Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism
at Brandeis University
i n v e s t i g a t i o n s
Photo | 承燁 韓
Investigating Slavery Now & Then
Modern-Day Slavery
"Underground Trade:
WGBH Boston Public Radio
8-part broadcast beginning
1/8/2013
Beginning Tuesday, January 8, WGBH Boston Public Radio presents a multipart investigation on human trafficking—for sex and labor— and spotlights some of the people working to stop it.
The WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) investigation (supported in part by the International Center for Journalists, The Ford Foundation, and the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University) takes Schuster Institute Senior Fellow and WGBH Senior Reporter Phillip Martin from Boston to Bangkok and back again, with stops in San Francisco, New York, Providence, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Vietnam.
The series will broadcast Tuesdays and Thursdays through January.
Photo | Ministry of Fisheries, New Zealand
Even when slaves are not trafficked to the United States, the products they catch, harvest and manufacture may wind up in American homes.
For example, in "The Fishing Industry's Cruelest Catch" in Bloomberg Businessweek, Schuster Institute Senior Fellow E. Benjamin Skinner documents the links between endemic debt bondage on fishing boats in New Zealand’s waters and the American seafood market.
Since the investigation was released in February 2012, the New Zealand government has changed its laws governing vessels fishing in its territorial waters.
Past Slavery
PBS American Experience documentary
3-part series starting 1/8/2013
January 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the historic Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln. Starting Tuesday, January 8, PBS's American Experience commemorates that history by premiering
"The Abolitionists," a three-part documentary portraying the lives of abolitionists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimké, telling the stories of how they “turned a despised fringe movement against chattel slavery into a force that literally changed the nation” and laid the groundwork for civil rights as we know it today.
Slavery Now & Then
The Role of
Journalists in
Exposing Slavery
The PBS American Experience series “The Abolitionists” and the WGBH Boston Public Radio eight-part series, “Underground Trade: From Boston to Bangkok,” in which Schuster Institute Senior Fellow Phillip Martin traces the routes of human trafficking from East Asia to the United States, spotlights the essential role of journalists in exposing slavery and raising public awareness about efforts to prevent and abolish it.
Essays by journalists and authors Adam Hochschild and Brooke Kroeger—along with her database of undercover reporting that includes investigations involving slavery—illuminate how critical the efforts by reporters have been through history in focusing public awareness on slavery, and remind us why journalists need to continue telling this story.
LEARN ABOUT OUR COLLABORATION with WGBH Boston Public Radio and PBS's American Experience and why we created this resource in a letter from Florence Graves, founding director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
