Dear UNA Members and friends: This year, our theme is trafficking, human bondage, and slavery - modern-style. The June meeting brings the international problem home (yes, it happens here!) with a distinguished panel of activists and academics. Please come; please bring friends.

Our June program will focus on those responding to human trafficking in Wisconsin on local, systemic and academic levels. The panel will feature Marianna Smirnova, human trafficking policy specialist with the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault who will report on statewide activities including a baseline study, legislation, and service provider protocols that are in development as well as make connections between state, federal and international anti-human trafficking laws; Jo-Ann Gruber Hagen founder of Slave Free Madison, a community-based group raising awareness about the problem of human trafficking in Wisconsin; and, Professor Margo Kleinfeld of UW-Whitewater, author of “Who are Victims of Human Trafficking in Wisconsin, A Geographical Analysis” – who will speak on the characteristics of human trafficking victims in Wisconsin. The panel moderator will be Jan Miyasaki of Project Respect, a city-county project helping prostituted women in Dane County rebuild their lives.

Speaker Biographies:
Dr. Margo Kleinfeld is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater. Her research has focused on questions of transnational humanitarian assistance and human rights from a geographic feminist perspective. Between 2001 and 2002, Dr. Kleinfeld worked at the UNICEF country office in Colombo, Sri Lanka, while collecting data on children and armed conflict as part of her dissertation research on humanitarian ceasefires. More recently, Dr. Kleinfeld has done a series of pilot studies associated with victims of human trafficking in Wisconsin.

Marianna Smirnova is the human trafficking policy specialist at the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Since 2008, she has been organizing the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance's Human Trafficking Committee, which is creating a statewide protocol on human trafficking. Smirnova is a member of Federal Human Trafficking Taskforce; Rescue & Restore Coalition; Wisconsin Department of Children and Families' Immigration Workgroup; and Slave Free Madison.

JoAnn Gruber-Hagen is currently the Chair of SlaveFree Madison volunteer community coalition dedicated to raising community awareness of and response to human trafficking in Dane County, WI From 1995 to 2004 Gruber-Hagen was Special Assistant to the Dean for Human Resources, University of Wisconsin-Extension responsible for human resources troubleshooting, legal and policy development.

Jan Miyasiki, panel moderator, is the director of Madison’s Project Respect which addresses local prostitution in the City of Madison and Dane County. Opened in 1986, this project is jointly funded by the City of Madison and Dane County and provides diversion services on an outpatient basis for women involved in prostitution as processed by the City of Madison and Dane County District Attorney’s Offices for the violation of loitering and other prostitution related ordinances and statutes in lieu of fines, court appearances and jail time.

Project Respect also provides services for women who have voluntarily come to RESPECT for counseling and assistance in leaving the life of prostitution. RESPECT provides a safe space and peer support as well as advocacy, case management, counseling and crisis intervention on an outpatient basis in order to assist women in leaving prostitution and to help them into essential community services in order to address a woman’s health, economic, and family needs so she can develop a safe, constructive lifestyle.