The summer after her sophomore year at Pomona College, Elena Shih ’04 interned as a Mandarin-language legal intake counselor with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles.
That experience—made possible by the Pomona College Internship Program (PCIP)—changed her life.

Brown professor Elena Shih spent years embedded in anti-trafficking organizations across Thailand and China, expecting to document the rescue of sex slavery victims. Instead, her award-winning research revealed a troubling reality: many "rescued" women were never trafficked at all, the rehabilitation programs often caused more harm than good, and the lucrative "slave-free" products sold to well-meaning Americans were built on a carefully crafted narrative that had little to do with what these women actually needed. Her findings challenge the entire anti-trafficking industry and raise uncomfortable questions about who really benefits from the business of rescue.

In 2024, the Human Trafficking Research Cluster marked major milestones: launching a new book on sex worker health in Rhode Island, continuing collaborative research with Red Canary Song, and preparing to debut “Liberation Atlas,” a digital map of policing violence against Asian massage workers in NYC.

Every year, distinguished Brown scholars are nominated for Research Achievement Awards by their colleagues for conducting exceptional and transformative research. Amongst the 2025 selection is Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Simmons Center Fellow Elena Shih.

In this investigation, Arman Deendar and Shravya Sompalli examine how New York City’s evolving enforcement strategies continue to target Asian migrant massage workers under the banner of “public safety.” Through their collaboration with Red Canary Song and the Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, their project "Body Workers’ Atlas" maps the hidden bureaucracies of policing and exposes how everyday administrative practices shape life and labor in Queens.

As New York City intensifies its use of bureaucratic enforcement against massage workers, Red Canary Song is taking the city to court. The collective of Asian and migrant massage and sex workers has filed a lawsuit against the NYC Department of Buildings for refusing to release public records on its inspections and fines—documents they say will expose discriminatory targeting under the guise of regulation. Supported by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), the suit underscores how anti-trafficking rhetoric and administrative policing have deepened economic instability and state violence against Asian migrant body workers.

The question of innocence (and lack thereof) is central to western imperial projects and their determination of who deserves to be “saved” and who, on the other hand, is expendable. In this text, Elena Shih describes the ways through which sex workers in Thailand refuse what she characterizes as compulsory innocence and organize together the political conditions on being “bad.”

In 2023, the HTRC celebrated the launch of "White Supremacy, Racism, and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking", an anthology exploring how anti-trafficking efforts are rooted in systemic racism and colonial power structures. The cluster also premiered "Fly in Power", a documentary on Asian migrant massage workers, highlighting labor exploitation and racial justice.

In 2023, a Rhode Island House Commission proposed some of the most ambitious sex work reforms in the state’s history, calling for decriminalization, police accountability, and protection for workers’ health and safety. Yet the final report, while groundbreaking, left out key recommendations on the racialized policing of Asian massage workers. Drawing from the testimony of advocates including Brown University professor Elena Shih, the piece highlights both the Commission’s progress and its silences, revealing how anti-trafficking policies continue to criminalize poverty and immigrant labor under the guise of protection.

In the years since the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings, organizers have continued to grapple with how to mourn, resist, and reimagine safety for Asian massage and sex workers. In this conversation, Red Canary Song organizers Esther Kao and Elena Shih join Phi Nguyen of Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta to reflect on grief, labor, and the limits of “Stop Asian Hate.” They discuss how state violence, stigma, and sensationalism continue to endanger workers, and how art, care, and organizing sustain their communities amid ongoing loss.

"Consumer and corporate-focused approaches to labour exploitation and trafficking are ineffective," writes Dr. Elena Shih.

“At our core, we believe that human trafficking and labor exploitation are driven by a system of racialized global inequality, exacerbated by unequal development and excessively punitive policy that often govern border control,” explains Professor Elena Shih, the Manning Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies and faculty leader of the CSSJ’s Human Trafficking Research Cluster.

In this conversation, Elena Shih and Andrew Crane join Thomas Thurston to unpack the global politics and moral economies behind anti-trafficking work. Drawing from years of research across business, labor, and human rights, they examine how well-intentioned efforts to combat trafficking can sometimes deepen inequality, blur accountability, and perpetuate harm under the banner of rescue.

Elena Shih is interviewed by Thomas Thurston about her work on human trafficking rescue efforts and the politics of labor, gender, and sexuality on last week's Slavery and It's Legacies podcast, out of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University.