Human Trafficking Archives - Julia Flynn Siler

Update on My United Nations Trip….

February 18, 2020 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

March is Women’s History Month and I had planned to participate by telling the story of a group of pioneering women who fought human trafficking…but, alas, our panel at the U.N. Women’s Conference in New York was just cancelled due to concerns over the coronavirus.

As part of a delegation of women to the United Nation’s CSW64, the Commission on the Status of Women. I was planning to take part in a panel to discuss the late 19th and early 20th century efforts to combat human trafficking detailed in my book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, on March 12 in New York City, as part of the parallel NGO CSW Forum.

Two Historic “Safe Houses”

January 21, 2020 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

Cameron House, at 920 Sacramento Street in San Francisco, is famous as the place where thousands of vulnerable girls and women found their freedom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It opened its doors in 1874 and is the setting for my book, The White Devil’s Daughters.

But it was not the first organization to supporting trafficking survivors in Chinatown.

That honor goes to the Methodist Mission Home, now located a few blocks away at 940 Washington Street. It opened its top floor two years earlier, in 1870, to provide a refuge to Chinese girls and women who’d been trafficked into labor or sex slavery. Like Cameron House, the institution now known as Gum Moon Residence Hall & Asian Women’s Resource Center still provides services to vulnerable women.

Five Generations at Cameron House

September 16, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

The Rev. Harry Chuck can trace his family’s history at 920 Sacramento Street back to the late 19th century.

That’s when his grandmother was sold into slavery by her impoverished family in China. Her owners sent her to San Francisco but she was intercepted by immigration officials before she reached one of Chinatown’s many brothels. They brought her instead to the Presbyterian Mission Home on 920 Sacramento Street, which was established in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1874 as a refuge for vulnerable women.

The Rev. Harry Chuck at Cameron House, photo by author.

Anti-Trafficking Pioneers

June 27, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

Donaldina Cameron (1869-1968) captured the nation’s imagination at the turn of the 20^th century. She was an early anti-human trafficking pioneer who ran a “safe house” for vulnerable girls and young women on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. A tall, auburn-haired woman with a Scottish lilt, she who fascinated headline writers and the public alike.

Staffers at 920 Sacramento Street: Donaldina Cameron center, Tien Fuh Wu standing to her right. Photo courtesy California State Library.

Disrupting the Business of Human Trafficking – Then and Now

March 5, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler 2 Comments

In 1874, a group of women opened a “safe house” on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Because their work disrupted the thriving trade in women between China and America, they faced endless legal challenges and even sticks of dynamite placed on their doorstep. By offering a place for survivors of sex slavery and other forms of servitude to escape to and drawing public scrutiny to the crime, they threatened their century’s existing business model of human trafficking.

Debunking the “White Rescue Myth”

February 18, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

The best-known image of the pioneering anti-trafficking crusader Donaldina Cameron at work was taken in the early 20^th century in a garbage-strewn alley in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Donaldina Cameron (left, standing) with interpreter and police officers staging a rescue of a Chinese girl. Courtesy of Cameron House.

Cameron, wearing a full black skirt that fell just above her ankles and a dowdy, small- brimmed hat, gazes toward the camera. A man in a suit stands partway up a ladder propped against a brick building. On a balcony above him, a man who appears to be a plainclothes police officer holds a girl in his arms. She has a long black braid hanging down her back and is the “slave girl” supposedly being rescued.

The Fight to End Modern Slavery

January 24, 2019 by Julia Flynn Siler Leave a Comment

January was Human Trafficking Prevention Month, a designation of heartbreaking relevance to my home state of California. Not only does it remain one of the nation’s leading hubs for sex and labor trafficking; the state is also home to a host of non-profit organizations who fight the crimes of sex and labor slavery year-round.

Map showing locations of human trafficking cases in 2017, as tracked by anti-trafficking organization Polaris.