization framework. The UN protocol that I mentioned earlier actually operates out of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. A very curious place for a human rights document. Furthermore, the policies we have, for instance, the policy in the United States, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, says that you can only get a T visa, a trafficking visa that would protect you, if you testify against your trafficker. But I ask you, what do you do if your trafficker is a member of your family? If it's your parents who sent you? If you never saw the contract? Or if you can't remember their name? Our paradigms really need to change. We don't have to have the current paradigms we have. We don't have to think about trafficking the way that we do. We can design a paradigm shift that will affect the way we understand trafficking. We can reconceptualize trafficking, and to do that, we need to listen to the lived experiences of those who've gone through it. Not just people who you hear about, you know, and see in the films you saw, or people who you hear about who just sort of were like damsels in distress waiting for a faith-based organization to come and rescue them, but migrants who empowered themselves or migrants who worked with other migrants to get out of the difficult situations that they were in. We need to hear their stories. We need to listen. We need to understand what they went through and why they went through it. And when we understand their lived experience, we can reserve judgment and we can look at what the structural factors are that led to inequality. What is it that makes people vulnerable? What is it that makes people have to leave home? Poverty, racism, gender discrimination, etc. Now, unfortunately, trafficking is colored by morality. People have this desire to save certain people, often from themselves, and this goes back to the issue of the sex industry. Much of our trafficking outreach and policies are so focused on the sex industry, people wanting to save women in the sex industry, often from themselves, which leads to blanket raid-and-rescue type strategies wherein all women in a brothel are raided, sometimes raped in the process, sometimes abused, taken to jail, sometimes deported. Women say that rescue does not feel like rescue most of the time. Others are seen as if they were complicit in their movement, as less deserving of outreach. So someone like Ravi, who made a decision to move, is seen as less deserving. So we have this sort of morality affect the way in which we think people Deserve outreach, deserve help. But anyone who's gone through force, fraud, or coercion deserves help, and that's how we need to think about it. Because, of course, it's never that simple. We have this idea that trafficking is about organized crime and these big networks like I showed you in the film clip a moment ago. But it's very rarely the case. More often than not, of all the people I've met, all the survivors I've talked to, it's family members or friends, or somebody hears about an opportunity and somebody says, Oh, you know, it's often a boyfriend who says, come with me, I'll take you to this place, and then any number of things go wrong. So the criminalization framework needs to be changed. We need to listen to stories of lived experience instead of spreading images of girls locked in jars or suitcases. And if you do a Google Images search of human trafficking, that's what you'll see— girls in jars and suitcases. And that doesn't do anyone any good apart from further perpetuating the idea that women or girls are commodities that could be bought and sold, which of course they can't. People cannot be bought and sold. They belong to themselves. Their labor might be able to. But when we perpetuate these images, we perpetuate a wrong paradigm. Instead of spreading problematic images, let's spread stories. Let's spread narratives of people. And let's recognize just how interconnected it all is. Believe me, these stories are everywhere. And much of forced fraud and coercion is interconnected to our daily lives. Now, I'm giving this talk today in Southern California. Home to the agriculture citrus industry, right? And I guarantee you many of the tomatoes that some of you will eat at lunch today were picked by people who undergo force, fraud, or coercion on a daily basis. And we need to listen to their stories. We need to think about where it is that our food and our products are coming from. We need to give credence to organizations like the Coalition for Immokalee Workers, which is doing just that. They go around the country talking about farm workers. Having farmworkers talk about the experiences of picking the food that you eat every single day. We need to think about our role in all of this. So to shift policies, laws, and outreach, we need to design a new paradigm for social change. And we can. We can listen to lived experience, hear what people need, and hear what people go through to design an outreach strategy or even design a new space that would be safe for people. We can leverage what pressure we have on corporations, governments, and NGOs, like has been recently done for Walmart and Costco with the scandal about the seafood, which some of you, some of you probably know. We can ride the wave of recent interest coming from the 4 major sectors of Wall Street, Washington, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. And instead of critiquing these sectors as problematic and perpetuating the problem, we can look at them as agents for social change. It's only by bringing lived experience in line with policy, law, and outreach that we can affect and impact the rights of those most challenged by this difficult time in our global economy. And it's only by talking about all of these issues at the grassroots level and from the ground up— that's how we design a paradigm for social change. Thank you. Thank you.
