Indiana Int’l & Comp. Law Review 
Volume 33                                   Number 2    2023 

 

 

SYMPOSIUM 

 
TRANSCRIPT 

 

WELCOME REMARKS & WOMEN AND HEALTH PANEL 

 

>>>9:34 a.m.  
Lizzie Ford: Good morning, everyone. I am glad you all could be here to start 

Women’s History Month out with this symposium. My name is Lizzie Ford, and 

I have the pleasure to welcome you to this symposium. I am the Current Live 
Symposium Editor for Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, and 

today we are going to present our topic: Where We are Now, and Where We 

Need to Go: The Status of Gender Equality Since the Creation of the Convention 
on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). 

Throughout this panel we are going to be talking with several experts, both legal 

experts and practitioners and professors in academia on the status of gender 

equality and areas such as health, education, and employment. We will also have 
a Keynote speaker who will focus on international trafficking of women and 

issues related to that topic. Before we go on. I have a few thank yous: I would 

first like to thank Gabriela Ocampo, who is the Executive Publication Editor of 
the Symposium for our Law Review and she’s been assisting me with planning 

this event. I would also like to like our Editor-in-Chief Jessie Walker for 

assisting with this event and running the law review in general. I would like to 

thank the members of the Office of External Affairs especially Barbara Beeker 
and Elizabeth Allington, for their assistance in planning this throughout the past 

year. I would also like to thank our Dean Karen Bravo for helping us find 

speakers and plan this event, as well as introducing our keynote speaker later 
today. Finally, I would like to thank all of our panelists. our moderators, and our 

keynote speaker, for taking their time to prepare their presentations, and be here 

today to make this symposium happen. With that I like to turn it over to Jessie 
Walker, who is Editor-in-Chief of Indiana International Comparative Law 

Review for her remarks. 

 

Jessie Walker: Good morning, everyone. As Lizzie said, my name is Jessie 
Walker, and I am the current Editor-in-Chief of the Indiana International and 

Comparative Law Review. I also had a few thank yous I wanted to say, before 

we start this event. I want to thank Lizzie Ford and Gabriela Ocampo for their 
amazing work, putting together the symposium. They’ve done a wonderful job 

putting this event together, and I know you will all enjoy it. I also want to thank 

the numerous people at McKinney Law who have helped in the coordination of 



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this year’s event. We know that we could not do it without you, and we really 
appreciate your contributions. I want to thank our panelists and moderators who 

are lending their expertise to important conversations on women’s rights. We 

are so thrilled to have each of you here today. We are really glad that you have 
all chosen to attend the event. Before we begin, I have some important 

information to discuss regarding C.L.E. credits. We are aware that many of our 

attendees today wish to obtain continuing legal education credit for those 
participants interested in earning C.L.E. hours. Please note the following: to 

obtain C.L.E. credit, we must be able to monitor your participation and 

engagement throughout the duration of today’s presentation. As a result, you 

cannot earn C.L.E. credit by joining the webinar by old-fashioned audio phone, 
so please tune in via computer or the zoom app on your smartphone. To monitor 

engagement, there will be several polls administered throughout the event. 

Please pay attention when these pop up and answer the poll questions. For 
questions related to C.L.E. credits please contact Barbara Beeker at the email 

address on your webinar screen: bbeeker@iu.edu. During the presentation 

today, we welcome your questions to our speakers and invite you to use the 

Q&A feature on the bottom of your screen to engage with our presenters. We 
will reserve time for Q&A at the end of each session, and the moderators will 

facilitate them by reading some of the questions that come in. Now, with the 

procedural issues out of the way, again, I am very pleased to welcome you. We 
will now begin with our first panel. 

 

Lizzie Ford: I am now going to introduce our first moderator for our first panel 
today. It is Brittany Kelly. She is an alumni of I.U. McKinney School of Law, a 

social worker, and an attorney, and currently the deputy Director of Indiana, 

Judges and Lawyers assistance program, or JLAP. Hi Brittany.  

 
>>> 9:40 a.m.  

Brittany Kelly:  

Hi Lizzie. Thank you so much for having me, and I am so thrilled to get to 
moderate this first panel today for this great event. With that, I am going to 

introduce our first panelists on the women and health panel, who is Professor 

Benjamin Davis. Professor Ben Davis is a retired professor from the University 
of Toledo, former chair of the A.B.A. Section on dispute resolution and a former 

consultant for projects in France and several African countries. That is a very 

shortened version of this incredibly impressive bio. But with that, Professor 

Davis, I hand it over to you. 
Professor Benjamin Davis: Well, thank you very much, Brittany. I am really 

honored to be here, and I thank you all for all the work that you’ve put together 

for this conference. So, my topic is in the health area, and I start from the Dobbs 
opinion that just was rendered last term where the was the overturning of Roe v. 

Wade. My paper is actually called Sanctimonious Barbarity: The Forced 

Pregnancy Alito Dobbs Opinion. So, I will talk about 4 topics. One is just an 



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introduction, a second is the Dobbs opinion, as an affront to human dignity, 

comparative law, and finally, international law. Understand that in making the 

presentation, I am very much focused on the international level of things as 
opposed to the domestic. And there is a number of, I think lawyers out there 

who think, “oh, international law doesn’t even exist.” I was reminded of a line 

from a Stevie Nick’s song of Fleetwood Mac Fame called Silver Spring, which 

I changed a little and said, “International law will follow you down until the 
sound of its voice will haunt you. You will never get away.” So, let me start out 

with the Intro. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. As you know, 

everyone has heard so much about is going to encourage what I call forced 
pregnancies. Pregnancies where the individuals affected by the decision in 

various situations such as unwanted pregnancies, rape, incest pregnancies, 

compelled to continue against medical advice. All those kinds of things are 

happening. I just saw this morning that Walmart has announced that it is not 
going to be providing some of the legal abortion pills in its stores, because of 

the threats that have been put against Walmart. So, it is having a dramatic effect 

on women, and I should mention that since some transgender persons can be 
getting pregnant, I would use the term women generally, but trying to cover 

pregnant persons. Also. Okay? The basic approach of Dobbs is to leave that to 

the State legislatures, which is to basically put people in a kind of whack-a-mole 
situation depending on what state they’re in, and what the particular regime is 

in that place. In addition, some of the rules are set up basically to suck away the 

possibility of medical treatment for women, certainly abandoning abortions by 

not criminalizing the woman, but criminalizing everybody who does everything 
to make it safe. 

So, the de facto effect is to reduce women’s health in those settings with 

risks for infant and women’s mortality. So, this is really one of the things that is 
coming out of what’s going on there. And of course, there is more in on the way 

with proposed rules and including a national ban on abortion. So, first, I will 

talk as to the area of this afront to human dignity. If you look at the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights. It says that all human beings are born free and 

equal in dignity and rights. Notice that there is not a word about fetus rights or 

things like that which is part of the discourse that you will hear in the in the 

context of the discussions inside the United States; the idea of the human rights 
being focused on people who are more free and equal in dignity and rights, and 

I think that the God’s opinion undermines this because one of the things it does, 

is a selective version of the history of this country in a manner-that is, where 
things are ignored or dismissed. One of the things about the post-1607 review is 

that it doesn’t really mention slavery. Now, please understand that since an 

enslaved woman was property, she did not have the capacity to consent-so that 

every enslaved woman who was had a child was raped. Whether it was by a 
master or by another slave who would be designated to mate with her. So, you 

have 250 years of rape and forced pregnancy—because there were certain places 

of breeders— that is completely ignored. In addition, during slavery, a lot of the 



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tools that are used on [a person] when [they go to a gynecologist] were 
developed by Dr. Sims, who did it on enslaved women without their consent. 

So, there is a very dark, dark, history with regards to forced pregnancy, and of 

abuse of women, that is there. In addition, one of the things that’s also not really 
being discussed is that there are these complex gender, race, and class issues 

that were going on all through these periods with regards to the status of women. 

My view is that women were not really having an opportunity to have 
meaningful participation in the process of making the various laws that he 

discusses until 1920 at the earliest when the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. 

That’s when women got the right to vote. Before that, it is all speculation about 

whether somebody talked to their husband or boyfriend. To me, the clearest 
thing is that the Nineteenth Amendment was really the first time that women 

could be participating in the selection of those would make decisions about 

them.  The second thing that I would say is that you could even argue farther 
that it is really only in 1965, with the Voting Rights Act that women of color, 

particularly black women were given more meaningful rights to participate. So 

that really, any part of the cases that are looked at prior to 1965, I think, are not 

a very strong basis on which to try to determine some kind of “ordered liberty” 
or “traditions.” I would go even further, and say to you, for example, in my own 

family I have the ancestors. You know who are my ancestors? I will tell you. 

Dilsia who was a concubine. Who was she a concubine for? William Henry 
Harrison, the ninth President of the United States. She was an enslaved woman 

at the time. She was an enslaved woman at the time. She could not consent. I 

know…they had… something happened, because her son Oliver Harrison who’s 
another one of my ancestors, who—there is a long story I could go into, but I 

don’t have time.  

But, the point I am just trying to make is that the history going back to the 

founders and framers is something that is a bit skeptical for the reasons of the 
way that women were marginalized on gender grounds. The race issue still, and 

there were class issues, too, between those who were the planter class or not in 

that setting. So, let’s take a look at the next section on comparative law. In the 
Comparative Law is a look at the United States versus France. I lived in France 

for 17 years; I adopted 2 children in France when who are now up in their 

thirties. So, with regards to the United States, basically right now, one of the 
things that I was kind of curious in the Dobbs setting was that there was a 

submission to argue that the Equal Rights Amendment had come into force since 

the oral argument, and before the decision came out. Mysteriously, that 

submission made to the Supreme Court has disappeared from the Supreme Court 
website. It was there for a while, but it has now disappeared. I always wondered 

“what happened about that?” That might have been a whole new debate. So, 

somewhat like with Brown when they had to have two sessions to discuss a 
particular matter, that could have been addressed because the Equal Rights 

Amendment obviously would have had a potentially significant effect on all 

those people who were trying to focus on traditions of ordered liberty. That’s 



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one thing. But now that the constitutional basis has been eliminated, we now go 

to the State level solutions, and you know, there is a hodge-podge of those 

around the country. At the federal level, there is an effort to codify Roe which, 
by the way, does not include transgender persons, I pointed out. And there is an 

effort to impose a federal ban on abortion. The thing about the federal ban on 

abortions, in addition to all the complications is that it doesn’t take into account 

the mental health of the woman. It specifically excludes the mental health of the 
woman, with concern and with regards to an abortion. Which is insane, quite 

honestly, it is insane. Compared to France, over in France, pretty much, abortion 

started out limited, and it has been expanded. And of course, there is universal 
health care and all the rest of that.  And really the focus is between the woman 

and the doctor. Now, as you move farther along in the time period of the 

pregnancy, then the concerns become about the health of the fetus, as well as 

the health of the mother. But that includes both mental and physical health of 
the mother, which I think is really important, and the process, obviously, gets a 

little bit more “deliberative.” If I could say it like that—in terms of having teams 

that evaluate abortions after, around, 15 or 16 weeks. But none of the kind of 
oppression that I describe in the laws that are here in those States that have a 

problem with abortion seem to be operating. Turning to international law. So, 

there is the Convention—I will call it CEDAW, for short here. So, with CEDAW 
and also the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. There is recognition 

that criminalization of abortion, and denial or delay of safe abortion and/or 

denial of post abortion care, and of course, continuation of pregnancy, are forms 

of—and this is very important—gender-based violence. There is violence going 
on right now, all across this country against women. And this tends to degrade, 

and amounts to torture, cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment on the U.N. 

Convention on the Rights of the Child. GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, are being 
subjected to this violence too. In those places that are not providing the proper 

sexual health and access to sexual health and reproductive rights development. 

Further, it is a criminal matter under the Statute of the International Criminal 
Court, which does define forced pregnancy, but it also says that States have 

powers with regards to making their laws with regards to reproductive matters. 

Of course, they should have powers to do that. The point is, is, are they doing 

so in a way that amounts to forced pregnancy, or is creating unnecessary 
suffering? And my view is that the kinds of things that we are hearing about—

while heavily anecdotal—but granted, terrible, horrible things are happening to 

people in this country, women all over this country, that is unnecessary 
suffering, and it is forced pregnancy.  

Finally, I go with the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel and 

Human or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and it is clear to me that this is 

amounting to, at least, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and I would 
argue that it is torture for every woman who is called in a situation of a force 

pregnancy. So, to summarize, I am just saying to you that from an 

International—Oh, sorry, I forgot one, excuse me. I am terribly sorry—the 



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Convention on Racial Discrimination. Given that this proportion of effect on 
African American women as a particular group, too. That’s a further aspect of 

what’s wrong with this. So, I would end there by just summarizing that the 

results of this decision is a sanctimonious barbarity. I would add one phrase, 
which is, that I was particularly upset by the citation in the article—I am sorry—

in the opinion, to a brief which ran into what we call the “black genocide trope.” 

It is offensive as a matter of international law, because if anyone knows what 
happened when the U.S. was presented with the Genocide Convention, it was 

the Southern political leaders who wanted the United States not to sign it 

because they’re worried about what it would do to what was the Southern way 

of life at the time. So, the genocide—the flipping of the genocide argument was 
just repugnant to me. Thank you very much.  

 

Brittany Kelly: Thank you so much, Professor Davis. That was such a new, 
powerful discussion, and I really look forward to talking with you more during 

the Q&A session at the end of this panel. So, audience members, please be 

putting your questions for Professor Davis and any of our panelists in the Q&A 

box, so that we can continue that discussion during that time.   
All right. Next, we have Dr. Kimi Chernoby. Dr. Kimi Chernoby was the 

first graduate of the University of Florida’s MD/JD program and is currently 

Counsel for the Reproductive Rights and Health at the National Women’s Law 
Center. We are thrilled to have Dr. Chernoby here with us. With that I will let 

you take it away. 

 
Dr. Kimi Chernoby: Excellent! Can you see my screen okay? …I am going to 

take that as a yes. 

 

Brittany Kelly: Yes! 
 

Dr. Kimi Chernoby: I am Kimi Chernoby and I am here to talk to you today 

about discrimination against women in the Post-Dobbs era. So, to begin, I have 
no disclosures, but will clarify that I am here in my own capacity, and so 

anything I say is not representative of the views of my employers. The objectives 

today are to discuss relevant provisions of the Convention (CEDAW) to 
examine State restrictions on reproductive health that have been recently 

enacted both pre- and post-Dobbs, and then to look at the effect these restrictions 

are having on patients. So, the two parts of the convention that I wanted to bring 

your attention to were first Article 12, which talks about the States’ obligation 
to make sure that there is no discrimination against women in the field of health 

care— I should clarify that I am a practicing physician. So that’s the perspective 

that I am bringing to this—and it specifically names that they have to have 
access to family planning services. The other provision is Article 16 that says 

that there can be no discrimination against women in issues related to marriage 

and family relations, and this means that they can choose the number and 



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spacing of their children, and that they have to have the ability to exercise these 

rights. It should be noted that, in some instances in other countries, this has been 

interpreted to protect a right to abortion access. 
So, there are some laws that are relevant in the United States that have been 

enacted around Dobbs. We will start with S B 1, because it is probably most 

relevant to most people who are tuning in. This was the first categorical ban on 

abortions that a State adopted after Dobbs, and that has very limited restrictions. 
It should be noted that is currently under litigation and is not being enforced. 

But there is abortion rights only up to age 12 weeks for rape or incest, and then 

22 weeks for fetal anomaly. And I will note that for pregnant patients who are 
undergoing their anatomy scan, which is the ultrasound that you get to detect 

fetal anomalies. The age is generally 18 to 22 weeks, and so, if you have your 

scan at 21 weeks and 5 days. This really doesn’t allow time to exercise the right 

to abortion in that time scheme. 
The next is a law that was adopted in Idaho. This was actually adopted pre-

Dobbs, but enforcement has changed after Dobbs, and this was a prohibition on 

abortion related activities at public universities or other public schools. But 
you’ll know, even though it is called an abortion ban, or a ban on abortion-

related activities, part D actually bans the dispensation of emergency 

contraception at school clinics. So, this is a ban on birth control. You may have 
seen in the news that after Dobbs, the Attorney General in some views went a 

little overboard, and others do not interpret this law in the same way, but he 

interpreted other parts of this law as banning all forms of contraception on 

college campuses. So, even condoms, they said, could no longer be made for the 
purpose of contraception on college campuses, only for STI prevention. The law 

that probably most of you are familiar with, and obviously this went into effect 

pre-Dobbs, was Texas’ ban on abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. I 
say “heartbeat” because there is no heart in a fetus at 6 weeks it is actually just 

an electrical impulse that we can measure by ultrasound. So, I wanted to clarify 

that. And it has an exception for a medical emergency. But that’s kind of 
ambiguous and is different from federal law. So, that’s why you have seen in 

the news that there are these lawsuits about how this interfaces with our federal 

law, called EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act). So, what 

do these restrictions mean? Well, it means that patients—Oh, I will go back to 
the Idaho one, and just show you that it also says that there is a ban on counseling 

in favor of abortion. So, these restrictions across states are meaning that women 

in our country are having limited access to information which is in contravention 
to the articles that I highlighted, right? Because those say that all women need 

to have access to full information around family planning to make their 

decisions. We have seen that these laws mean limiting access to contraception, 

right? And that’s in contravention of our right or our duty to make sure that 
women have the ability to determine how many children they want to have; if 

they want to get pregnant; how many times; and what the spacing is; in limiting 

access to abortion. And because these laws are big, like the Texas law, it means 



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that there is limited access to therapeutic abortion, because abortion is health 
care, and in medicine we use abortion to treat certain medical conditions. But 

with these laws patients are not able to get the lifesaving abortions that they 

need in a timely fashion. So, we are seeing the consequences to this. 
So, what are the benefits of reproductive choice? Right? What is at stake 

here? Well, there was a study in St. Louis that was done about 2010, and they 

essentially gave access to free birth control to anyone who qualified. So, it was 
women of reproductive health age who did not want to get pregnant in a year. 

And these women, by and large, chose long-acting, reversible contraception. So, 

that means the implant that goes in your arm or IUDs. And in the study, the 

unintended pregnancy rate around patients who opted for birth control was less 
than 1%. And when you compare the abortion rates in this study it was actually 

less than half of the regional and national rate. And this is not to say that birth 

control and abortion should be conflated, right? We do not think of birth control 
as having the purpose of reducing abortion rates. But what it does tell us is that 

when patients have access to birth control without any barriers, they are able to 

make the decisions that they need or want to make, about the spacing of their 

children, and they do not have to subsequently get an abortion. 
So, what are the consequences of these abortion bans? Like I said, in Texas, 

this law has been interpreted so that patients cannot get therapeutic abortions 

until it is at the very end, and their life is really in danger, and they meet the 
criteria of this exception of “the life of the mother.” There was a study done in 

Texas, and it looked at women who presented with a medical condition that 

would normally be treated with abortion between 6 and 22 weeks. And they 
said: what was the morbidity to women before Dobbs when they could get the 

abortion? And what is the morbidity to women after Dobbs when they can no 

longer get the abortion? When they are just sent home, or kept in the hospital to 

do expected management, which is, you wait and watch until their life becomes 
in jeopardy, and then-only then-can you intervene. And they saw almost a 

doubling in the rate of morbidity to the moms—it went from 33 to 57%. So, this 

is not some theoretical harm to women, this is an actual harm that we are seeing 
where women are having increase morbidity. And we know that the United 

States is already at the bottom of industrialized countries when it comes to 

maternal morbidity and mortality. 
So, in conclusion, under the Convention, States have an obligation to make 

sure that women have access, that they have the freedom to make choices about 

the number and spacing of their pregnancies, that they have access to 

information, and that they can exercise those rights. In the United States, in light 
of Dobbs we are seeing that there are increased restrictions on access to 

reproductive health, and so the women cannot exercise these rights that they 

should have, and that the results of these are real threats to women’s health and 
the right to life. 

 



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Brittany Kelly: Thank you so much, Dr. Chernoby, that was really insightful, 

and I look forward to talking with you more during the Q&A portion. Okay. 

Next, we have Anamika Krishnan, and Anamika is an L.L.M student at 
McKinney, studying health law policy and bioethics. She is the founder of the 

Global Bioethics Collective, and her work has been published in the 

Netherlands, Hungary, and Indonesia. Welcome, thank you.  

 
Anamika Krishnan: Good morning, everyone, I am Anamika Krishnan, and 

today, I will be talking about how caste discrimination impacts access to 

reproductive health services in India, especially with respect to women.  So, I 
have heard some scholars addressing this discrimination in health care as a 

“hidden apartheid.” But, when your caste and gender determine your average 

lifespan, access to public health amenities; when there are places where you will 

be turned down as a patient due to your caste and gender, in a democracy, I 
refuse to tone down and dilute the term that I use to address this gross injustice. 

So, today, I will be talking about an open medical apartheid. 

Whenever I use the word “woman” I am using it inclusively. Defining a 
person as a man or woman based on their biological organs is nothing but the 

commodification of human beings. So, I start off my presentation with this very 

basic acknowledgment-let all those individuals who identify themselves as 
women be called women. Initially, we need to define the terms “apartheid” and 

“caste system,” and figure out, are these terms, are these distinct concepts even 

related? Or are these concepts even distinct in the first place? Looking at the 

definition of apartheid it is a system or practice that separates people as per their 
race ethnicity or caste. It emerged as a rigid policy to separate non-white 

population from the white population. So, what about the caste system? As you 

can see from the screen, it is a form of social stratification which involves a 
system of hierarchically round, closed strata. When I use the term “closed” it 

means you are immobile within the system, and as I am focusing on the South 

Asian perspective, the concept of caste system emerged under Hindu system of 
slaves. And there are multiple terms that they used to acknowledge these classes 

of people who are marginalized; there are some who use the term “dalit,” but 

some people find it offensive, as well. So, to be politically correct I will be using 

the term “depressed classes” which were used by the forefathers of the Indian 
constitutional history. At the same time, accountability starts with language—

are these merely oppressed people or communities or should we call them 

“systemically oppressed” and institutionally marginalized populations? Some 
food for thought here. 

Now, we are going to draw parallels between apartheid and the caste system. 

Both of these concepts are founded on the belief that certain categories of people 

are inferior to the majority population. Both of these are graded inequalities, and 
it stops people from accessing basic public health and amenities, and both of 

these are human rights violations. So, how are these concepts really distinct? 

When we use the term medical apartheid, it emerged into popularity when this 



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book was published by Harriet A. Washington. A medical apartheid enforces 
untouchability in medicine and medical myths surrounding how people of color 

are a distinct species and you blame them for their diseases. If you look at the 

caste metrics and public health system in India, look at the statistics of the health 
of the first classes. Mortality of these kids is 76% higher than the rest of the 

population and look at the public health amenity access: there are only 3.89% 

of these classes have access to pipe-water supply or even clean drinking water. 
When we look at the intersectionality between women’s caste and health, again, 

it is problematic and disturbing. Look at the statistics here. The average lifespan 

of a woman belonging to a depressed class is just 39.5 years. While women 

belonging to other communities have at least 54 years which is again, lower, but 
still look at their disparity. And one in four women suffers from anemia. And 

there is a dark deep history of sterilizations in India. There are health care 

professionals and hospitals where women belonging to oppressed classes are 
turned down as bogus patients. Just imagine the adverse impact on the mental 

health of these women. Even if they try to gain access to mental health services, 

they are again turned down, or they’re even told that “the caste discrimination 

is just your inferiority complex, and it doesn’t exist in the 21st century.” But the 
statistics prove otherwise. Talking about caste and reproductive health, 

briefly—the first question that these women have is: “are we safe?” Women 

belonging to these depressed classes are more prone to sexual and gender-based 
violence. When abortion rights were attacked across the world during the 

pandemic, Indian scholars applauded “oh yeah we have the right to abortion!” 

Really?  We need to determine and identify if all women have equitable access 
to reproductive health services—not yet.  There are trained nurse-midwives who 

turned down or even refuse to assess to these women, and there is a higher 

maternal mortality among the classes. There is no education, no awareness and 

there is a complete lack of access to family planning services. As you can see, 
the news clip that I have shared on the screen is again disturbing. So, looking at 

the CEDAW principles these two articles were earlier mentioned by the 

panelists, and there have been numerous general recommendations made by 
different committees within the United Nations to address the intersectionality 

between caste, gender, and access to health. But none of these have been yet 

operationalized. But don’t get disheartened. Is CEDAW applicable in India? 
Definitely, because if you ratify the convention in 1993 and the Indian 

Constitution, which is the largest written constitution in the entire world, shows 

the basic principles and enshrined in the convention, and the Indian judiciary 

has taken a proactive role to assist the applicability of the principles in the 
Convention to the judicial decisions. I have compiled a set of judicial decisions 

over here. I would say that the landmark decision came out in 1997 even though 

the principles had tried and said they were applied before as well. In Vishaka & 
Ors vs. State of Rajasthan & Ors, the Ethics Court of India applied the guidelines 

and principles enshrined in the convention, and asked the union government, 

which is the equivalent of Federal government, the institute a legal framework 



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for combating sexual harassment in the workplace. Take a look at these cases, 

the most recent one being in 2018. There, the Ethics Court took a […] to 

eradicate stigmatization based on menstruation. So there have also been statutes 
instituted by the federal government to apply the principles in practice. And I 

would say that, in my experience, the Protection of Women from Domestic 

Violence Act has been the most effective so far.  

If you ask me, what is the way ahead? First of all, stop the silence, if people 
tell you, discrimination is a thing of the past, tell them that caste discrimination 

is real. Laws should address the intersectionality, and we need to redefine 

medical education. We need to combat the medical apartheid that exists in the 
country [India]. We need to ensure cultural competency of health care 

professionals, and the health delivery system. Even though we have a universal 

health care, we need to ensure equitable access to system as such. Whenever 

you hear the word “morality,” what morality are we talking about? It is not based 
on religious or moral values of distinct sectors of people—we are talking about 

the morality instituted by the constitution in India. To conclude, with the code 

by the father of Indian Constitution “you cannot build anything upon the 
foundations of caste you cannot build up a nation you cannot build that a 

morality anything that you will build on the foundations of caste will crack and 

never be whole.” Thank you and have a good day.  
 

Brittany Kelly: Thank you so much for that great discussion. Next, we have 

our final panelist from this session, and that is Dr. Amber Comer. Dr. Amber 

Comer, received a J.D. From I.U. McKinney School of Law, and a Ph.D. in 
health policy from Indiana University. She is an Associate Professor of Health 

Sciences and Medicine in the Indiana University School of Health and Human 

Sciences, and the Department of Health Sciences, and the School of Medicine 
Department of Medicine. Take it away Dr. Comer. 

 

Dr. Amber Comer: Hello, everyone. It is so lovely to have the opportunity to 
be able to speak with you today. So, today, I am going to talk to you about 

gender differences in withholding and withdrawing life, sustaining treatments. 

What I want to begin with is talking about what withholding is and what is the 

difference between withholding and withdrawing life, sustaining treatments, 
because what we find is that legally and ethically these can both be distinct. So, 

withholding treatments denotes not beginning a therapy. So, for example, 

foregoing the use of a ventilator in a patient. While withdrawing therapy denotes 
stopping interventions when, but for the use of the intervention, the patient 

would die in natural death. In the United States the majority ethics opinion is 

that there is no distinction between withholding or withdrawing treatments. 

However, people do tend to struggle more with the concept of withdrawing 
treatments rather than withholding. And we’ll see throughout this lecture that 

historically, we have gotten those rights legally at different times. So, this is a 

really important topic, because most people who die in the hospital-including 



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90% of patients who die in the ICU-die from a decision to withhold or withdraw 
life-saving treatments. 

And so, just to go through a brief history of the legal and ethical right to 

make medical decisions, including the right to make decisions at end of life, is 
that the outside of Western medical practice, physicians made patient decisions 

for patients, and as we move throughout the ages, physicians held the final 

decision-making authority for medical decisions. In fact, in the Middle Ages, if 
medical treatments did not work, the physician was not to blame, but rather the 

patient was actually recommended to get right with God. And for a long period 

of time in the United States, “head and master laws”, otherwise known as 

coverture, were the norm. Under these laws women were not considered 
separate from their husbands, and therefore husbands were responsible for their 

medical decisions if there was a decision to be made because we were still 

practicing under for paternalistic medicine. 
In fact, the practice of physicians making decisions for patients was the 

norm until the 1970s. When we started to see the pendulum shift towards 

autonomy from paternalism. And although in the West we allow patients to 

make their decisions even now, including women, this is not the accepted 
practice throughout the world. So, what makes the practice of patients being 

allowed to make their own end of life decisions so phenomenal is that women 

played a pivotal role in progressing the legal and ethical right for all patients to 
make decisions at the end of life. The shift towards autonomy really began in 

the 1970s. There were many things happening within the United States which 

helped to shift the transition of medical decision making from paternalism to 
autonomy, including the ending of both coverture laws, and for sterilization 

which interestingly, the last State to ban for sterilization didn’t occur until the 

1970s. Also, we have the Supreme Court ruling and Roe v. Wade.  

In regard to the right to make medical decisions for patients at end-of-life 
women played a pivotal role in progressing the legal and ethical right for all 

patients. And so, I want to talk about these women, and what role they played, 

and how their legacy still continues today. First in Schroendorf v. Society of New 
York, we have Miss Schroendorf, who did consent to go into an examination of 

a tunnel tumor under anesthesia. However, she made it clear that she did not 

want the tumor removed. While she was incapacitated, the doctor removed the 
tumor against her wishes, and Miss Schroendorf suffered gangrene in her arm, 

which resulted in the amputation of several fingers. Miss Schroendorf case 

resulted in the statement that every human being of adult years and sound mind 

has the right to determine what shall be done with his own body. This was the 
beginning of the legal right to inform consent in medicine, a right to inform 

consent which we will see developed throughout World War II, with the 

Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Code, and that we won’t really 
see…come into full…we won’t see the right to make medical decisions come 

into full practice until the 1970s. So, while we started with this right to be told 

what would be happening to us, we still didn’t really have the right to make 



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certain decisions when it came to our own medical care. That was until 1976, 

when Miss Quinlan suffered cardiac arrest with the anoxic brain injury, and 

while she was not brain dead, she was in a persistent, vegetative state, meaning 
that her condition was unlikely to improve. Miss Quinlan was dependent on 

mechanical ventilation to sustain her life, and Miss Quinlan’s parents had to 

actually sue the hospital in order to remove the ventilator, because this was one 

of the first cases of its kind. So, this case resulted in the legal right to withdraw 
medical interventions. One important aspect of this case is that the court in this 

case based the right for patients to withdraw mechanical inhalation on the right 

to privacy found in Roe v. Wade. And it was not until the Cruzan case in the 
1900s, that the court determined the right to refuse or withhold medical 

treatments came under the due process clause— something that now, under the 

Dobbs decision, we are really grateful for that transition in the court’s thinking.  

So, now that we had the right to withdraw treatments, we had to fight for 
the right to withhold treatments. And so, Miss Bouvia was born with cerebral 

palsy, and she required a feeding tube in order to obtain the necessary nutrition 

and hydration to sustain life. Miss Bouvia sued for the right to withhold artificial 
nutrition and hydration, stating that her quality of life was tremendously 

diminished, and that she no longer wished to receive medical interventions. This 

case resulted in the legal right for patients to withhold medical treatments or 
interventions with the court, stating “a patient has the right to refuse any medical 

treatment, even that which may save, or prolong her life.” So, in this case Miss 

Bouvia did win the right to remove her feeding tube, to withhold her feeding 

tube, and she actually decided to live, and actually went on to continue to fight 
for patient rights and be an advocate for patients.  

That brings us to 1990 where we have Ms. Nancy Cruzan. Miss Cruzan, was 

in a car crash that resulted in her being left in a persistent vegetative state, and 
while she was not dependent on mechanical ventilation, like Miss Quinlan, she 

did require a feeding tube to receive the necessary nutrition and hydration to 

sustain life. As Miss Cruzan lacked capacity to make her own medical decisions, 
her family sued for the right to make medical decisions on her behalf. This this 

case was—the result of this case was this concept of surrogate health care 

consent, or the right of a surrogate to uphold a patient’s autonomy through 

making medical decisions on their behalf.  
So, it was not until the 1980s that we first started seeing States make laws 

about health care consent, meaning who can make a decision for a patient who 

is incapacitated, and in 1990 we had a Supreme Court ruling, which gave us the 
right that, under certain circumstances, a surrogate may act for the patient in 

electing to withdraw hydration and nutrition. During this panel you’ve heard 

many areas where women are facing inequity, and I am happy to report that at 

least in the area of end of life, care, women are receiving of their own volition 
higher quality, care than men. Women choose to receive less aggressive 

interventions at end of life, including CPR, surgery, artificial, such as nutrition, 

and are more likely to consider palliative care, comfort, measures and hospice 



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at end of life. Although women are leading men and quality of care at end of 
life, most people do not actually receive high quality end of life care. For 

instance, men and women both have a low prevalence of goals, of care, 

conversations at the end of life, surrounding their preferences, values and goals 
of medical treatments, and men and women both have an extremely low 

prevalence of advance directives and health care, representatives and power of 

attorney forums to help direct their medical decisions and preserve their 
autonomy. And despite all of the efforts that we’ve made, and most patients 

reporting that they would rather die at home, we still see most patients die in 

hospitals under a decision to withhold or withdraw life-sustaining interventions.  

So, the takeaway is that while women have paved our path forward, and 
women are receiving higher quality, end of life care we still have a high need 

for better serious-illness and end of life care for all patients. Thank you. 

 
Brittany Kelly: Thank you so much, Dr. Comer, for that really engaging 

discussion. This has been an incredibly powerful panel. I’ve really enjoyed it. I 

know our audience has as well because there are many, many questions in the 

Q&A box. We are at 10:25 a.m., and I want to not go over the time that we are 
supposed to get our next panel started, which is 10:30 a.m., and we are also 

going to work in hopefully a minute for you to take a break. So, that said, I am 

sure our panelists welcome you to reach out to them with questions after today. 
For now, let us dive here shallowly into the Q&A box. I think the most 

overarching question we received was the one that asks about the application of 

international law, given that this is an international and comparative law review, 
and it feels like an appropriate way to wrap up the session. So, I would like to 

hear from any and all panelists that have a 30 second or so word to share with 

us. 

Where are we at given the U.S.’s reluctance to ratify treaties and to 
recognize international law as binding authority? How realistic is it that we 

might expect policymakers and legislators in the U.S. to apply them? Are there 

any examples that we can pull from here? 
 

Professor Benjamin Davis: I can start if you would like. 

 
Brittany Kelly: Please, start us off, Professor Davis. 

 

Professor Davis: OK. So, for treaties that the U.S. is a member of— human 

rights treaties— there is a periodic review that is done every 4-5 years, and as 
members of civil society you can make shadow reports about the specific 

articles in that, and whether the U.S., at whatever level is compliance—local, 

state, or national, and those reports that come out which are the conclusions of 
these committees, do carry some weight inside the United States—they are 

basically saying “the whole world is watching” and that can help with the 

internal work.  Beyond that, the second thing I would point out is that the reason 



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the U.S. is so hostile to human rights treaties is that the United States—basically 

a deal cut by Eisenhower which was “please pass the genocide convention and 

I promise not to bring forward any human rights treaties.” Back in the day 
because of the worries about the southern way of life “type of stuff.” So, this is 

not something that is generic from some…you know, it did not come down from 

the sky. There is a conscious decision to protect segregation, basically. So, if 

you can understand that issue, then you realize that of course, this is not 
necessarily anything that is, is dramatic, and that it should actually…we should 

adopt these treaties. 

 
Brittany Kelly: Thank you, Professor Davis, especially for that actionable item 

that you gave us there. With another minute or two left, I would like to open it 

up to Dr. Comer, Anamika, Kimi Chernoby. Where did we go from here? You 

know, in 30 seconds—this is a very broad question, but where do we go from 
here? What kind of takeaways or action items would you like the audience to 

leave with today? 

 
Dr. Comer: I would just like to say that the action item is that we need to work 

as a society to accept the concept that we are all going to face the end of our life 

at one point or another, and that we need to work towards having better end of 
life care for all patients, and that includes care, not just hospice care for those 

who are actively dying, but for those who are facing serious illness. So that 

would be one takeaway. And the really important thing is, we have talked about 

international law and other areas which would be very applicable, but when it 
comes to making decisions for patients who are facing serious illness there is no 

one answer that fits all patients. Every person has different preferences, values, 

opinions, and goals, and people’s religion and their ethnicity, where they are 
from, their community, all plays a role in what they would find to be acceptable 

treatments for themselves. Which is why this concept of autonomy is so 

important. So, if we were going to have any one national precedent or 
international precedent, even in regards to end of life, it would be that people 

should have the right to autonomous medical decision making for themselves. 

Thank you.  

 
Brittany Kelly: Thank you. Any other thoughts from our panelists that we wrap 

up? 

 
Anamika Krishnan: I just wanted to add one command with respect to all the 

questions that I received regarding the resurgence of Hindu nationalism in India, 

and how it how it fosters caste discrimination in India. So, I just wanted to say 

that, you know, an analysis of Indian philosophy is more than an antiquarian 
curiosity right now. Without this inevitable inquiry we will remain helpless 

pawns in the grand political game instituted by far-right forces across the world. 

Not just in India, just to make sure. So, you know, we need to discard all the 



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thoughts and ideas that are not founded on secularism, rationalism, and scientific 
knowledge. Thank you. 

 

Brittany Kelly: Thank you so much. Dr. Chernoby, I would love to hear from 
you as well. 

 

Kimi Chernoby: Yeah, I would just reiterate that access to abortion is a part of 
routine, health care, and that without access to full spectrum, reproductive health 

care we cannot eliminate discrimination against women, and that there are real 

repercussions to the health and well-being of people in this country with these 

restrictions. In light of Dobbs, so, in this post-Dobbs era, it becomes more and 
more of a State issue, and so we need to continue working at the State level to 

protect those rights and access. 

 
Brittany Kelly: What great closing thoughts that you all left us with. I really 

appreciate that this has been an incredibly engaging panel. I appreciate the 

opportunity to moderate it, and I look forward to the rest of our day being just 

as engaging and productive. So, thank you to everyone who shared with us, and 
I will hand it back over to our student leaders. 

 

Lizzie Ford: Hi, everyone! Thank you so much to our presenters and our 
moderator from this past Women and Health panel. We will now take a break, 

and we will come back at 10:40 a.m. for Women and Education. 

 
WOMEN AND EDUCATION PANEL 

 

>>> 10:40am 

Lizzie Ford: Hi, everyone! Welcome back. We are now going to move into our 
second panel women and education, and I am here to introduce the moderator, 

Dr. Courtney Jarrett, who I’m lucky enough to call friend. Dr. Jarrett is the 

current Director of Disability Services at Ball State University in Indiana, where 
she currently assists students in getting access and opportunity-over 3,500 

students with disabilities to be exact. She has also authored a book called Not 

Your Mom’s Feminism, which is used to teach undergraduate women and gender 
studies courses. 

 

Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Thank you very much, Lizzie. I am very excited to be 

with you all today. It’s my pleasure to introduce our first presenter in the Women 
and Education Panel. Nancy Cantalupo is a Professor at Wayne State University 

Law School and a nationally recognized scholar and expert on Title IX sexual 

harassment and gender-based violence in education. So, Professor Cantalupo, 
we are looking forward to hearing from you this morning. 

 



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Nancy Chi Cantalupo 甘念齊 (she/her): Thank you so much, and my thanks 

to the Indiana International and Comparative Law Review for inviting me to 

speak today and especially to Lizzie Ford for her tireless work on this 
symposium. So, as Dr. Jarrett indicated, I am most known for my research and 

writing on Title IX-the US civil rights statute that was passed in 1972. I also 

have actually done a bunch of work related to international Women’s Human 
Rights Law, including teaching a course on it and taking, I think, three classes 

of students to the People’s Republic of China to engage in what I used to refer 

to as human rights factfinding-light,  because with the authoritarian government 
in China, it’s not really safe to do full on human rights factfinding. But I did 

bring three classes of law students to the PRC to engage in that kind of research 

and report writing. So, this panel nicely brings together a number of different 

things that I’ve done in the past. So, I’m going to kind of flip between the two 
in my remarks today. 

So, Title IX is just a few years older than the Women’s Convention, but as 

I first laid out in an article that I published in 2012, they are similar in several 
key ways when it comes to sexual harassment and gender-based violence. First, 

and most importantly, both prohibit sex discrimination. Title IX, when that 

discrimination takes place by US schools, and CEDAW by Nation States, of 
course, covers a much broader set of explicitly stated substantive areas in which 

sex discrimination is prohibited. But education is one of those areas. So, a 

second commonality between the two is that they both explicitly deal with equal 

educational opportunities and environments. Third, Title IX and CEDAW did 
not originally conceive of sexual harassment and gender-based violence as 

forms of sex discrimination. Neither say anything explicitly about either 

harassment or violence. Indeed, both had to be interpreted in such a way that 
recognize sexual harassment and gender-based violence as forms of sex 

discrimination. Those interpretations started in the 1990s. In CEDAW’s case, 

that happened with General Recommendation 19, which was issued by the 

Committee, and in Title IX’s case, both the US Supreme Court and the US 
Department of Education confirmed that Title IX had it applied to. Sorry, I just 

got a pop up asking if I was still with you. I’m not sure what to do with this. But 

can everyone still hear me?  
 

Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Yup, you’re good, Nancy. 

 

Nancy Chi Cantalupo 甘念齊 (she/her): All right. So, I think I was saying in 

Title IX’s case, both the US Supreme Court and the US Department of 

Education confirmed that Title IX applied to sexual harassment and gender-
based violence late in the decade. Ultimately, as a substantive matter, both 

CEDAW and Title IX recognize sexual harassment and gender-based violence. 

As forms of sex discrimination, because of how they are, they are intertwined 
with gender inequality and its perpetuation. So, indeed, as the United Nations 

General Secretary articulated over a decade ago, gender-based violence is both 



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a cause and a consequence of gender inequality and we can see an example of 
how sexual harassment and gender-based violence are a consequence of gender 

inequality in the persistent sex stereotyping that women and girls in particular 

face that they lie about being harassed and abused. This leads to heightened 
vulnerability to being sexually harassed and victimized because of users know 

that victims will not be believed, and therefore, can be abused with relative 

impunity on the flip side sexual harassment and gender-based violence cause 
gender inequality by, for instance, causing trauma that brings about in the case 

of students, a drop in grades which leads to both short term and long term 

economic losses like wasted tuition and decreased future earning potential  

Fourth, and finally, but finally only for today, as I could go on and on, if I 
had unlimited time, Title IX and CEDAW are both expansive and apply to many 

more forms of gender inequality than sexual harassment and gender-based 

violence. Moreover, such expansion of this kind of expansiveness goes beyond 
the text of each of the statutes and shows how greater equality in one place leads 

to greater equality in other places. So, for example, Title IX was first, and 

arguably is still best, known for equalizing athletic opportunities in school. 

Although that equalization process is far from having been fully achieved, we 
can often see its successes when we compare US women athletes to other 

countries’ women’s athletes. Both logic and research, have shown us women 

would not have won so many world cups, for instance, without title IX, but the 
benefits of Title IX don’t just stop with those victories. The US Women’s World 

Cup team identified the inequities that they face once they were playing 

professionally and won a groundbreaking pay equity lawsuit that is sure to 
benefit US women as a whole, and all of that is aside from the ways in which 

athletic participation helps girls develop leadership skills, and has many other 

positive effects on their lives. All of which brings me to the where we need to 

go part of my remarks.  
As we all know, international human rights treaties like CEDAW are 

critically important in prompting States to act and to take steps to ensure that 

their people are not only equally protected from State abuses, but also have equal 
access to social and economic rights, such as education. We also know that the 

most effective way of fulfilling those international commitments is through 

domestic action.  And the US experience with Title IX, even as partial as its 
successes have been, is a model worth considering by other countries. So, I don’t 

have time to get into much detail with regard to such an idea, so I will simply 

mention the most important of the reasons why I make this suggestion. Along 

with families, schools, play can play, and should play, basically the greatest role 
of any societal institution in shaping the lives of almost every person in a country 

and throughout the world. And as we see in both the case of the US Women’s 

World Cup champions and in the case of the millions of us students who deal 
with sexual harassment and gender-based violence, schools have tremendous 

power to advance equality and to intervene in inequality. But they too rarely do 

either, if they’re not prompted to do so by law. Schools are also institutions 



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sometimes, but often not, state run, and they have the power, the kind of power 

and control over their students’ lives that is almost state-like in its in its nature, 

and that’s regardless of whether they are private or public. So, like with states 
themselves, we need a mechanism to get schools to promote equality and to stop 

discrimination. Title IX and other US civil rights laws provide those kinds of 

models, and, you know, give us a way to guide schools as institutions in the 

right direction. They also guide schools in a way that works with the unique 
qualities of educational institutions which are different from, yet share, 

characteristics with other institutions like for-profit businesses, other nonprofit 

enterprises, and States themselves.  
So, I fully believe that State adoption of Title IX-like laws would 

significantly advance CEDAW’s goals and States’ commitments under 

CEDAW. So, I think that such passage is a worthy goal for where we should all 

try to take CEDAW in the future I believe it’s time, and I thank you again. 
 

Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Thank you so much, Nancy. I thoroughly enjoyed, 

especially the part about the US Women’s team, because I know that the 
Canadian Women’s Soccer Team is going through the same thing. And so, I 

hope there really is a trickle-down effect, which is great. So, thank you. So, 

before I introduce our next presenter, I’ll just quickly say, if you haven’t seen 
in the chat, the CLE questions will pop up. And so, in case you see that, don’t 

worry, we can still hear you, and everything is all good. So just a quick reminder 

for that. But our next presenter in the Women and Education panel is Jonathan 

D. Glater, who is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley 
School of Law. He has written extensively for law reviews on Higher Education 

opportunity, frequently exploring the implications of rising student 

indebtedness. So, Professor Glater, I’ll let you take it away. 
 

Jonathan Glater (he/him): Thank you so much, and thank you to the 

organizers for inviting me to participate, and apologies to the for the panicked 
puppy here you might hear in the background. I’m hoping we won’t hear from 

him over the course of my remarks. So again, my name is Jonathan Glater. I 

teach at University of California, Berkeley School of Law, and I often write 

about higher education, access, and equity and my goal here in the next 10 min, 
because I’m told. I need to stick to 10 min, and I have 10 slides, so if I keep to 

one slide per minute we’ll be on track. My goal is to give a kind of an overview 

of the place of women in higher in the higher education universe today, and the 
theme of my remarks, is really duality. The position of women in higher 

education in 2023 is both remarkable in historical context, and also precarious, 

given the costs and risks of higher education. So, 10 min, 10 slides. Let me start 

sharing.  
Okay, slide number one. So, the percentage of women in higher education. 

The number of women in higher education has increased dramatically, 

especially since the Higher Education Amendments of 1972, that Professor 



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392 

Cantalupo already alluded to. That gave us Title IX, which in turn required 
greater equity and access to higher education, opportunity for women, and of 

course it’s more complicated than just increasing numbers, even numbers that 

are exceeding the number of men in higher education. It’s not just gender 
diversity, which is a term that means a good deal more now than it did in in 

1972. But that’s really beyond the scope of my remarks. Today, if you consider 

other aspects of identity. You see that the distribution of higher education 
opportunity is not the same for all women or all men. And so, this is one of the 

dualities. Two things are true. Women enjoy much greater access than they have 

historically, but also within the population that we categorize as women there 

are disparities along lines of race, there are disparities along lines of class, that 
are not captured in this graph that are evident. Okay, which means when we talk 

about educational opportunity for women and educational achievements for 

women, we need to be a little more nuanced in our thinking.  
You can see that more precisely here some of those differences within racial 

and ethnic subgroups. Within each group you can see that the percentage of 

women of traditional college age who are enrolled in higher education is higher 

than the percentage of men. Indeed, there’s increasing study and popular 
concern about who has access, and what, as a matter of policy we should be 

worried about. That’s also beyond the scope. But it’s probably something that 

folks want to talk about in the Q&A, what does it mean that the priorities seem 
to evolve as access seems to improve. Okay.  

The differences are also evident in the fields of study. This is undergraduate, 

and I’m going to show you graduate and professional schools on the next slide. 
And I show this slide not to make a normative argument that there should be 

any particular mix of people in any particular field of study. That’s not what I’m 

trying to say. But in showing this slide, I do want to suggest that there’s 

something going on in the selection and self-selection process, who pursues 
which fields of setting. Whether you’re concerned probably depends on what 

idea you have of how people should be distributed across these different fields 

of study, or perhaps how they would be distributed, how we would be distributed 
in the absence of a history of discrimination and exclusion of women in 

particular fields disproportionately right. In other words, this snapshot has to be 

placed in a historical context. So, then we can begin to think about? Is it 
problematic that the distribution looks this way? What potential vestiges of an 

overtly exclusive regime are behind the disparities that that we see? Okay, so 

here the graduate and professional school statistics as promised, and you can see 

disparities here as well. A lot of law is right around 50-50, and has been for 
several years. And we can. We can speculate about why one of the arguments 

for higher education generally is increasing socioeconomic opportunity and 

security. I don’t have a chart for that. But it’s been well-documented that higher 
education leads to a significantly higher lifetime income relative to students who 

have who are only high school graduates. But it’s also the case that higher 

education is expensive, and the cost has grown more quickly than incomes 



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consistently for decades. That means that students have to borrow, especially if 

they’re pursuing advanced education, right? But going beyond undergraduate 

education, students have who borrow, right, tend to be students who have less 
money. This is a logical, right? A logical result. So, borrowing, then, is a 

regressive instrument to promote educational opportunity. So, it’s families who 

have less money-families who might be a recent immigrants, first generation 

students. These are the ones who have to borrow, who disproportionately have 
to borrow enough to borrow larger amounts. Also, women who overall borrow 

more than men. And here again we see differences across racial and ethnic 

groups. That is a constraint on the benefits of higher education. Right? You 
might earn more if you complete your program of study, but you also, then have 

to repay this debt, obligation that you’ve incurred along the way.  

Further, the prospect of debt may put off the decision to pursue higher 

education entirely, and this is something that’s incredibly difficult to study the 
idea of debt aversion that there are students who don’t want to borrow, and 

therefore, do not pursue higher education. To get at that you would have to 

survey people and ask them why they did not do what they did not do, and it’s 
hard to find the people who did not do something so that you can ask them why 

they didn’t do it because maybe they were never going to do it anyway. 

So, this data version is real. You don’t have to have a lot of conversation 
with undergrads or law school applicants to hear concerns about the debt burden, 

but there is a debt burden. And to the extent that students of other lifetime 

response life responsibilities that they are also weighing, you can imagine that 

those who are disproportionately caretakers might be more debt averse than 
people who are not, okay. That is risky and stressful even though it puts higher 

education opportunity within reach. This is another one of those dual dualities 

that that I want to emphasize, emphasize for you debt burdens don’t affect 
everybody the same way among those who borrow, okay. It takes longer to 

repay. The risk of a painful default experience is greater for women and people 

of color, and this study made a media splash because of just how stark the 
differences are, right. The fact that there are so many subgroups who end up 

owing more than the original balance 12 years after repayment, remembering 

that the standard repayment term for a federal student loan is 10 years. That’s a 

striking finding. Okay.  
But in the big picture oh, a survey just popped up in the big picture. In a big 

picture sense this is not surprising, because wage differences lead to differential 

abilities to repay loans. So now, we’re implicating not just a difficult to measure 
concept like that aversion. We’re also  learning that labor market patterns are 

affecting higher education, opportunity. This is part of the story about what 

women have been able to achieve, and what the potential risks are of their 

pursuing higher education. More women are working, but receiving lower 
wages than their colleagues who are men.  Okay. Oops. All right. I need to make 

the survey go away in order to get to the next slide. Okay. Difficulty and 

repayment is also related to the type of institution attended. So, women are 



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394 

disproportionately attending for profit schools which have worse graduation 
rates and worse repayment rates among their borrowers. Of course, women also 

are disproportionately carrying the burdens of care for others in their families, 

and those burdens can interfere with school completion and failure to complete, 
undermines the socioeconomic benefit that students should otherwise receive.  

As a result of obtaining the higher education, I want to touch on the 

pandemic, and perhaps we can talk about that more in the discussion or Q&A 
stage. But the pandemic has distinct and disproportionate effects on women as 

well, right in terms of workforce participation rates, but also because of that 

caregiving role that disproportionately affects women. Okay.  

What this means is opportunities for women overall in higher education and 
the potential benefits. Excuse me, and the achievements and getting to this point 

are tremendous, right. But at the same time higher education- access exacts a 

cost, and it’s an increasing cost that is not nearly as significant in decades past 
as it is now.  This, so the challenges confronting women and people of color, 

and those who are both, make plain the connections between current opportunity 

and past exclusion. The connections between educational experiences today, 

and workforce experiences and opportunities between formal economic 
responsibilities and also informal right responsibilities within the family. And 

fairness and higher education opportunity going forward is going to require 

attention to all of these facets of the higher education experience well beyond 
the classroom, and you can see that schools increasingly recognize this in that 

they are expanding the scope of student support services to deal with, to provide 

support with all of the needs and challenges that students face in addition to 
academics. So, thank you again. It’s really an honor and privilege to be here, 

and I look forward to the conversation. 

 

Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Thank you. So, I want to be mindful of Lizzie and 
Gabriela’s planning skills for this event, and so we just have a quick minute to 

wrap up the conversations. But I, Jonathan, I’m so pleased that you included the 

research from the AU, because the longevity of what they’ve put together about 
debt is, is really important. So, I think, for both panelists there are questions in 

the Q&A, and if those of you that have asked those if we don’t get to those, and 

you want to reach out, I’m sure both Nancy and Jonathan would be happy to 
continue the conversations. But I think perhaps, if we could ask one question to 

each of you about what particularly is an action item that folks that are here with 

us today could take away from each of your topics. We’re in many different 

fields. Some of us are in higher ed, some of us are practicing lawyers, some of 
us are in social work. And so, if each of you might think about that and speak 

on it for a minute, I think that would be great. So, Jonathan, would you like to 

start us off with that? 
 

Jonathan Glater (he/him): Sure, I can try. I think one lesson is that the 

implications of a whole host of policies are important and relevant to higher 



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education opportunity. So, I already mentioned disparities in wages. That’s one, 

right? So, pursuit of policies that promote equity at the institutional level, as 

well as at the policy level, are incredibly important to promote equity and 
educational opportunity overall. It also means that policies that are very much 

in public discussion right now. I’m thinking of debt cancellation and the 

Supreme Court arguments that we just heard this week over debt cancellation, 

which all of my friends have been very, very excited about. And so were my 
students strangely. That is a policy debate and a legal doctrinal argument with 

potentially profound gendered effects, because who holds more of the debt, who 

takes longer to repay the debt right? So, there are policy choices that both put 
higher education within reach, but extract a penalty, right, in terms of what the 

nature of that opportunity is, or what the implications of the obligation to repay 

afterward are that that may not look like. They’re about gender equity or racial 

equity, but very much are. And so, I think one lesson we can all take from that 
is, be thinking about fairness in context, where perhaps at first blush, it doesn’t 

look like that’s the driver or the dominant concern. 

 
Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Thank you. Nancy, what would you like to say? Maybe 

your one action item is for your topic. 

 

Nancy Chi Cantalupo 甘念齊 (she/her): Well, so I would say, for those who 

have access to international contexts, or who regularly are, you know, having 

interactions, or go to other countries and do work in other countries, I would 
refer you to my earlier remarks about, you know, creating Title IX laws in other 

places. For those who are working more domestically, I encourage you to, so 

the American Bar Association Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence, 
some time ago created a set of comprehensive recommendations for how 

schools should be dealing with, particularly investigations of complaints of 

sexual harassment and gender-based violence at their institutions, and the 

recommendations are incredibly comprehensive, and I’ve experienced lots of 
attorneys who want to get involved in some way in, you know, helping 

particularly sexual harassment and gender-based violence victims in these kinds 

of cases. And so, I refer you to those recommendations because they are an 
excellent resource for getting involved in all kinds of different ways in that 

process. 

 
Dr. Courtney Jarrett: Great. Thank you. Well, again, I want to say thank you 

to both of our presenters, and thank you again to the organizers of this event, 

and I’m going to hand it off to Lizzie, for I think our next thing. So, thank you 

all very much. 
 

Lizzie Ford: Thank you, Courtney. We’re going to take just a few minutes for 

a break again. We’ll come back at 11:15 for our next panel, Women and 
Employment. 



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WOMEN AND EMPLOYMENT PANEL 
 

>>> 11:15am 

Gabriela Ocampo: All right, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you for staying 
with us. Our next panel is going to be Women and Employment. It’s a really fun 

panel, and our moderator is David Fleischhacker. David has been the Indiana 

Civil Rights Commission Deputy Director and a General Counsel since 2021, 
and he also is a graduate of the IU McKinney School of Law. So, David, please 

take it away. 

 

David Fleischhacker: Alright, Thank you, Gabriela. Good morning and 
welcome everyone to the women in employment panel, where you’ll hear three 

presentations. Please put any questions you might have in the Q&A function, 

not the chat function, as we plan to have some time for questions at the end of 
the presentations.  So let’s get started. Our first panelists for the Women and 

Employment panel is Dr. Jennifer A. Drobac who is the Samuel R. Rosen 

Professor of Law at the Indiana University, Robert H. McKinney School of Law. 

She holds her J.S.D and J.D. Degrees from Stanford Law School. Professor 
Drobac, the virtual floor is yours. 

 

Jennifer Drobac: Okay, thank you so much, and let me just quickly share my 
screen here, and we’ll get into our presentation. I want to thank the organizers 

for inviting me and all the participants out there. And now we can. I think, okay, 

let’s start that over. Go into what I’m calling the elements of the, okay, so I’m 
going to end this show. Excuse me for a second, and there we go.  All right. 

Let’s start again. My apologies to everyone.  Alright, so I was in the middle of 

trying to give a shout out to all of my former students out there. So, hello to 

everyone.   
Alright, so “Title VII Sexual Harassment Cases Still Crazy After all These 

Years.” And I want to say that this exploration is specifically with respect to 

whether or not we need to look at Title VII, and even Title IX, judging from the 
prior panel, with new eyes, and maybe make some recommendations. I have 

some basic questions to start with. First of all, sexual harassment and assault 

survivors display common responses to their abuse. But I would argue that they 
are not crazy, nutty, slutty, or gold diggers, as has historically been argued, and 

we’re kind of going too fast here. I don’t know why, but our US sexual 

harassment, rape, and anti-discrimination laws aren’t consistent with the science 

about what target survivors experience, and I’ll use those names 
interchangeably. My thesis is that these laws, including Title VII and Title IX 

and their elements thwart prosecution and recovery by target survivors.  

Okay, so let’s start with a comparison. I want to make a comparison between 
groups of survivors, and I’ll start by pointing out the Stockholm Syndrome, 

which was used to describe common responses to abduction or traumatically 

imprisoned victims. Now the Stockholm Syndrome has been, is, a contested 



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illness, but whether or not it exists formally as described, it has some elements 

that are similar in some ways to PTSD. PTSD is a Posttraumatic Stress Disorder 

is sometimes associated with sexual harassment and assault. And so, the 
question that I ask is, does the science confirm that a common response occurs 

with severe, persistent sex-based abuse and harassment, something that I’m 

calling the Mann Effect.  

So, let’s look at the Mann Effect so generally defined. The Mann Effect is 
a descriptor for a not fully defined, yet set of responsive behaviors to sex-based 

abuse and harassment. The manifest and the requirements of anti-discrimination 

law may explain why harassment targets, survivors may be disabled from fully 
prosecuting their legal case against perpetrators or organizations, and I’ll start 

here with Jessica Mann. She accused Harvey Weinstein of a 2013 rape, and she 

was a key witness in his 2020 conviction. and she displayed common behavior 

seen in other rape and harassment targets. But she didn’t complain until 2017, 
four years after the alleged rape, and in the interim she wrote him flattering 

notes, and so the question is, was she a willing participant or a model of the 

Mann Effect?  
Alright, so let’s look into the elements of the Mann Effect. First, I argue that 

the target experiences a traumatic sexual assault or series of abusive sex-based 

behaviors by more and more, one or more people in positions of relative power. 
Second, the survivor fears for her physical, psychological, social, professional, 

and or financial safety, and we can remember back to Christine Blasi Ford, and 

the fear she expressed not only in the moment, but later, with respect to whether 

Brett Kavanaugh, now Justice on our Supreme Court was going to rape her. I 
had many clients who experienced this, including one Jane Eschemia, who was 

worried, afraid that she was going to be raped, and was, in fact, sexually 

assaulted in a wooded property. The third element is that the survivor 
occasionally experiences a dear in the headlights moment in which she is frozen 

or numb, as one of my former clients described it, and cannot defend or assert 

herself. Lady Gaga explained on being raped, “I felt numb. Excuse me, I felt 
full on pain, then I felt numb then. I was sick for weeks.” This is not an 

uncommon response. The fourth element is that, excuse me. The fourth element 

is that the survivor understands that if she complains about the more powerful 

perpetrator’s misconduct and illegal behavior, she will probably suffer 
retaliation and other undesirable consequences. Therefore, the survivor 

experiences fear or negative response not only during the abuse, but after it the 

fear or anxiety or negative response can continue for long after the abuse has 
purportedly ended. Number five. Many Mann Effect survivors experience what 

we’ve known throughout history as a retaliation against women who protest 

sexual abuse, and this causes some women, including, for example, Anita Hill, 

to continue seemingly cordial relationships with their abusers. They may even 
admire their abusive mentors even as they dislike them for their abuse of 

conduct.  



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So, I want to draw another comparison again as we talk about, why, the 
Mann Effect might be important. For example, if we required that all persons in 

wheelchairs access the ballot box upstairs, we would be effectively denying 

them the right to vote, a fundamental right. Do we effectively deny targeted 
abuse survivors, their civil rights and the right to sue for their relief under anti-

discrimination laws by ignoring or denying the effects of their sex-based abuse? 

Now I get to CEDAW and here-oh, goodness gracious! Here, Article 11 of 
CEDAW requires that we eliminate discrimination against women in their field 

of employment. And in particular item three notes. The protective legislation 

relating to matters covered in this article shall be reviewed periodically in the 

light of scientific knowledge and technological knowledge and shall be revised, 
repealed, or extended as necessary. This presentation is a call for the revision 

and extension of Title VII, Title XI, and other anti-discrimination laws in the 

US, despite the fact that the US has not adopted CEDAW. It’s just good policy 
and a good idea.  

Alright, so let’s look at Title VII in particular, and see why first there are 

defenses within Title VII that say an employee who, and now I’m getting a pop 

up. So okay, then, an employee who unreasonably fails to avail herself, or 
otherwise take advantage of preventive or corrective opportunities could 

experience a block in her ability to sue in the form of an affirmative defense by 

an employer. In other words, she has to basically complain or engage in this 
responsive behavior within 180 days of the last incident of discrimination that 

gets extended to 300 days by certain provisions of State law in combination with 

Federal law, not really a logical reason for extending the statute of limitations. 
But, as we know from Jessica Mann others, it can take even years before they 

are able to recover sufficiently from their trauma or get over the fear of 

retaliation for them to complain, or fully prosecute their cases. This is also true 

within Title IX, where a complainant has to give actual notice, and this is a 
complainant who may be a minor. And so, excuse me again. The statute of 

limitations. Again, we’re looking at 180 days, and so these provisions within 

Title IX are what are thwarting individuals from prosecuting their cases coming 
forward and receiving relief.  

Alright, so, mandatory arbitration has been another problem in Title IX. 

While some states are revisiting the notion of arbitration, many employers still 
require arbitration in their employment contracts and waiver of rights to sue 

under anti-discrimination law. This can create a whole plethora of problems, 

including difficulty in securing council when the only avenue for relief is 

arbitration. It also affords minimal protections from abusive discovery and 
evidentiary tactics. So that’s just you know, another problem in Title IX we 

could also look at capped damages which haven’t been raised since the 1991 

amendments.  
So, my argument is that anti-discrimination laws in the United States are the 

next glass ceiling.  And in order to secure rights to fair employment, we have to 

be able to sue under anti-discrimination laws, or have anti-discrimination laws 



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that would take into consideration the science and effects on the targeted 

population. And these laws basically don’t do that. So again, my apologies for 

my technological problems. But I want to say thank you again to you all, and 
we can think outside the box, and I will leave questions for the very end, and I 

will stop sharing now. 

 

David Fleischhacker: Alright thank you, Professor Drobac, for your look at 
Title VII. I’m very interested in the further research in this area that I think you 

call for. We’ll now turn to our next presentation, where you’ll hear from a trio 

of panelists. Naomi Khan is a Professor of Law at the University of Virginia 
School of Law. June Carbone is the Inaugural Holders of the Robina Chair of 

Law, Science , and Technology at the University of Minnesota School of Law. 

and Nancy Levit is the Associate Dean for Faculty and the Curator’s and Edward 

D. Ellison Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School 
of Law. Professors, take it away. 

 

Naomi Cahn: Thank you so much. We are absolutely delighted to be here and 
our presentation. We plan this so well. Our presentation follows up quite nicely 

with Professor Glater’s, which provided some of the gender-based gaps in 

earnings and looked back at gender debt issues and on Professor Jennifer 
Drobac’s on sexual harassment and CEDAW Article 11, of course, to which we 

will also be referring as well as US states’ discrimination laws. We are US 

focused. But I should mention that I’ve taught international and comparative 

gender rights, and I worked on gender issues when I lived in the Congo for two 
years. But this presentation is very much US focused. The three of us are writing 

a book. There’s a title, Fair Shake-How Women Lose in a Winner Take All 

World, and we’re gonna end with-are we moving towards a new era of gender 
theory and equality? We started by looking at how the gender pay gap in the US 

has hit a glass ceiling with a long-standing pay disparity between the genders, 

improving somewhat in the immediate decade after CEDAW came into force, 
but then barely improving since then, and indeed getting worse for those at the 

top. And so, our question was: why is the gender gap wage gap stalling? And 

why is it getting worse for those at the top? And we found, although we’ll talk 

a little bit about Title VII, that Title VII simply is not equipped to deal with the 
shift in Corporate America from the Organization Man. And yes, we are using 

gender terms from the Organization Man to the Winner Take all economy, and 

to a new boys club which is currently reigning. So, we actually started by 
looking at a series of legal complaints. Most of them brought under Title VII, 

and we found initially, there was some improvement in the gender wage gap in 

the first decade after CEDAW came into force. But the question is, and we will 

get to this in the next set of slides, as I turn it over to my co-authors. What has 
changed? Why is it that women are, in fact, losing now? Thanks, June. you’re 

muted. 

 



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June Carbone: I will talk fast and answer questions later. There’s a lot on the 
slides. I’m not going to go through them individually. But let me give you our 

short answer. I like to explain the difference this way. Imagine George Romney 

and compare him to his son Mitt Romney. Both ran for President. Both were 
governors of Major States, both bragged about their accomplishments as 

businessmen. In George’s case that accomplishment was the health of American 

Motors. In Mitt’s case, it’s how much money he had in the Cayman Islands with 
the OP ED Pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying: “If you were really a good 

businessman, he would have more than 200 billion dollars.” And so, the 

conclusion we’ve got is if you look at what the Organization Man was: nearer 

portals of entry with secure career ladders and distrust of anybody who is out 
for themselves. What’s the new model? The new model is Jack Welch and can 

be summarized in terms of shareholder primacy. But we want to argue the secret 

is the bonus systems. What this new system does is a system that could be called 
CEO primacy, in the sense that it gives the people at the top an ability to 

manipulate the system for their own benefit. The key is internal competition that 

keeps everybody insecure, allowing the system to be used to extract. Well, 

here’s the difference in CEO pay versus average pay, but I want to emphasize 
that the commonalities in this system run across the economy. So, yet Welch 

became famous for earnings management. What do you do? Over the course of 

his tenure GE earnings went up something like 300, 400, but share price went 
up 4,000. What he did, and Welsh emphasized with the right bonus system, you 

can incentivize anything. And you don’t have to look too closely at the details 

of how people accomplish their numbers. “Well, I give them freedom so long 
as they hit their numbers.”  

What are the numbers? How do you beat expected earnings every quarter 

which also happens to be securities fraud? Okay? Or, if we focus on short 

termism. You could do it the legal way: 80% of executives say they would cut 
investment training, advertising research labs, employees, if it would boost your 

term earnings and share price today. The legal way to do it is stock buybacks. 

Here’s what happened to GE: we will tell you the story of what happened to 
Shafer, who filed a sex discrimination complaint. But the bottom line was it 

changes what you look for in employees. She has a traditional case of 

employment discrimination, what was really going on? Her boss wanted what 
he called a big time GC. What does that mean? It means somebody who could 

figure out a way not to comply with the SEC Order on securities fraud. What 

we want to argue the common denominator in a lot of the companies we look 

at. I’m going to give you more detailed examples in a minute is what Michael 
Cohen described it was like to work for Donald Trump: dangle big bonuses for 

those who produce the right numbers. Don’t ask questions about where the 

numbers come from. Internal competition keeps everyone off balance. It 
neutralizes the opposition, and virtually every study shows whether it’s merit, 

pay for teachers, or finance, it produces increased gender disparities greater in 



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group favoritism, more politicized decision making. It’s bad for women and 

everyone else.  

So, I want to give you some examples of how this worked out for women 
where we have good data. Walmart is one of the most telling examples. You 

have a nationwide class action goes to the Supreme Court in 2011 in 5-4 

decision. Justice Scalia says Walmart decentralized decision making, how can 

you give it class treatment? Well, all the policies were. In that case, we 
wondered about select for store managers who will agree to move on short 

notice. Don’t hire from the hourly employees at the same store, have a bonus 

system tied to the suppression of labor costs, and have an understanding on your 
staffing long and unpredictable hours. Don’t advertise the positions. No criteria. 

And B and C Students are preferred to A students. These are all policies bad for 

women. They produce huge gender disparities. The not advertising positions are 

given as evidence of discretionary decision making. Why does Walmart do it? 
Because plausible deniability? Walmart is number one in the country in wage 

theft, having paid a billion and a half dollars in wages and hours violations over 

a course of 15 years. It is hiring, and it micromanages everything from 
Bentonville except personnel matters. Why? Because this allows the 

suppression of labor costs through a variety of methods, many of which are 

illegal and it does so with plausible deniability. The people at the top don’t have 
their fingerprints on the outcome, and so, if you have managers who will move, 

you can take the effective wage suppression tactics in one place and move them 

someplace else.   

Bottom line-the system. High-stakes reduction bonus metrics tied to looking 
the other way at unscrupulous practices also produces gender disparities. What 

about Wells Fargo? Wells Fargo is a fraud run by women. They’re not designed 

by women, I might add, but the critical fine disparities have to do with who is 
fired. So, you will recall Wells Fargo had a scandal based on fake accounts. But 

there’s a fascinating study coming out of Herbert Business School that shows 

for finite financial advisors nationwide, 1/13 have a record of misconduct, a 
rather high number for any profession. Men are three times more likely to 

engage in misconduct, twice as likely to be repeat offenders. They commit 

offenses that are 20% costly to their employees, but women are 20% more likely 

to lose their jobs as a result of misconduct, 30% less likely to find new ones 
compared to the men. The study came out before the Wells Fargo scandal, and 

then the authors of the study went back to look at Wells Fargo specifically, and 

found it had the biggest gender disparities in the country. Let me emphasize-this 
does not just mean women to commit misconduct are more likely to be fired. It 

also means women who are whistleblowers are more likely to be fired because 

of reporting misconduct in an environment in which almost everybody is guilty 

of something. It’s one of the reasons women are fired for more minor offenses 
than men sometimes. That’s not the real reason for the termination, but it is 

almost impossible to fight in a gender discrimination claim, and we’ve got lots 

of stories of that. So, with this I am going to turn it over to Nancy.  



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Nancy Levit: Thank you so much for inviting us. Luckily, Jennifer did much of 

our work for us, so I will be very brief. The types of discriminatory behavior 

that Naomi framed and June described are virtually unreachable through legal 
doctrines in the United States employment discrimination realm. As Jennifer 

said, Title VII applies to employers with 15 or more employees. Even if state 

anti-discrimination laws reach smaller employers, almost all these laws are 
inapplicable to gig workers. There are short statutes of limitation, even if 

plaintiffs make it to court, and what do they get? Damage caps that have 

remained unchanged since 1991. The total amount of compensatory and 

punitive for employers up to a 100 employees is $50,000. These kinds of suits 
are not worthwhile for lawyers to take regarding employment discrimination 

law, and these kinds of behaviors lead to the fraud.  

We see the first leg of this sort of oppressive triad is that principally men 
are succeeding through narcissistic, self-interested behaviors and corporations 

are handsomely rewarding characteristics that are the upside of narcissism: the 

ability to influence people, to manipulate, to risk, take. And you can’t sue people 

for being asshats for risk-taking and for being equal opportunity backstabbers. 
When women are acting atypically for their gender, as June said, in Mark Egan’s 

study, women are substantially more likely to be fired from misconduct and less 

likely to be rehired. The retaliatory terminations for misconduct, using disparate 
impact to reach lower wages, documented disparities in promotional practices 

with the background of fraud is problematic. The competitive promotional 

practices are justified as business necessity. 
So, what can be done about what we call the “winner take all economy” and 

this sort of triple bind for women? We believe the first step is to make the 

injustices of the WTA economy visible. But the MeToo movement was 

galvanizing, and it has trended to 85 countries. The extra-legal MeToo 
movement gains power from the fact that it doesn’t rely on the courts to right 

injustice. The sexual harassment is ugly wherever it occurs, but making it visible 

will shine a spotlight on perpetrators, and make it possible for victims to 
organize interestingly, as we say in our book. MeToo, served as a form of jujitsu. 

It turned the power of celebrated men to act with impunity as a weapon against 

them, and use their very celebrity to topple them.  
We have a number of other suggestions for what might work, but let me end 

with one that is particularly relevant to the heart of this conference, and that is 

the CEDAW. We think it is incredibly important to strengthen the rule of law 

because the Winner Take all Economy, disproportionately benefits people who 
can break the rules and get away with it. Article 11 of the CEDAW provides the 

right to the same employment opportunities, including the application of the 

same criteria in matters of employment. That would be a much better beginning 
point for law. We thank you for your attention. Sorry. We ran a couple of 

minutes long, and we welcome questions. We hope that, if there is an effort to 

engage in the practices on the last slide, this will empower someone who is 



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coded feminine. The Organization Woman doesn’t have to actually be a girl to 

punch through and break the glass ceiling. 

 
David Fleischhacker: All right. Well, thank you, Professors Cahn, Carbone, 

and Levitt. I look forward to reading this book and learning more about what 

you’ve discussed today. Now to wrap things up. We will now hear from our last 

panelists Deborah Pollack-Milgate. Ms. Pollack-Millgate is a partner at Barnes 
and Thornburg, LLP, where she focuses her practice on intellectual property 

litigation matters, including at an international level. Ms. Pollack Milgate, the 

floor is yours. 
 

Deborah Pollack-Milgate: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here. I’m 

seeing now whether I can share my screen, so give me just one moment for that. 

Alright, it looks like that’s coming through, alright. So, one thing I have to tell 
you that I’m really especially thrilled about at the moment is that I do think that 

my talk is sort of the, I hope it’s the right end to this conversation, because it 

dovetails very nicely with the bad news we’ve heard. There’s a lot of bad 
behavior out there. What are things that we can do about that? And that’s really 

what I want to focus on today.  

So, I am in my day job a partner at Barnes and Thornburg, but I’ve become 
increasingly involved in engagement over the last several years, in addition to 

having some very, very strong interest early on in my career in in feminist 

jurisprudence, and I’ve been co-hosting a podcast for the last two years with a 

woman who is similarly committed and similarly engaged. And our podcast is 
really focused on talking about concretely: what can we do because the 

problems are so vast? We just found we were very motivated to see what we 

could do, and at three different levels. So, we talk in our podcast a lot about 
what an organization can do. what allies can do, and also what women can do. 

But frankly, with the third focus on women, because women are doing a lot of 

things already. It’s really the rest of us who need to come. It’s everyone else 
who needs to come along for something to change.  

So, with that, let me go into first of all talking about what is corporate 

culture. There are really, for those who care, for those who want to have a 

corporate culture that really does support women, there are solutions out there. 
So, what is corporate culture? It’s the tacit social order of an organization, and 

actually, in the best case, it’s also articulated, so people know what it is, so it’s 

clear; it’s not ambiguous, and if it’s communicated well, the research shows that 
it can actually increase performance of the employees by 20 to 30. So, as it turns 

out, if employees know why they’re working somewhere, and they know what 

that culture is, it makes them happier.  

Now, what’s interesting when we started engaging in some of this research. 
And, by the way, this is based on one of our episodes from season one. So, I’ve 

adapted it from there is that we picked up one book by someone. Her name is 

Diane Primo, and the book is called the ALL REPORT, and it’s at the end of my 



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presentation here, and one thing that was interesting here was she polled a bunch 
of different women and underrepresented groups from the from the workplace, 

and what they said was, they really believed that the companies actually know 

how to fix the problem, and they’re just not doing it. So, if they were focused 
on, for example, you know, diversity efforts as much as they were focused on 

the bottom line, we would have no more problem. So, it was very interesting. A 

compilation of different surveys to survey women and underrepresented groups 
in the law in particular and other industries, to see, okay, what do they think is 

going wrong? So again, we all think we can, they think that we can fix it. I tend 

to think we can fix it, too, at least in a lot of a lot of situations.  

So, where do you have to fix it if you’re looking at your organization? 
Where is this corporate culture? Where is it really? Where does it come through 

for people? And we’ve identified three different places where it comes through. 

Most evidently in a corporate culture. First of all, it’s how do you speak to 
people? When do you speak to people? And that is all of your inside 

communications. That’s all of your outside communications as well.  Second 

area where this comes through is the decision-making process. Who is involved 

in that decision-making process? Do people have the opportunity to weigh in, 
and what decisions are made? Where does the company put its money, for 

example? Where is that money invested? And so, for example, you know what 

is really important to with respect to corporate culture, and I’ll talk about this 
just a little bit more, is that decision making process, and where you invest your 

money speaks louder than some other things. So, if you say you’re really 

engaged, and you’re focused on, you are focused on diversity, but you don’t put 
any resources toward it, then that speaks louder than anything, and there’s 

nothing worse than having a corporate culture that’s actually inconsistent with 

what you say it to be. The third thing there is, people practices, and I think the 

other speakers have really touched on this nicely as well. If there’s transparency 
in the HR Processes, if you have diversity at different levels of the organization, 

you have employee support, and you know how these decisions are made, that 

is also going to be a big driver in communicate communicating your corporate 
culture.  

So, since we like to come up with phrases that are easy to remember, we’ve 

come up with this with this, which s stands for SIGNPOSTS, which are here, 
the things that you can look for to determine whether there is actually a healthy 

culture in place, that as a worker you might want to be part of.  

The first one is the suggestion box and that is organizations should have real 

suggestion boxes that are really a culture of continuous improvement. So, the 
best organizations are open to change, especially in today’s world, where we 

know that changes are imperative.  

The second part of it is that individuals matter. The organization should 
allow for autonomy, not micromanaging. and you should also be considering 

employees assignments when you give, when you dole out those assignments. 

That’s a really important element. Growth Opportunities Organizations need to 



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create a flexible structure with opportunities for equitable growth and 

advancement and super important one. When it comes to the corporate culture, 

no one person can dominate the culture. And as you can imagine, this comes 
through in a couple of different ways. One is a book that I love, just maybe 

because it was the title I read a few years ago, which is called the No Asshole 

Rule.  If you have that person who takes over the culture, that’s going to get in 

the way of fostering the culture that is going to be openly inclusive to all. This 
can happen, and another example is in meetings. For example, if you have the 

meeting where one person is allowed to dominate the meeting and talks the 

whole time. That is another instance in which you have someone dominating the 
culture. So there has to be a process in place to try to deal with these instances, 

so that no one is able to take over and undermine the culture.  

The P stands for the purpose of the organization is clear and mission driven, 

and it’s a mission that aligns with your personal values you hope as a worker, 
otherwise the worker is not going to is not going to stick around. And what’s 

again important to emphasize in connection with this point is, if you 

communicate, this is really what the studies show. If you communicate one 
thing, but you act in the opposite way, there is nothing that is more detrimental 

to a culture, a corporate culture, a clear, proper culture than that.  

The O stands for open communications, and these should be 
communications that are frequent. They’re respectful. They’re consistent, and 

they’re gender neutral, and that’s a really, really important one. And obviously 

it doesn’t have to just to do with being gender neutral. It also can include any 

sort of thing that communicates a bias to your employees. Karen Catlin, who’s 
the author of Better Allies, has some great catch phrases that are just off-limits, 

because they really communicate to someone who belongs to one of these 

underrepresented groups that they are not welcome there, I can tell you for sure 
I hate getting emails that are addressed to me still with “Dear, Sir.”  

The S for signpost stands for safety, and that is obviously this culture needs 

to your culture, needs to have a safe environment for employees to offer their 
ideas and to offer the input. If people don’t feel safe, they won’t speak up.  

And then T in some ways is the most important in a way. You have a 

transparent process for hiring, for firing, for compensation, for review, for 

promotions. And there are all kinds of resources out there that can tell you from 
start to finish. How do I make sure I have a diverse pool of applicants? How do 

I make sure I have a process in place, so that I am not just arbitrarily promoting 

someone because he’s my buddy. And what is the process for compensation 
again being transparent, so that everybody understands what the rules of the 

game are? We certainly do not claim to have the answers to all of these. But if 

you’d like to dive into each one of these categories in a little more depth. We’d 

absolutely love it if you’d listen to our podcast. Because again, my message here 
is yes, we have lots of bad actors out there, but we also have lots of solutions, 

and if we can get people to pay attention to the solutions, because frankly, I’m 

not sure law can fix it at this level. Well, as I tell people, they never want to be 



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in the accident. It’s a personal injury accident where they actually need a lawyer. 
Right? We’d rather have the culture that everyone can respond to, to begin with 

in a positive manner.  

So, the parity prescription, I’ll just say briefly, stop trying to change women, 
create diverse teams, recognize unconscious bias, intentionally include and 

partner with men as allies, and talk about the issues. And there are lots of good 

resources out there. I’ve mentioned both of these, most of these already. One 
other one is the good culture which is the Leader’s Guide to a Workplace that 

Doesn’t Suck. I just like picking out the fun titles. So, thanks very much. It’s an 

honor to be again. Really an honor to be among this group today. 

 
David Fleischhacker: Thank you, Ms. Pollack-Milgate. Great insight on how 

our workplace can be more conducive environment for equitable success, and I 

look forward to checking out some of your podcasts, as well as some of the 
books that you mentioned. Interesting titles, indeed. It looks like we have a 

couple of minutes for questions. I know that Professor Drobac and others have 

been in answering some of the questions that have been posed in the Q&A, and 

our panelists will continue to do so. I wanted to pose one question to the 
panelists.  So, I’m at the Civil Rights Commission, where we have a limited 

jurisdiction and focus on enforcing the laws as passed by the Indiana General 

Assembly. But we have, you know, practitioners, students, and others who are 
listening. What are what are one or two actions that they could take to help kind 

of break down some of these systemic barriers especially, and move the needle 

toward greater gender equality in this employment area? We’ll go with 
Professor Drobac first. 

 

Jennifer Drobac: Yeah, I’d love to respond to that. The Indiana Code has a 

provision that specifies that if someone who believes that they’ve been 
discriminated against in employment, if they want to avail themselves of the 

Indiana Civil Rights Act, they have to get the employer to agree in writing to be 

sued. Guess what, no employers agree to be sued in writing. I mean, that’s crazy. 
And so, the Legislature needs to retract that provision. It stops all use of the 

Indiana Civil Rights Act. The Indiana Civil Rights Act hasn’t kept pace with 

Title VII for the provision of damages, we’re back in the 1964 damage 
provisions in Indiana. In essence, the Indiana Civil Rights Act is completely 

meaningless with respect to employment discrimination, and is a joke. You have 

to use Title VII. If they want a good model they could go to sister states, and a 

really good one is California’s Government Code Section 12, 9, 48. And so, I 
would encourage Indiana to make haste to demonstrate its dedication to the 

people who make this economy work. 

 
David Fleischhacker: Alright, Thank you. Any of the other professors or you 

want to chime in? 

 



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Deborah Pollack-Milgate: I think I gave my answer already. Read, educate 

yourselves. Answers are out there. People just need to educate themselves and 

execute. It turns out that’s not really hard. 
 

David Fleischhacker: Absolutely. 

 

Nancy Levit: I’ll go ahead. I think you’re hearing from the three, of us from 
Jennifer, from Deborah, from Naomi and June and me, if you want to cap power, 

if you want to limit the ability of people to rig the system, that requires 

transparency. It requires establishing the rules of the game in clear and in 
consistent ways. You know what? When we look back in history we can go even 

further back than you, Jennifer. When you look back in history to like 1929, it 

was a remarkable period of relative economic equality. The New Deal came in, 

because when for Franklin Roosevelt took office, he was discrediting the 
finance czars, who’d produced the stock market crash of 1929, and you know 

what opened their eyes. It was revelation of the outside pay of a million dollars 

a year in 1929. That’s what generated the shockwaves across America, if we 
have to route the sort of revelation of the disparities between CEO and average 

worker pay, and it would be really interesting to do that. If that that deep dive 

in Indiana, what are your statistics? I think that can also galvanize attention. 
 

David Fleischhacker: Absolutely, absolutely. Alright. Well, that concludes our 

time for the women and employment panel. Participants will have access to the 

PowerPoint slides sometime after today’s event has concluded. Thank you, 
Professors Drobac, Cahn, Carbone, and Levit, and Ms. Pollack-Milgate for your 

insightful informative and timely information today, and thank you to all the 

participants who joined us today. I’ll now turn it back over to Gabriela. 
 

Gabriela Ocampo: Thank you so much, David. What a powerful house of a 

panel! We’re gonna take a 5-minute break and we’ll be back by 12:00. Thank 
you, everyone.  

 

DEAN KAREN BRAVO AND KEYNOTE SPEAKER 

 
>>> 12:05 PM 

Gabriela Ocampo: Alright everybody, welcome back. Right now, we’re going 

to start our keynote Speaker, and Dean Bravo, the Dean of the IU McKinney 
School of Law, will be introducing her. Dean Bravo is also the Gerald L. Bepko 

Professor of Law. Dean Bravo, take it away, please. 

 

Dean Bravo: Thank you, Gabriela. Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Karen 
Bravo, the Dean of IU McKinney School of Law and the Gerald L. Bepko 

Professor of Law. As a scholar of international law, I have studied and published 

several articles and book chapters on the subject of human trafficking. My work 



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in this area has shown me the need for more public awareness of various issues 
surrounding human trafficking. For this reason, I’m very excited to introduce 

the symposium’s keynote Speaker: Julie Dahlstrom.  

Professor Dahlstrom is a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the 
Immigrants’ Rights and Human Trafficking Program at Boston University 

School of Law. She founded the Human Trafficking Clinic, the second law 

school clinic in the United States to represent trafficking victims. In 2014, that 
clinic was recognized by Pre-law Magazine as one of the Nation’s top 25 most 

innovative clinical programs. Her research looks at the evolution of human 

trafficking law in the United States exploring the ways in which litigators have 

mobilized human trafficking law in different contexts. Her articles have been 
published in leading journals, including the California Law Review, UC Davis 

Law Review, and UC Irvine Law Review. Professor Dahlstrom teaches in the 

areas of immigration, human trafficking, public interest, and gender-based 
violence. She speaks nationally on the topic of human trafficking, including for 

the National Association of Attorneys General, the National Sexual Violence 

Conference, the Massachusetts Victim Assistance Advanced Academy, and the 

National Attorney General Training and Research Institute. She is a thought 
leader on issues of human trafficking and immigration reform, and has 

published opinion pieces in The Hill, Cognoscenti, and the Los Angeles Times, 

among other publications. I hope that you will find her presentation, “The Anti-
Trafficking Cause: The Evolution, and Limitations of Legal Responses to 

Trafficking and Women,” to be both thought provoking and informative. 

Welcome, Professor Dahlstrom. 
 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Thank you so much, Dean Bravo! It is 

wonderful to see all of you, and I just want to thank Dean Bravo specifically for 

all of her contributions in the field. It means so much to have her introducing 
me and to be a part of this really important symposium. So, I’m gonna go ahead 

and start by sharing my slides and also for sharing. Thanks again to the Indiana 

International and Comparative Law Review, and specifically the tremendous 
organizers that you have already heard from today: Jessie Walker, Lizzie Ford, 

Gabriela Ocampo, and Hannah Rarick. And thanks to the many panelists for this 

rich discussion. I know that I’ve already learned a lot.  
So, before I get into the substance of the remarks today, I want to tell you 

how I came to this work of representing trafficking survivors which I’ve been 

doing for about the past 15 years. I have to say, I embarked on this practice a bit 

by accident. At the time, I was a practicing immigration lawyer representing 
clients and humanitarian claims, and I started to see human trafficking cases in 

my day-to-day practice that were left unidentified. In fact, one day a teacher 

brought in a young woman who was a domestic worker and didn’t have access 
to her passport or other documents. And naively, I thought there are robust legal 

protections in this area, perhaps unlike other areas of immigration or other in 



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areas of law generally, and the pathway to immigration relief should be 

relatively straightforward. 

And that misconception started off my journey into trafficking law, where I 
found that this survivor, like many sense, would instead face tremendous 

challenges, especially when navigating the interconnected systems designed to 

“protect her.” From the law enforcement officers who interrogated her, to the 

labor officials who sought to calculate her wages, to also the immigration 
officials who adjudicated her application for a special T-Visa that is designed 

for trafficking survivors. She faced pervasive misconceptions, stigma, and bias 

that would punctuate her journey to legal relief. It would ultimately take years 
for her rights to be vindicated and that was with access to a lawyer and many 

other resources that which many are never afforded.  

Since that first case in teaching and in practice, I’ve thought deeply about 

trends about best practices, and also about the evolving meaning of trafficking, 
and I hope to share a little bit about that today, and to learn from all of you 

throughout this conference. So, today my talk will focus on trafficking of 

women and girls internationally, particularly using the term female broadly to 
refer to those who identify as female. It reflects on CEDAW’s prohibition 

against trafficking in women and girls which is enshrined in Article Six and the 

continued commitment by the CEDAW Committee to combat trafficking and 
also to refine legal approaches. In 2020 decades after CEDAW was a was 

adopted, the committee made this important statement. The committee indicated 

it advances a life free from being traffic, and that that must be recognized as a 

human right. States Parties, they said, must pursue all appropriate means to 
eradicate trafficking and exploitation of prostitution, to ensure that laws systems 

regulations and funding are in place to make the realization of that right effective 

rather than illusory.  
So, initially, the statement may seem relatively straightforward and 

uncontroversial. But stepping back, one might find it a bit strange. Looking at 

the state of both international and domestic legal efforts to address trafficking 
in 2020. You might observe that while anti- trafficking efforts are admittedly 

uneven and imperfect, there is a relatively developed international, and for many 

countries domestic, legal framework. There’s substantial international and 

domestic funding aimed at eradicating trafficking. And there’s also almost 
uniform condemnation from international bodies and world leaders. Yet, 

trafficking persists and proliferates with rights of trafficking survivors often is 

this quote states they illusory.  
So, my talk today will examine why. Why does trafficking persist in the 

right rights of trafficking survivors remain often unrealized, despite persistent 

attention by the international community? How does trafficking manifest now, 

and what are some of the most pressing legal concerns? And, finally, what are 
the limits in international and domestic law in addressing this global problem? 

These are incredibly difficult questions, incapable of comprehensive answers in 

the time we have together. So, my hope is just to highlight a few key tensions 



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and themes, and if you take away anything from my talk, I hope you take 2 
lessons. First, it is that legal responses continue to evolve thank thankfully. And 

I think you’ve seen that throughout today’s conference, and that current law 

students and future lawyers can and will have an important role in continuing to 
re-envision and refine anti trafficking responses. And, second, we need 

intersectional responses, like those embodied in this very conference, that 

grapple deeply with the underlying structural routes of trafficking and openly 
connect discussion about gender-based violence with questions of access to 

education, reproductive justice, work and rights. Symposiums like this are an 

important step forward, and I’m so delighted that we’re here today.  

So, I’m gonna start by clarifying terminology. What is trafficking? The term 
human trafficking may seem pretty self-evident. We see images of trafficking 

in the popular media quite a lot, and most people think they have a sense of what 

trafficking is. A few examples in the United States context. Trafficking includes 
the conduct of Raymond Jeffries. For almost 10 years Jeffries and others 

trafficked women and minor girls throughout Massachusetts and neighboring 

States. They targeted girls and women, including those who lacked financial 

resources, were unhoused, and had substance abuse issues. And eventually he 
and others were convicted and sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking offenses. 

It is the labor, trafficking conduct of a couple in a gated community in Stockton, 

California, who brought a domestic worker from India to the to the United 
States, and made her work 18 hours per day, paying her no money, threatening 

to deport her if she stepped forward. These allegations only came to light when 

she suddenly managed to appear at the Stockton police department. And the 
employers were later, after many years, convicted of forced labor charges, and 

imprisoned, convicted, and sentenced to 188 months in prison. And it is, of 

course, the conduct of Jeffrey Epstein. Now infamous financier here, who 

recruited young women to provide commercial sex. So, these are examples in 
the US context, but we see the trafficking over 20 years after it was defined 

internationally, which we’ll speak about in just a minute, persist in global 

proportions. It often thrives amidst war and conflict, UN special representative, 
Pramila Patten, in 2022 pointed out how Russia’s war has created a “human 

trafficking crisis”. She called it a crisis within a crisis, calling for a coordinated 

regional approach to address trafficking. Many news outlets have highlighted 
the proliferation of sexual exploitation involving Ukrainian refugees, and others 

have noted how Ukrainians, both within and outside of Ukraine, especially those 

from marginalized groups, are vulnerable to labor exploitation, particularly 

women and girls. In reporting from the PBS News hour, Regina described how 
she received an online offer of rent, free accommodation in exchange for 

housework and sex with the host, and she says she feels the fear and discomfort 

of objectification in daily life. Another refugee, Tatiana explained that weeks 
after weeks, month after month, “I was waiting for payment, but they paid me 

just a small part of what I was owed, and in the end, it was all empty promises”. 

The company thinks that they can fool us just because we are Ukrainian. 



2023]                                     SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT                                       411 

 

 
Other new forms of trafficking have proliferated, fueled by the Internet. A 

recent undercover investigation by BBC News Arabic found that domestic 

workers, many from Northern Africa were bought and sold online using apps 
by well-known media technology companies in a booming black market to 

employers in Kuwait and elsewhere, where their passports were taken, and many 

were subject to abuse. Some of this was taken out, was carried out on 

Facebook’s own Instagram where posts had been promoted via algorithmic 
boosted hashtags. And looking at culpability international organizations pointed 

not only to the perpetrators but also to the technology companies themselves.  

Urmila Bhoola said, “What they are doing is promoting an online slave 
market,” calling for accountability against companies like Google. Increased 

migration also continues to facilitate vulnerability to trafficking. For example, 

a report by the international organization on migration highlighted the prolific 

trafficking in women and girls from Nigeria to Italy estimating that about 80% 
of Nigerian women and girls arriving by sea in Italy in 2016 and forward are 

likely survivors of sex trafficking. The report also highlighted the prolific 

challenges for women seeking to leave exploitation where fear of deportation, 
debt, or stigma prevents them often from seeking help.  

One representative story from the report described what Precious, who was 

17 years of age when encountered, noting that she contacted a Nigerian woman 
who is waiting for her in Italy, so that she could find employment in her beauty 

salon. But, contrary to what she was promised, precious was forced into 

prostitution when she saw law enforcement agents approaching her, she called 

her trafficker, asking her what to do. The latter urged her to run to avoid 
repatriation.  

So, we know that trafficking persists globally, and while it can it impact 

anyone, including men, statistics indicate that it disproportionately impacts 
those who identify as women: women, girls, transgender women, and also 

LGBTQ+ individuals. Now, estimates are difficult and often unreliable, but the 

international labor organization estimated that the number of individuals in 
quote modern slavery has risen in the last 5 years with 49.6 million people in 

modern slavery in 2021, 27.6 million in forced labor and 22 million in forced 

marriage. So, we know that trafficking continues to be prevalent despite 

profound, almost uniform, condemnation of the conduct.  
Feminist organizer and scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, in describing the 

often-conflicting feminist viewpoints on trafficking noted, “no one defense 

trafficking there’s no pro-sex trafficking position any more than there is a public 
pro slavery position for labor these days.” And little has changed. President 

Biden in January 2023 unequivocally spoke out about human trafficking, noting 

that “around the world, human trafficking has stripped nearly 25 million people 

of their safety, dignity, and liberty, disproportionately affecting historically 
underserved and marginalized communities. And world leaders have similarly 

condemned trafficking and offered strong opposition, opposition that often is 

bipartisan in the United States.  



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But what exactly are world leaders condemning? First, what is trafficking? 
The meaning of trafficking despite this consensus has not always been apparent, 

and, in fact, has been historically contested. Slavery has been a concept since 

the beginning of time, but trafficking is a relatively new legal concept and has 
been the source of feminist battles with dominance feminists and others 

advocating for broader definitional frameworks to trafficking, opposed by 

intersectional or choice feminists who sought to distinguish sex work from more 
limited conceptions of trafficking. And indeed, efforts to eradicate trafficking in 

the twentieth century often emerge from a quite racialized and gendered legacy 

with advocates in the early twentieth century, often connecting concerns about 

trafficking to discourse about white slavery and centering narratives of white or 
Western European women in commercial sex, and coupling them with 

popularized narratives of kidnapping violence, rescue, and escape.  Ultimately 

trafficking was defined in 2000 in international law, through the trafficking 
protocol, in gender neutral terms, and since then many countries have come to 

criminalize it and define it in slightly different ways. Regardless of how these 

lines are drawn, the concept now includes both labor and sex trafficking. And 

contrary to what many do think, the trafficking does not require transportation. 
Instead, it really refers to this unique form of exploitation, whether in the context 

of commercial sex, or more broadly, in various types of labor markets ranging 

from domestic work, nannies and housekeepers and domestic workers to 
carnivals, restaurants and factories.  

Efforts to define and combat trafficking took a number of forms 

internationally. It was the address by a range of international instruments in the 
1900s, again focusing primarily on white slavery and sex trafficking of women 

and girls. Then addressed in distinct conventions relevant for today CEDAW 

and the Conventions on the Rights of the Child. In Article 6 of CEDAW, those 

drafters called for States parties to take all appropriate measures, including 
legislation, to suppress all forms of trafficking in women. But finally, trafficking 

was not defined until 2000 under the protocol to prevent, suppress, and punish 

trafficking in persons, especially women and children, which supplemented the 
UN Convention on the transnational, organized crime. This solidified the 

approach of trafficking as one embedded in efforts to address crime, and some 

argued, not in efforts to address this as a human rights issue, and also in 
solidified a prosecutorial approach that continues to this day.  

So, what does trafficking mean? Just briefly. In the in the trafficking 

protocol, Section 3(a) lays out the definition of trafficking, providing a very 

broad framework focusing on actions, so, you see here, recruitment, 
transportation, transfer, harboring, means which can include such diffuse means 

as the abuse of power or position of vulnerability, and the purpose of 

exploitation which itself was not defined concretely in the protocol. So, the 
Protocol has been subject to some critique for lacking a concrete human rights 

enforcement mechanism, and instead encouraging States parties to enact 

legislation, and also for providing a broad, often ambiguous in some spaces, 



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legal framework. However, many agree that it has had an important, tremendous 

effect, promoting a shared understanding of trafficking, and also pushing States 

parties to adopt domestic legislation. As legal scholar Anne Gallagher has noted, 
“Without the Protocol, it is likely that the human rights system would have 

continued its shameful tradition of sidelining issues of forced labor, forced sex, 

forced marriage, and the ritual exploitation of migrant workers through debt.” 

Most critically, the Protocol provided the impetus and the template for a series 
of legal and political developments that overtime have served to ameliorate 

some of its greatest weaknesses, including the lack of human rights protections 

and of a credible oversight mechanism. As a result of the protocol, the 
international community’s response to trafficking has grown more pronounced 

with many countries and regions, adopting legislation, protocols to address 

trafficking, adding texture and substance to these provisions designed to provide 

rights to Survivors. 
Navi Pillay, in 2010, noted, “over the past decade, human trafficking has 

moved from the margins to the mainstream of international concern as we 

witness the rapid development of a comprehensive legal framework that 
comprises both international and regional treaties, as well as a broad range of 

soft law Instruments related to trafficking. These represent a fundamental shift 

that has taken place in how the international community thinks about human 
exploitation.” And that is indeed true. These legal developments have had 

tremendous value which have been greatly uneven in different countries. But 

I’ll focus on the United States as an example.  

In the US, since 2000 we have seen legislation, and passed reauthorizations 
acts as well, that have criminalized forms of sex and labor trafficking that have 

established a broad civil remedy for survivors of trafficking including fairly 

generous provisions around third-party liability. All 50 States have now passed 
anti-trafficking legislation, some much more comprehensive than their federal 

counterparts and States have passed statutes to vacate or expunge criminal 

convictions related to trafficking and provide for affirmative defenses. There 
have also been proactive efforts to expand victim compensation, criminal 

restitution, and proactive efforts, especially in in California, to address supply 

chain issues and think about and promote transparency among other provisions. 

So, I’ve written about how these provisions in many ways have provided 
groundbreaking rights to survivors of trafficking. As one example in the United 

States, legal responses have permitted survivors to file new groundbreaking civil 

lawsuits, not only against perpetrators, but also against a wide range of third 
parties, that knowingly benefit from trafficking.  

As an example of one of these lawsuits, in 2022, a Federal Jury in Texas 

awarded a Cambodian woman 1.76 million after finding a Rockport couple 

illegally trafficked her to the United States and forced her to work in a donut 
shop. Council for the survivor, Jones Yvonne, marveled at how many people 

don’t believe the trafficking can exist in the United States. But this this is why 



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it is tremendously important that survivors are able to step forward and claim 
their rights and compensation. She’s not alone.  

Civil lawsuits have risen dramatically in the United States under trafficking 

statutes. According to the trafficking, Human Trafficking Legal Center, the 
number of federal civil trafficking lawsuits has increased steadily each year 

from 2003 to 2021, with the exception of 2020, with where there was a brief 

drop, and as of 2021 plaintiffs had brought a total of 539 Federal cases under 
the federal private right of action, and they had also filed 13 times as many cases 

in 2021 than they had in in 2004. Similar lawsuits have been filed against third 

parties like hotel chains, private detention centers, and others. According to the 

Legal Center, the number of cases brought against corporate defendants has 
continued to increase as of 2021. The vast majority of federal civil anti 

trafficking cases have included at least one corporate defendant with many 

defendants, including universities, website staffing agencies, and other 
corporate entities. And apart from these wins, and in the context of civil 

litigation advocates, advocates and survivors have celebrated other important 

victories which I’m happy to talk about in Q.& A. They’ve charted out avenues 

for immigration, relief for immigrant survivors, and also important remedies for 
survivors who are charged with crimes. 

However, profound challenges remain in this space, as in the others 

described by the panelists. And many scholars and advocates have critiqued the 
ongoing and evolving trafficking legal framework. So, while there are a myriad 

of critiques, I’m just going to focus on two primary concerns in my remarks. 

One is the danger of an expansive, trafficking framework which Professor Janie 
Chuang has dubbed “exploitation creep” and the persistence of a prosecutorial 

approach which censors criminal legal responses and often disproportionately 

can penalize women of color and LGBTIQ individuals. So, alongside the 

development of the international framework embodied in that trafficking 
protocol scholars have critiqued the broad, definitional framework of 

trafficking. Professor Janie Chuang, in her 2014 law review article, argued that 

the expansive definition has led to what she calls “exploitation creep,” which 
she is defined as quote efforts to expand previously narrow legal categories, at 

least in terms of rhetoric and policy, but in some cases, also in hard law, in a 

strategic bid to subject a broader range of practices to a greater amount of public. 
She’s observed that the expansion of trafficking can include, in her estimations, 

inclusion of forced labor, more subtle forms of a of psychological coercion, and 

noted how it now does not require transportation. But since she published this 

article in 2014, we’ve seen new examples in practice of this widening. An 
example is trafficking statutes, reaching new third parties, including hotels and 

others. State legislation in some States, including Massachusetts where I’m 

located, to include all commercial sex as trafficking and to provide for harsh 
criminal penalties in that context. and legal efforts aimed at expanding, 

trafficking, to subsume other forms of sexual assault and domestic violence.  



2023]                                     SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT                                       415 

 

 
And there is a great value to widening interpretations, but there’s also some 

collateral consequences that are important to consider as the standard evolves. 

So, it’s true that the previously narrow legal categories often constrain who 
receives protections or rights. In fact, you know, I run a clinic. We’re often 

representing clients to advocate for a broadening of legal standards and 

interpretations. It allows litigators and survivors to benefit from moral 

condemnation associated with trafficking generous provisions around civil 
damages and other benefits, and it prompts action sometimes, which has been 

lacking or slow. But it’s also important to acknowledge and mitigate some of 

the risks of broadening trafficking approaches.  
As the concept of trafficking expands, there are also challenges. First, the 

concept can be more easily manipulated by politicians and policymakers in 

instrumental ways to promote anti-migration or other enforcement initiatives 

that can harm survivors. This was borne out under the Trump administration, as 
President Trump threatened to bring the full force of the US Government to 

address “trafficking concerns” defined broadly and used his power to engage in 

immigration enforcement efforts that often ultimately made non-citizens more 
vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Also, as trafficking widens, there is a risk 

that broad statutes and trap the very victims they seem they seek to assess.  

So, one example of this broadening or state efforts in the US, as I mentioned, 
that have broad sex trafficking statutes, and while these do in bold and 

prosecutors to build cases without cumbersome you know, victim testimony, 

and without survivors having to step forward, they also allow prosecutors to 

charge survivors themselves with trafficking crimes and vest tremendous 
discretion at the hands of prosecutors. And ultimately some of the moves to 

broaden and expand trafficking are responding to some of the mentions earlier 

about anti-discrimination claims not being as generous, and litigators are 
moving to invoke the trafficking frame. But I argue that we also need to look at 

those frames, the claims that aren’t moving forward in other contexts, and 

address those legal barriers as well.  
So, alongside the broadening trafficking framework is also a question about 

the efficacy of a predominantly still prosecutorial approach to trafficking, which 

many find has displaced focus on structural causes of trafficking. Kate 

Mogulescu and Abigail Swenson persuasively have observed that common calls 
to action around human trafficking continue to urge greater law, enforcement, 

action, and attention increased to rest of traffickers and more prosecutions. In 

many instances the prosecution-based model reveals itself as antithetical to 
principles of human and civil rights, ignores the reality that many trafficking 

survivors confront, and redirects the conversation away from important critique 

and reform. It’s true that the focus on criminal outcomes as “success” in the anti-

trafficking cause has often encouraged arrest and conviction with less attention 
to survivor autonomy, and also addressing the underlying structural causes.  

And I’ll provide a brief example from our work. I’m going to share a story 

largely based on a client who we represented. I’ve changed some key aspects to 



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416 

protect confidentiality. She also gave me her permission to use this story 
because she wanted others to understand the true challenges that survivors may 

face in accessing their rights. Melissa was a child when she entered the United 

States. She lived with extended family, but everything changed when she 
received news that her father had been killed abroad. She was in middle school. 

After his death, she found it difficult to focus on school, started to hang out with 

different kids, and was a victim of sexual abuse. Things started to become more 
difficult, and she found herself unhoused.  

Although her family had immigration papers, she didn’t have family 

support, or a lawyer to navigate that process. She had no way to support herself, 

and later her young child. She started engaging in sex for money to support 
herself, and as time went on, she found a boyfriend, who ended up being violent 

and made her work with him. One day she was targeted by a trafficking raid. 

She was arrested and detained. Her boyfriend had always made her fear 
immigration, and it was coming true. She was terrified that she would be 

deported. She was eventually referred to our program and came into our office, 

and we told her about these immigration protections, about avenues to vacate 

convictions. But she was insistent: “I’m not a victim. I’m not going to work with 
law enforcement.” She told us about the systems with which she had engaged 

in the past, and how they had failed her. The police, the “child protection 

system,” the immigration system, and she wanted no part in these systems, but 
she also didn’t want to be deported. 

Although her family had gotten immigration papers, she did not have an 

attorney to work on her case. We had to address outstanding warrants and other 
jurisdictions, engage with barriers to get her stable housing, consider how to 

regain custody of her children, and prioritize her desire not to participate in the 

criminal prosecution. At times it sounded like that was not going to be possible, 

despite the fact of these systems that were designed to provide her with benefits. 
As an example, even though she qualified for the immigration benefit, we 

received a request indicating that she needed to show why discretion should be 

exercised on her behalf despite countless letters and evidence in her file. 
Remarkably, years later, she now has immigration status, she’s out of 

deportation proceedings, and has been a survivor advocate helping others. But 

this was despite the odds, and often, despite those systems that were enacted to 
protect her.  

And her story is not unique. It highlights continued challenges the 

proliferation of systems, of solutions that are embedded in the criminal system, 

the fact that survivors remain often criminalized and often do not self-identify, 
and the profound systemic barriers that individuals face when exiting out of 

exploitation, and of relevance to this symposium, the lack of intersectionality, 

and responses to the fact that survivors often have to navigate multiple legal 
systems where they encounter stigma, discrimination, and more. And so, what 

does that mean for the future of anti-trafficking reform? It means that much 

more is needed for the legal system to function for survivors, and to offer viable 



2023]                                     SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT                                       417 

 

 
options for exit. In the next wave of reform, there’s a need for more nuanced 

intersectional responses to trafficking once the decenter criminal responses and 

ensure non-criminal criminalization. Also, there’s also a need to prioritize 
survivor-centered remedies like civil litigation, compensation, restitution. 

Thankfully, CEDAW, the CEDAW Committee, and Recommendation 38 has 

reinforced those approaches. The committee notes that criminal law is alone 

unable to address or redress the crime of trafficking, due to uneven 
harmonization of laws, including the definition of trafficking both between 

countries and within countries. The complexity of financial operations, and the 

powerlessness of justice systems. An effective anti-trafficking response relies 
on ensuring that women and girls are a are able to exercise their fundamental 

rights. And this is no doubt true. Unfortunately, often criminal legal responses 

have ensnared victims.  

Let’s return to the beginning of the presentation and the case that I 
mentioned. In this case, what you didn’t see is that there were two survivors 

deemed defendants who are charged alongside Jeffrey’s in this case. And this is 

also important for us to realize what sex trafficking looks like. These two 
survivors, according to Court pleading, were both subject to violence and 

coercion, had children with the defendant, and yet, were charged with 

trafficking. Charges that, because of the lack of any system for federal vacature 
in the United States, will never be erased from their record, or at least, not for 

now. Charges that did nothing to address the root causes of trafficking they 

experienced and instead will deepen the stigma and vulnerability that they 

experience as they navigate their lives. And unfortunately, this isn’t, common.  
According to a recent study from the UN office of drugs and crime, women, 

and girls represent a majority of human trafficking survivors. But they also make 

up a large portion of those prosecuted for trafficking related crimes. The study 
notes, for example, that while most countries report female offenders accounted 

for less than 15% of total crimes charged, 30% of trafficking cases involve 

female defendants. And the report also found that traffickers themselves use 
survivors to shield themselves from prosecution. But there is good news on the 

horizon. International legal responses are evolving to incorporate these 

principles, especially around non criminalization. The High Commissioner for 

Human Rights recently recommended principles and guidelines outlining this 
concept and calling on States to consider, “ensuring that legislation prevents 

traffic persons from being prosecuted, detained, or punished.”  

What does this mean further, in the United States and elsewhere? It means 
providing for more expansive duress or coercion defenses for a wide range of 

crimes not just for sex, for fee, or related issues. It means expanding post-

conviction relief for trafficking survivors, including the right to federal vacature. 

It also means, as the CEDAW Committee has noted, ensuring that innocent 
women and girls, this is in quotes, “are not arbitrarily arrested, abused, or falsely 

charged including in trafficking raids.” It means that Melissa should not have 

been arrested in the trafficking sting. In fact, she should not have been arrested 



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418 

at all. It means that she should have been able to vacate her existing criminal 
record related to trafficking. It also means that she should not have been held in 

immigration detention and should have had easy access to immigration relief. 

She should be able to reunify with her children, and she should have access to 
victim compensation and civil remedies. And the CEDAW committee adds 

substance to that framework.  

So where do we go from here? As you’ve seen, early efforts importantly 
focused on defining the problem of trafficking and encouraging domestic anti 

trafficking legislation. Efforts that essentially were very important in a in 

developing a shared consensus of the problem. Yet now anti-trafficking legal 

advocates, scholars, and law students in the audience today have to do more. 
They have to address the legacy of these imperfect legal responses. They have 

to refine existing remedies and bolster intersectional responses. And finally, 

many have pointed to the need for an approach that centers education, labor 
rights, anti-discrimination, principles, and reproductive rights, and an approach 

that has yet to be fully realized, but it’s embodied in the structure and the 

aspirations of CEDAW. Those efforts are incredibly important to ensure that 

anti trafficking responses themselves don’t reinforce a subordination or 
vulnerability. So, I’ll end with the quote that began this presentation. Much is 

needed for us to ensure that the right to be free from exploitation is effective and 

not illusory. What we need now is not a hammer, but more nuanced legal tools, 
and a recognition too of where the limits of the law may be, of areas where 

access to housing work, economic rights, are key to fill in these gaps, and 

admittedly, much time is passed in CEDAW, but returning to the aspirations 
behind it, are key to this endeavor. And I’m excited with many of you in this 

room, to begin to answer those difficult questions, and to see what your role is 

in sort of re-envisioning these answers. So, thank you very much. 

 
Lizzie Ford: Thank you, Professor Dahlstrom. We’re going to move into a 

Q&A portion, and I’ll be assisting with the Q&A. So, we have some questions 

in the Q&A. The first question is “How do you suggest that the global 
community make global trafficking laws enforceable in countries where the 

domestic legal regime is not necessarily as focused on trafficking as in the 

United States?”  
 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): This is a great question. So much of as I 

mentioned, much of the work internationally is focused on in acting domestic 

legislation. I think you know many countries there is an effort. If there isn’t 
already anti-trafficking laws, there is some nascent enforcement of trafficking 

laws. There have been organizations that have worked abroad like the 

Trafficking Institute in bolstering those approaches and providing training to 
prosecutors when there is trafficking statute already, but perhaps it’s being 

underused or under prosecuted. I also think we need to rely one of the exciting 

parts of the anti-trafficking movement is that survivor led initiatives have been 



2023]                                     SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT                                       419 

 

 
tremendously successful. And so, I think you know, part of this also is engaging 

in those communities with survivors, with how they see solutions impacting 

them, and how statutes or criminalization might impact them as well to build 
consensus around new ways forward. 

 

Lizzie Ford:  Sounds like you had quite the examples for that question. You 

were ready to go with that. My next question says, “Prior to your presentation, 
I wrongfully assumed that violence has to be involved in human trafficking, or 

the human trafficking victims are limited to foreign nations or immigrants. Since 

the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 includes both US citizens and 
foreign nationals, do you feel that this more inclusive definition, while broad, 

has had the desired effect on protecting human victims?” 

 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Yes, so I do think you make an important 
point. So, trafficking can impact US citizens, non-citizens. And the framework 

in the US, which we didn’t talk as much about was also passed in 2000 when 

the trafficking protocol occurred, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, and it 
applies to US citizens and non-citizens. I think that’s tremendously important. 

Trafficking is an issue that does impact a wide variety of people, and it’s 

important that it does recognize subtle forms of coercion which it does both in 
the sex and the labor trafficking context. So those things are important. I think 

we still want to watch at the edges of about the expansion of the kind concept 

as it’s assuming other legal concepts and sort of blocking or obscuring where 

reform is needed. But great to point that out too. 
 

Lizzie Ford:  Thank you. Our next question. It says you mentioned remedies 

for those women convicted of trafficking offenses. Can you give an example of 
what that might look like? 

 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): This is a great question. So, in many, 
many states of past statutes, to either vacate, expunge, or seal criminal 

convictions that were related to the trafficking because we know that survivors 

of sex trafficking or labor trafficking may be criminalized at different stages. 

They may be charged with crimes. They might relate to the underlying 
commercial sex, but they might not. I think we’re also seeing that individuals 

may be charged with larceny, or even more serious offenses. And so many States 

have passed statutes to allow those individuals to go into court and to vacate or 
expunge, to erase essentially that criminal record. That is not the case currently 

for federal offenses, so there is no federal right to vacate offenses. There have 

been efforts, though to do that, and I think it’s tremendously important because 

for the individuals I mentioned, although ultimately, they were charged with 
trafficking, they were not convicted of trafficking. They pleaded down to other 

offenses, but that trafficking charge will remain on their record, and will impact 

likely access to employment to other benefits. 



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420 

 
Lizzie Ford: Kind of going off of that talking about how those federal offenses 

stay with those convicted of trafficking offenses, even though they might have 

been victims in the situation themselves in their own ways. Do you think there 
might be like some recidivism back into trafficking because they feel stuck? 

 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Great question, you know, I think I 
referenced earlier in the talk language that often emerges in the trafficking 

discourse around rescue or escape, or that views the conduct, as you know, is 

one point of sort of where an individual is able to exit out, and often there’s not 

a linear path, because, unless we address the underlying structural barriers that 
are in place, like access to education, work, I mean many of the issues that this 

conference is discrimination, you know, is addressing, then that that underlying 

vulnerability remains. 
 

Lizzie Ford:  Yeah, it definitely sounds like it’s kind of a loop that people can 

get stuck in. My next question you talked about the positive aspects of having 

kind of a broad definition of trafficking. But at the same time, I think there’s 
this movement of, you know, recognizing consensual sex work as not crime or 

something to be ashamed of and can be very empowering. How does the law 

reconcile those? The broad definition but still allowing consensual sex work. 
 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Yes, it’s interesting, I mean, in some 

ways trafficking law has grappled with this from its inception with different 
feminist advocates having different conceptions of what trafficking should look 

like, should trafficking include any engagement and commercial sex? Or is it a 

more limited form of relief for particular type of exploitation and separated from 

sex work as you, as you mentioned. Currently in the US, in most jurisdictions, 
engaging commercial sex is criminalized. There is definitely a movement, both 

in terms of reducing stigma, but also to decriminalize, and that is a foot, but 

often that would not. Well, it depends, and it depends on different jurisdictions, 
but that might not displace federal trafficking laws which still exist. 

 

Lizzie Ford: Yes. I think that’s a good thing to keep in mind, and a good way 
to approach the framework, because I know for me kind of listening to your 

presentation, I was like well, how would that work? So, I appreciate that you’ve 

really thought of the nuances of that. 

 
Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Well, if I could just add one thing that 

that your question brings up that, I think is quite interesting in this context is as 

the example I gave. Often individuals are navigating these complex legal 
systems but also legal systems that embody these disparate tendencies. So, in 

immigration law, yes, we say you could get it T-Visa if you are a survivor of 

trafficking, but we also there’s an in a ground of inadmissibility that you can’t 



2023]                                     SYMPOSIUM TRANSCRIPT                                       421 

 

 
get a benefit if you’ve been engaged in commercial sex, and both of those 

tendencies remain embedded in the law. There are ways to reconcile them, but 

we see that in criminal law, too, right trafficking is a crime, and yet commercial 
sex is still criminalized even for those who may be survivors. So, I think there 

is very much a need to reconcile those challenges embedded in in the law. 

 

Lizzie Ford: Yeah, definitely. The next question I have. I have someone from 
the audience who says: “I am curious about your thoughts on the international 

responsibility of the United States, for how immigration policies affect 

trafficking in other countries.” 
 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Effect of trafficking in other countries? 

Yes. Well, this is interesting. I would love to say more about the even, the how 

the US. Think about immigration and its intersection with trafficking 
domestically, which I’ll just say what we briefly what we have seen over the last 

period of years is increased denial rates for survival immigrant survivors of 

trafficking within the United States. We just recently published a report on that 
trend, and noting why that might be happening, so happy to share more on that. 

So, that’s a note just to say that we are doing this work, we aren’t necessarily 

always the model in certain aspects. But in terms of how we think about this 
issue abroad, the US does publish a trafficking persons reports where they 

comment about the status of trafficking and trafficking prosecution, prevention, 

and protection efforts abroad. Those reports have also been subject to critique 

the question of, you know, is the US in the position to provide that commentary. 
But those do provide an overlay to how trafficking efforts are going, and they 

also place individuals in different tiers and that does impact diplomacy efforts 

as well. 
 

Lizzie Ford: It’s interesting that you say that it’s kind of and we’re kind of 

unsure if the US is in a place to really give an opinion on that commentary, can 
you talk about you know arguments for and against whether the US would be in 

a good position to do that? 

 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Yeah. I mean, I think, as I mentioned in 
the in the presentation, in many ways there is this robust legal framework in the 

US which is a model. Yes, there are still profound challenges in terms of how 

that model is applied, and the persistence of trafficking. And so, you know, 
while well, I think we want to see, for example, civil legal remedies developed 

in other countries, or become more robust there are also aspects of the US. 

Policy that we probably do not want to see replicated abroad like the arrest of 

survivors, or, you know, being charged with trafficking crimes. 
 

Lizzie Ford: And do you think that if we were to, we as United States, are a 

party to a lot of international treaties, but we don’t ratify a lot of them. Do you 



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think that ratifying the treaties like CEDAW and the other treaties you 
mentioned might assist us in being more of a leader in in this area of combatting 

trafficking? 

 
Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): What a great way to end this conference! 

I mean absolutely. I think, that, you know it would be nice for the for the United 

States to take a leadership role, and to also acknowledge in the context of 
CEDAW the interconnected nature of aspects of discrimination work and you 

know, employment all of these pieces that we’ve spoken about today to 

trafficking to gender-based violence. This is not an issue where we’re going to 

be able to, you know, criminalize it, and it will go away right. We need really 
intersectional responses, and we need to be a leader in that space. 

 

Lizzie Ford: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s the hard part of looking at how we handle 
treaties and with our government, and just kind of trying to reconcile that and 

reconcile kind of all the different views on the issue. Well, that is what I have 

for the Q&A section. Thank you so much again, Professor Dahlstrom, for 

presenting and talking about this very important topic. 
 

Julie Dahlstrom (BU Law, she/her): Many thanks to you and the organizers 

for this excellent symposium. 
 

Lizzie Ford:  Well, thank you. That brings us to the end of our symposium. We 

ended just a few minutes early, but we hope you all enjoyed it. 
 

>>> 12:56 PM