Professor Kate Mogulescu to Speak at Human Trafficking Consultation in Bangkok
Professor Kate Mogulescu, director of the Law School's Criminal Defense & Advocacy Clinic, will be one of 15 international speakers at a consultation in Thailand next week focused on human trafficking, titled “Critical Analysis of Criminal Law Approaches to Trafficking in Persons.”
Presented by the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women, which focuses its efforts on preserving the rights and needs of trafficked persons, the event will be held in Bangkok Nov. 17-18.
Mogulescu’s participation will highlight her expertise in anti-carceral feminist approaches to gender-based violence. Research with survivors of trafficking in the United States has found that the incarceration of traffickers was not a priority for the majority of interviewed survivors, who were more aligned with restorative justice models that seek to repair the harm of trafficking by providing survivors with, for example, community acceptance and access to dignified work.
“I am excited to meet and think with advocates from around the world. Collectively, we will look at the harms of punitive approaches to issues of exploitation and abuse. It is an honor to be invited to participate in such a small convening of dedicated activists,” Mogulescu said, reflecting on the upcoming consultation.
Mogulescu’s work and scholarship center largely on gender, sentencing, and reentry issues in the criminal legal system, with a focus on gender-based violence, intimate partner abuse, sex work, and human trafficking. (In 2016, Mogulescu and Abigail Swenstein published Resisting the Carceral: The need to align anti-trafficking efforts with movements for criminal justice reform, Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 6, 2016, pp. 118–122).
Before joining the faculty and launching CDAC in 2017, Mogulescu worked as a public defender at the Legal Aid Society for 14 years.
Mogulescu has founded several pioneering projects directly related to human trafficking, including, in 2011, the Legal Aid Society’s Exploitation Intervention Project, the first effort by a public defender office to address the systemic criminalization of victims of trafficking and gender-based violence; and in 2016, Freedom Network USA’s Survivor Reentry Project (2016), the only national program to coordinate post-conviction relief to human trafficking survivors by connecting them to a nationwide network of pro bono lawyers.
Alongside a small group of advocates, Mogulescu also co-founded the Survivors Justice Project (SJP) in 2020 and grew it into an interdisciplinary collective of activists, lawyers, researchers, social workers, and students—many of whom are survivors of domestic violence and long-term incarceration. SJP is now its own program, but its work remains the signature project that students in Brooklyn Law School’s Criminal Defense & Advocacy Clinic (CDAC) focus on under Mogulescu’s direction.