The summer after her sophomore year at Pomona College, Elena Shih ’04 interned as a Mandarin-language legal intake counselor with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.
That experience—made possible by the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP)—changed her life.
This fall, she shared insight about the work it inspired for Pomona’s Asian Studies Distinguished Alumni Lectureship.
Understanding the experiences of people at the margins
The year was 2002, and the United States had just introduced a visa program (known as a “T-visa”) for people, usually women, who had been trafficked. The work was eye-opening, but not for the reasons Shih expected.
“In those early years, it was nearly impossible to get women T-visas, because they had to claim they had no knowledge of their difficult migration decisions,” says Shih. The women “had to say ‘I’m a complete victim. I know nothing, and I’m willing to prosecute my trafficker in court.’”
“So [the T-visa] mandated that people who are already incredibly precarious and at the margins would participate in a [frightening] U.S. court process.”
Shih discovered that while there was a desire to provide humanitarian assistance through programs such as the trafficking visa, government policy didn’t always mesh with the ways the women felt comfortable sharing their testimonies.
She continued to explore trafficking in a second internship after her junior year and followed the thread through her senior thesis, for which she won the Asian Studies Department’s Chanya (Butt) Charles ’90 Senior Thesis Prize.
Learning on-the-ground realities
A Fulbright Fellowship in 2004-05 allowed Shih to expand her research to China, where again she was based at a women’s legal aid organization. While Shih was hearing from the U.N. and U.S. that a clear anti-human trafficking agenda was needed globally, what she found in China was an on-the-ground reality that focused on more immediate concerns like domestic worker rights, fighting against sexual harassment in the workplace, and women’s rights following divorce.
Two decades later, now as associate professor of American studies and ethnic studies at Brown University and director of the Human Trafficking Research Cluster through Brown’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Shih continues the research she began at Pomona.
Her work has resulted in the award-winning book Manufacturing Freedom: Sex Work, Anti-Trafficking Rehab, and the Racial Wages of Rescue.
In the classroom, Shih often discovers that students’ views of trafficking are shaped by popular movies such as Taken, where characters get kidnapped in order to be forced into commercial sex work.
“In my two decades of research, we find very few cases like that,” Shih says. “The majority are everyday instances of people making very, very difficult decisions.”
The Hollywood-based perception, Shih says, “really ignores the heart of what human trafficking is about, and that is the uneven power relations between people who hold enormous amounts of power and the vast majority of people in the world who are at the margins.”