Laura A. Dickinson

Foundation Professor of Law Laura A. Dickinson was included in a July 18 article in The Washington Post about a U.S. policy that forbids government contractors and employees to engage in sex trafficking in war zones and is proving nearly impossible to enforce.

In “U.S. policy a paper tiger against sex trade in war zones,” Post staffer Carol Leonnig and Nick Schwellenbach, a staff writer at the Center for Public Integrity, report that sex crimes among those workers are occurring in Iran and Afghanistan, despite the policy instituted eight years ago by President George W. Bush.

Dickinson, the Faculty Director of the College of Law’s Center for Law and Global Affairs, said two main challenges in pursuing allegations of human trafficking are gathering evidence and legal jurisdiction. Some experts believe authorities are ignoring evidence of such crimes.

Read the article, a collaboration of the Post and the Center for Public Integrity, here.

Dickinson, who joined the law faculty in 2008, focuses on human rights, national security, foreign affairs privatization, and qualitative empirical approaches to international law. Her current work-in-progress is a monograph entitled, Outsourcing War and Peace, to be published by Yale University Press. The book examines the increasing privatization of military, security, and foreign aid functions of government, considers the impact of this trend on core public values, and outlines mechanism for protecting these values in an era of privatization.