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University of New Haven Professor Studies Human Trafficking

What keeps Professor Mario Gaboury going are the survivor stories.

"The level of human suffering is mind numbing and emotionally draining at times," said Gaboury, who has spent a career studying the victims of crimes and most recently, the problem of human trafficking.

The University of New Haven professor and chairman of the department of criminal justice was named this year as the university’s first Oskar Schindler Humanities Foundation endowed professor. He will hold the post for three years, during which he will involve graduate students in research projects on victimology, in general, as well as human trafficking in South Africa.

"There are people I have worked with who have taken horrible tragedies and somehow through their great personal spirit or their faith ... they have actually turned tragedy into something good," Gaboury said. He hopes to try to understand how these people get the strength to refocus their energies on a positive resolution.

Gaboury, a former deputy director of the Office for Victims of Crime at the U.S. Justice Department, is proposing a study he hopes will get a better handle on how this happens. "I want to see if we could learn from it to encourage good human behavior more broadly," Gaboury said.

Schindler was the German industrialist who saved some 1,200 Jews who worked in his factories during World War II from being shipped to the death camps in Poland. The professorship is funded with a $100,000 gift given to the school in 2005 by Jeanne and Irving Glovin, the mother and stepfather of UNH President Steve Kaplan.

Irving Glovin, who had befriended Schindler and was moved by his heroism, wanted to establish a way UNH could use its academic resources to advance such altruism. Gaboury, who holds a law degree, as well as a doctorate in human development and family studies, and is president of the American Society of Victimology, was seen as the perfect candidate for the initial award.

He has written about and seen the suffering of child abuse victims, young girls dragged into prostitution and people desperate to get out of poverty, unwittingly ensnared by human traffickers. While some professors in the field are totally focused on the academic end, he said the best approach "is a marriage between academics and practitioners" that uses theory, but takes it to the next level and applies it to policymaking.

Gaboury has worked with numerous federal investigative and prosecutorial agencies in designing victim and witness assistance programs and has been a consultant on community policing and problem-solving policing methods. At a conference on victimology held in South Africa in 2003, he struck up a friendship with academics there fighting human trafficking and now he will be able to provide some research to determine the extent of the problem.

South Africa is on the Tier 2 Watch List of countries suspected "as a source, transit area and destination country for men, women and children trafficked for forced labor, organ harvesting and sexual exploitation," according to a paper put together by Gaboury. He will work with students at UNH to help develop interdisciplinary training for law enforcement, non-government agencies and the courts trying to deal with the victims of human trafficking.

Gaboury said South Africa has made progress in law enforcement, particularly at its international ports of entry, but a key concern are its porous borders with neighboring countries. And while it is cooperating with international agencies, its resources are insufficient to counteract the trafficking without more structured help.

To assist the victims, Gaboury’s plan is to work with other trainers from California State University at Fresno and Washburn University to assemble a culturally sensitive multi-disciplined group of mental health care providers, police, customs officials and clergy. Gaboury will act as the project coordinator along with Rika Snyman, a professor at the University of South Africa.

While he will have to wait to learn specifics of the problem in South Africa, his studies to date all point to poverty as the number one reason. "Poverty is a very powerful traumatic event. You have people who are looking for a way out. They are easy prey," Gaboury said of the unwitting decisions people make where they end up enslaved.

Adapted from: Mary E. O’Leary. "UNH professor to study human trafficking’s toll." New Haven Register. 13 March 2007.