From almost day one of the fall semester, students in the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic had a single task: research, design, and draft a manual on sex workers’ rights in Africa.
By mid-November, the manual was complete; the students’ remaining responsibility was to actually travel to Africa and serve as the curriculum instructors themselves. On November 7 Clinic Director and Professor Chi Adanna Mgbako, an expert on sex workers’ rights, and seven of her students took off for Port Louis, Mauritius, to teach 18 African sex worker activists how to use international, regional, and domestic legal strategies to advance sex workers’ rights on the continent.
“Law school until this point has been a lot about theory. With the trip to Mauritius, we were implementing that theory into practice,” said Zahava Moerdler, one of the clinic’s students. “No matter your choice of law, in today’s world where globalization has made everything feel so much closer, it is important to realize the effects and interactions of your practice abroad.”
As the holidays arrived at Fordham, many law students took a breather from school, but Mgbako and Professor Clare Huntington, the associate dean for research, shepherded 20 students in their respective classes abroad for lessons in good governance. While Mgbako went 1,242 miles off the coast of Africa, Huntington’s Comparative Family Law class traveled to Taiwan, just over 100 miles from mainland China, for eight days to take an intensive course at the National Taiwan University Law School, visit governmental and non-governmental organizations in Taipei, and observe family court.
“Taiwan is a fascinating country for this course because there are considerable differences with the United States. Family law there is based on traditional Confucian values such as filial piety. But the laws are rapidly changing, incorporating legal norms from other countries,” said Huntington. “The value of comparative work is that students learn about a new system, and they see our legal system in a new light. Through the experience, students are able to appreciate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the U.S. approach to domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault.”
Mgbako, the author of the new book To Live Freely in This World: Sex Worker Activism in Africa (New York University Press, 2016), agrees. “Fieldwork has always been an integral part of the learning experience in the human rights clinic.
“We didn’t want to teach sex worker activists simply how to use human rights mechanisms; we also wanted to come up with concrete plans and strategies for utilizing these mechanisms.”
“Sex workers face disproportionate amounts of violence and human rights violations and often have difficulty seeking redress for these abuses since sex work is criminalized,” said student Hailey Flynn, who also participated in the fall 2014 International Human Rights Clinic in which the class developed a similar human rights training for LGBTI refugees living in South Africa. “Sex workers’ voices must be front and center in shaping the movement advocating for the decriminalization of sex work.”
Huntington had previously used India as the correlative portion of her annual class, but differences in laws in Taiwan, such as its relatively robust welfare state and gun regulation, made it an appealing place to compare systems and encourage students to think critically about problems in a more nuanced way.
After visiting a Taiwanese NGO whose work addresses domestic violence, DeAnna Baumle, a joint JD/MSW student, said that she was “particularly inspired with the interdisciplinary approach given to these cases and the strong emphasis of both evidence-based practice and empowerment of clients. There was also a huge emphasis on prevention and mediation—something that U.S. family law fails to provide in many ways. We saw firsthand how the courts, the government, and NGOs work together to address issues of abuse and violence, and I think many of us were impressed by the friendly, progressive, and non-adversarial atmosphere that permeated all of these places.”
During her spring semester class, Huntington’s students will write research papers on a topic of family law, comparing the U.S. and Taiwanese systems, using information culled from the seminars with NTU law students and various site visits, including the Garden of Hope Foundation; Formosa Transnational Attorneys at Law; the Taiwan Fund for Children and Families; Taipei District Court, Family and Juvenile Divisions; and the Taipei City Center for Prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.
Mgbako’s clinic will put several of the advocacy plans developed during the workshop into action, including working with the sex workers’ rights advocates to approach certain international, regional, and domestic human rights monitoring mechanisms on human rights violations that sex workers face, such as the right to health, the right to work, the right to freedom from violence, and the right to be free from discrimination.
“Sex work is work,” Moerdler said. “Too often it is conflated with the human trafficking narratives. I met a group of incredible fighters who are making a difference for themselves and their families every day.
“The individuals who attended the training in Mauritius chose sex work and fight to be considered equal, to be given equal access to health services, and to be treated with dignity. I respect them and have learned so much from them.”
