Rice Seminar presents program on trafficking of girls and women in Houston Nov. 14

MEDIA ADVISORY

David Ruth
713-348-6327
david@rice.edu

Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
jfalk@rice.edu

Rice Seminar presents program on trafficking of girls and women in Houston Nov. 14

HOUSTON – (Nov. 12, 2012) – Julie Waters, a local attorney and director of Free the Captives, a Houston faith-based, anti-human-trafficking nonprofit, will lead a presentation of efforts to fight the trafficking of American girls and international women in Houston as part of the inaugural 2012-13 Rice Seminar, “Human Trafficking Past and Present: Crossing Disciplines, Crossing Borders,” at Rice University Nov. 14.

Nongovernmental organizations and local law enforcement agencies that combat trafficking will participate in the free public forum. A panel of speakers will include Dennis Mark of Redeemed Ministries and Ed Gallagher of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance.

The discussion will be at 7 p.m. in Rice’s Herring Hall, Room 100, 6100 Main St. For more information about the event, contact laurenk@rice.edu. For a campus map and parking information, visit http://rice.edu/parking.

Co-directed by history professors James Sidbury and Kerry Ward, the 2012-13 Rice Seminar has convened a distinguished group of four faculty fellows from outside of Rice, one Rice faculty member, one Rice postdoctoral fellow and two Rice graduate students to study human trafficking and historical slavery from several disciplinary perspectives, from public health to women’s studies to political science and others. The seminar will use Houston as one of its case studies to examine the public and private philanthropic leaders working to combat new forms of slave trade and labor exploitation. The most tangible product of the seminar will be scholarly publications by the participants, including a book.

The United Nations defines human trafficking as “a crime against humanity. It involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harboring or receiving a person through the use of force, coercion or other means for the purpose of exploiting them.” Human trafficking has been identified as the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world, second only to drug trafficking as the world’s most profitable industry. According to the latest United Nations estimates, nearly 2.5 million people from 127 different countries are being trafficked into 137 countries around the world.

This fall and throughout the remainder of the inaugural year, the Rice Seminar will bring local and international experts on human trafficking to campus to share their insights and perspectives with the Houston community.

The Rice Seminar program is an initiative of the dean of Humanities, funded by the School of Humanities and the Humanities Research Center, and is designed to promote humanistic research.

For more information about Rice Seminars, the topics, participants and events, visit http://hrc.rice.edu/riceseminars and http://hrc.rice.edu/houconnect. More information about Free the Captives can be found at www.freethecaptiveshouston.com.

-30-

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,708 undergraduates and 2,374 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice has been ranked No. 1 for best quality of life multiple times by the Princeton Review and No. 4 for “best value” among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go to www.rice.edu/nationalmedia/Rice.pdf.