376: Why Documents Decide Who Traffickers Can Exploit Next

Dr. Xanthe Scharff joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to explore how displacement, missing documents, and unequal citizenship laws quietly raise the risk of trafficking, and why prevention starts long before a child is ever exploited.

Dr. Xanthe Scharff

Dr. Xanthe Scharff is President and CEO of the Women’s Refugee Commission, which she joined in June 2026 after more than two decades spanning humanitarian action, women’s rights, journalism, philanthropy, and nonprofit leadership. She previously served as Managing Director for External Affairs and Editor-at-Large at The Freedom Fund, a global collaborative working to end modern slavery, where she helped elevate the work of hundreds of frontline anti-slavery organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Earlier, she co-founded The Fuller Project, a global newsroom reporting on women, served as Associate Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and founded Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa. She has raised more than $200 million for social-impact organizations and reported on Syrian refugees in Turkey, with earlier roles at CARE, Save the Children, the United Nations, and the World Bank.

Key Points

The Freedom Fund gets money directly to the front lines, granting to almost 200 frontline organizations, and this past year 47% of them were led by survivors.
Birth certificates are a frontline prevention tool: in Bangladesh, mothers believed they couldn’t register children without the father’s signature, until Freedom Fund’s partners socialized a legal provision and registered over 400 children in about six months.
Twenty-four countries still bar mothers from passing citizenship to their children on equal terms with fathers, and Syria’s law can leave a returning mother’s child stateless and more vulnerable to exploitation.
When people lack legal status, they have no one to report abuse to, and fear of deportation keeps exploited workers silent even when wages are stolen or they are assaulted.
Immigration and refugee are not synonyms; asylum seekers are specifically people seeking protection, a distinction that gets blurred as legal pathways narrow.
Before larger plans, women’s groups like Women of the Sun in Gaza and the West Bank made addressing trauma and supporting one another their first priority.
A scholarship alone did not change Anesi’s future; without cultural support structures, she left school for marriage after one year and later regretted it, showing that prevention takes more than money.
Xanthe urges the field to listen to survivors: “Alternative livelihood activities in our community is what’s going to protect our children,” and “we don’t need to wait until the children have been trafficked to do an intervention.”

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Xanthe Scharff: We want people to listen to survivors when they say, “Alternative livelihood activities in our community is what’s going to protect our children.” We don’t need to wait until the children have been trafficked to do an intervention.

[00:00:19] Elisha: Syria is one of the twenty-four countries where a mother still can’t pass citizenship to her own child. That single gap in the law can open up a family to exploitation. It’s a small legal detail with a big impact on who’s protected and who isn’t. Hi, I’m Elisha. I’m a student here at Vanguard University, and I help produce the show.

[00:00:37] Today, Sandie talks with Dr. Xanthe Scharff, the new president and CEO of the Women’s Refugee Commission. Before joining the WRC, Xanthe led anti-trafficking work with the Freedom Fund and has spent her career focused on women and girls around the world. And now, here’s their conversation.

[00:00:55] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking podcast, Dr. Xanthe Scharff. I am so excited for our conversation today as we talk about the intersection of human trafficking, particularly with women. So welcome. Tell us just briefly about your history and your engagement in this.

[00:01:24] Xanthe Scharff: Thank you, Sandie. I’ve worked my entire career for women and girls and human rights. Early on, I started a nonprofit for girls’ education called Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa, AGE Africa, still running today in Malawi. Soon after that, from Turkey, I started a different nonprofit.

[00:01:48] I ran AGE Africa for 10 years, then started a different nonprofit called The Fuller Project, a global newsroom focused on the stories of women and girls. I ran that for 10 years, including lots of stories we did on situations of forced labor that impacted women in global supply chains.

[00:02:08] From there, and very relevant to our conversation today, I was with Freedom Fund, where I was on the leadership team helping to support about 200 frontline partners in the work to stop trafficking. And I’m now the very new, just five weeks in, CEO at the Women’s Refugee Commission. So I’m coming to you from New York today.

[00:02:31] Sandie Morgan: I love that. And just briefly, before we jump into women refugees and the intersection with human trafficking, can you give me a capsule about Freedom Fund? I’ll tell you why I’m interested in this. That fund helps support frontline practitioners, and so many times the resource-scarcity mentality is a barrier in our own minds, in the kind of work that we’re doing globally, nationally, locally.

[00:03:11] And so how we begin to engage resources that we didn’t even think to invite into our collaborative approach, I feel like Freedom Fund has something to teach.

[00:03:25] Xanthe Scharff: I agree. Sandie, I think you and I are kindred spirits, because it’s really all about how we use the resources we have in this world to make change. This is the moment when we really need to be questioning our assumptions about global partnership. And Freedom Fund is a phenomenal organization because the way it does its work is to get money to the front lines. We can talk about this more, but I do think that as we’re seeing governments and multilateral organizations really struggle, as public support or elected officials pull money out of those organizations, we face the reality that we have less money. So we’ve gotta do more with that money, and the way to do more is to get it into the front lines.

[00:04:16] So I think that’s maybe what I feel is embedded in your question, and that’s my view. I think that’s critical today. It always has been, but it’s especially critical today. So to answer the question you actually asked me, which is what is Freedom Fund? Freedom Fund is a collaborative fund, meaning that donors come in together and align around the purpose and the way this will work.

[00:04:41] The Freedom Fund then gives grants to almost 200 frontline organizations, and this past year, 47% of those were led by survivors. Many of these are small or even new frontline organizations. They call them hotspots or geographies. These are geographies where they are working: in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Brazil.

[00:05:13] I can go on. It’s kind of an ecosystem or movement-building approach, where the team member on the ground finds out who those frontline groups are. They give grants, they become partners, but they also bring them together in capacity building and network building.

[00:05:35] Sandie Morgan: Wow. Okay. So I would love to have another conversation with somebody now at the Freedom Fund. I’m thinking of so many people that need to know about

[00:05:49] what they’re doing.

[00:05:50] Xanthe Scharff: And it’s exciting because they have a new CEO coming in as well, Havovi Wadia. Nick Grono has been the founding CEO, my brilliant former colleague, and he’s passing the mantle to Havovi, so she will be a wonderful person to talk to.

[00:06:08] Sandie Morgan: Okay. I love when people introduce me to other people, because this is how we build a network that becomes a safety net in our global community, all of those intersection points. But let’s talk about your new leadership at Women’s Refugee Commission.

[00:06:31] Who belongs to that commission?

[00:06:35] Xanthe Scharff: The commission has a very rich legacy. It goes back 36 years. And it started when a group of four women, including Liv Ullmann, who is a famous Norwegian, went out and traveled the world and met with women, and found that those women were not at the leadership table and were not being listened to. So I’ve been told these stories, this lore of Women’s Refugee Commission: these women would go as ambassadors. They would go to a refugee camp. They would be welcomed. A group of men would give them seats and try to begin the meeting, and they would say, “We will begin the meeting when the women elders are also invited.”

[00:07:23] So they would insist. I’m so honored to have this opportunity to lead Women’s Refugee Commission, and I find it’s so heartening that the very first instinct of the Women’s Refugee Commission is to listen to women. And today, 36 years later, it’s the same mission.

[00:07:47] We have to make sure that women refugee leaders are heard, that the solutions they advance are baked into the work of any responders. It’s very simple when you boil it down. But we are a research and advocacy organization. We do work globally.

[00:08:06] We have very meaningfully informed the humanitarian system so that core women’s needs, like sexual and reproductive health and protection for gender-based violence, are met with programs and policies and toolkits. We also have a very powerful program in the United States called the Migrant Rights and Justice Initiative, which was instrumental in helping to stop family separation in the first Trump administration, and is holding this administration accountable for violations of its own policy in terms of how families should be treated, how children should be protected, and what proper process should be.

[00:08:49] Sandie Morgan: And I’ve worked for 20 years in this space across multiple administrations, and it’s always been a challenge. And yet, people step up, organizations. I was just in Greece, and with our study abroad students, we were part of a full-day program for women at a refugee camp that was solely provided for women with children.

[00:09:28] And it was stunning to understand their unique challenges, and that when we did this one-day activity, there were five organizations at the table, which always reminds me that nobody can do this by themselves. And refugee women are very open to having partners, and grateful that they show up and that they have a place to have a voice.

[00:10:02] So can you share a specific experience that changed how you understood the connection between the issues, particularly displacement and documentation?

[00:10:19] Xanthe Scharff: Yes. I love that we’re talking about collaboration. In that spirit, I’ll pull together a few different threads. Documentation is absolutely critical in terms of preventing trafficking, and I learned this in a very real sense with Freedom Fund. Freedom Fund supported research that was really rooted in the experiences of survivors.

[00:10:46] And survivors advised that one of the things that needed to be tackled in global research is the connection between documentation and trafficking. That led to a series of reports, and I learned from those reports about the connection and how it manifests differently in different countries. But then it was our program in Bangladesh that really helped me understand more deeply.

[00:11:09] In Bangladesh, Freedom Fund works with children to prevent their recruitment into sex, and works with mothers who are in the brothels. Some of these are really large brothels, huge footprint. And so a child is growing up inside that environment, and the documentation challenge is that mothers believed they had no way to register their children for birth certificates, because the father’s signature was necessary.

[00:11:40] Now, when the child didn’t have a birth certificate, it meant they couldn’t get registered for basic services: education, nutrition, or health. And these children are already so vulnerable. But take into account, if their age is not even documented, it’s just that much easier for a predator to come and recruit them at a very young age.

[00:12:02] And they don’t have other options. They don’t have the protection of being in school. This is a huge vulnerability. And actually, Freedom Fund figured out that there was a provision in the law, they call it a loophole, that allowed for a different documentation process.

[00:12:21] It just needed to be socialized. And so Freedom Fund’s partners socialized this, and in the course of about six months or so, they were able to register over 400 children. This was to me very stunning. And it just shows: that’s 400 children who have very important protection, who can exist in the formal, institutional way that the state has laid out for them.

[00:12:50] And so I think that does show both sides of this. One, the vulnerability. But also, I’m always excited about solutions. That is a solution. That is something we can do. We don’t have to wait for the worst-case scenario, or to rescue a child. We can work on the institutional side with the solutions that survivors are telling us we must do.

[00:13:13] And Sandie, if I can go into kind of a second part of that.

[00:13:17] With Women’s Refugee Commission, one of the really important pieces of work that we do is that we have incubated and we host this campaign, the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights. This is collaboration at scale.

[00:13:34] This campaign works to ensure that women have the equal right to pass citizenship to their children. And even before joining WRC, I went and heard the campaign speak at the UN during the Commission on the Status of Women. And it was so powerful, because I heard a woman from Malaysia talking about how she had been active and gotten her government to pass these types of laws.

[00:14:00] Now, there are still 24 countries where this is not the case. I spoke recently with one of our collaborators, Rasha Al Tabshi, who works in the campaign in the case of Syria. Syria is one of those countries where a woman cannot pass citizenship to her children. So imagine, with Syria there’s always gender dynamics, and there were more male fighters than women fighters, and there were more women and children refugees.

[00:14:26] So imagine a woman, like the Syrian women, some of whom are in the US and just had their protections under TPS, Temporary Protected Status. There was just a ruling that can take those away. So imagine that woman with her child. The child doesn’t have the right to return to Syria.

[00:14:49] They may be able to get a return anyway, even though they don’t have it as a right. But maybe they return, and now they’re not a citizen. Now that mother has to go through all manner of difficulty to try to get their child registered as a citizen, and it could be costly. It could keep them out of school.

[00:15:05] There are so many things that can happen to that mother and to that child that make that child more vulnerable to all kinds of dangers.

[00:15:15] Sandie Morgan: Well, because of my work in Greece, when you mention Syrian refugees, I have spent years especially interviewing Syrian women refugees, getting asylum, getting documentation. This was necessary. Otherwise, how did they get work? Because government resources from the EU, from the UN, from the country they’re in are never sufficient, and are always dependent on the refugees integrating and getting jobs.

[00:15:56] But if you don’t have documents, how do you work legally? And so that becomes a huge risk factor, because employers can exploit that gap in documentation. So how are the women refugees speaking up about their experience of being exploited, even in labor?

[00:16:24] Xanthe Scharff: Yeah, I think it’s just as you said. These conditions of vulnerability put people in a place where they are desperate, trying to find a way to earn money, take care of themselves, take care of their children. But they don’t have the ability to report abuses. They don’t have anywhere to go.

[00:16:45] And so it’s being in the shadows, which is so dangerous for workers. Being in a position where you don’t have anyone to go to when you know what’s happening is wrong, whether your wages are being garnished or you’re being sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. You know that it’s wrong and you have no one to go to, because if you go to them, you could be deported. And so that’s the connection. In the US discourse, we have politically seen this administration connect trafficking with immigration. But I think there’s a big misconception there. What we need to understand, and what I know your audience understands, is that when there aren’t legal, proper pathways, and when a person is pursuing asylum and doing everything in the correct way but still understands that they could be deported or detained, then when they face these kinds of abuses, they’re not going to be able to report them.

[00:17:52] Sandie Morgan: So let me ask for a little more clarification here. I often am in conversations where people use immigration and refugee like they’re synonyms. They are not, right? Can you describe the difference?

[00:18:11] Xanthe Scharff: Yes. Well, immigration is a much broader category, right? Immigration could be economic migration. It could be that someone is fleeing something but has not gone through the process of declaring themselves an asylum seeker. So yes, there’s a big spectrum. And in our case, when we’re talking about our US work, we call it migrant justice.

[00:18:39] But we are in fact talking about people who are fleeing, who would be asylum seekers. I think in the US we have more blurring, because the legal pathways to seek asylum have become so much more fraught. So you’re right to distinguish; these are different things. Migration includes people who have high-skills visas and who are moving around the world in very different ways.

[00:19:05] But for the purpose of our conversation, we’re talking about people who are seeking protection. That’s generally what we’re talking about.

[00:19:13] Sandie Morgan: Well, in some of your work that I was reviewing, you’ve talked about how conflict drives refugee movement. And my experience that I based this conversation on, recently being at the camp in Greece for single mothers, I met women escaping the conflict in Sudan, Sudanese women. And one little boy, because our students did childcare, which so many times people offer wonderful conferences, this is me being on my bully pulpit, and then don’t provide childcare.

[00:19:55] It’s like, well, how are they going to stay in? And we have legal services here. Oh my gosh. But one of my students, afterwards when we were debriefing, she said this three-year-old who was laughing and playing on a beautiful playground with just the right size slide for him, all of a sudden dropped and froze. And then she realized there was a plane going overhead, and he ran inside.

[00:20:29] And that kind of conflict trauma that comes with them is not just on the children, but on the women as well, and they’re trying to serve their children, build resilience. There are so many things that women escaping conflict are going to be experiencing. So what are you hearing from the Women’s Refugee Commission firsthand?

[00:21:00] Xanthe Scharff: Well, I will give an example from Gaza, which, to your point about definitions, the people in Gaza can’t leave, so that doesn’t make them technically asylum seekers or refugees. They’re people who are experiencing displacement within their own areas.

[00:21:25] But I think this really is a good example of what you’re talking about as far as trauma. And before joining WRC, I did reporting on the women peace builders from Palestine, representing and in Gaza as well as the West Bank, and also in Israel. And so I spent a lot of time with a group called Women of the Sun. Women of the Sun was successful in raising some funds and some support to be able to offer some basic training and coordination for women in Gaza and in the West Bank.

[00:22:04] And it was very interesting to me to understand that one of the first things they saw as a priority was to deal with trauma, to discuss and to support one another. Because even before grander plans, really dealing with the trauma at the level of survival, being there, supporting one another, having that facilitated was just so essential.

[00:22:36] And these are women who are leaders in their own right. Some of them are leaders of organizations. Others are leaders in the sense of protecting their communities and their families, figuring out how to survive, and doing that through collaboration. But addressing that first layer of, how are we living?

[00:23:00] How are we surviving? I think that is very real and very visceral. I do think this is something we hear from people on the front lines, and the philanthropic field is starting to grapple with and understand this a bit more. Since COVID, it has also understood the need for mental health within the frontline response of philanthropy itself.

[00:23:25] So you see more and more awareness about this. How are we taking care of our community at all levels? This is vitally important. Finding the ways to make sure that people are okay enough to be in a place to care. That’s something we hear a lot about.

[00:23:46] Sandie Morgan: I love hearing about the philanthropic level-up of knowledge and insight on these issues. And particularly because so much of the focus has been driven by pictures of UN humanitarian relief, passing out bags of rice and beans and things like that. But there are so many other aspects, and one of the stories that I read about with you was an area very dear to my heart, which is girls’ education, because that’s going to be the long term.

[00:24:29] And you told a story about a little girl named Anesi, and I would love for our listeners to hear that.

[00:24:38] Xanthe Scharff: Thank you. Anesi, who is now in her early 30s actually, but when I met her, she was 14, in a rural village in Lilongwe in Malawi. And I met her because I was working for CARE at the time, so I was doing research, and I had been asked to write a feature article for the Christian Science Monitor about life on a dollar a day, which was the poverty line at that time. And so I interviewed her family and her mother, and it turned out that her older brother was going to secondary school, and she had dropped out. I reported this for the readers of The Monitor, who are kind of a special bunch, a very active, global bunch. And they started sending money to me, asking that I help Anesi.

[00:25:25] So it was actually my Malawian colleagues at CARE who guided me, because I was not an expert in the cultural aspects and what would be more sustainable. They guided me to say, “If you just try to target help to this one girl, the community may not support that. So we have to find a way to be fair and work with the community.”

[00:25:47] So we found all the girls in that village who hadn’t made it, and we worked with the women’s group, and we worked with the chief, and we found a way to bundle up the money from the readers and get those girls back into school. Now, I think more interestingly, and sort of transparently with our audience because we’re trying to learn, with Anesi, I actually went back to visit her a couple of years ago in her village, and this attempt to help her didn’t pan out in the way that the readers and I had hoped. She went back to school for a year, and then she accepted a marriage proposal at the end of that year, and she felt a lot of regret. And she said to me, “I wasted this, and I’ve regretted it ever since. I wished I had stayed with the scholarship and finished school, because my life isn’t different.”

[00:26:41] She felt her life was like her mother’s life, where she was a subsistence farmer. And that one year of school, I think, did give her something. She was married a year later. She had her children a little bit later. But over time, we learned how many obstacles need to be addressed, and that it’s certainly not enough just to give the scholarship. You have to really give the promise.

[00:27:10] You have to show the promise. You have to deal with the cultural challenges. You have to build a support structure, so that when she’s looking at the marriage proposal and she’s looking at education, she sees that education can really take her all the way, and that it’s a better offer than a marriage offer.

[00:27:28] Sandie Morgan: That’s so good. Yes, and we at the Global Center for Women and Justice are very committed to girls’ education. We have survivor scholarships for trafficking victims, labor or sex trafficking, building into a future that is built on resilience. That’s one of the elements. The other aspect of our conversation, how you describe that collaboration in the community, the village leaders and your readers from far away, and then an organization on the ground that really had a history and understood the culture.

[00:28:14] I think those kinds of collaborative models are really helpful. What I have experienced, particularly in the anti-trafficking field, I gave up when people asked me how many anti-trafficking organizations there are. It’s like another one pops up every day, right? So what would you say, particularly to people just getting into this field, what do we still misunderstand about refugees and human trafficking?

[00:28:47] Xanthe Scharff: We have to support prevention and solutions. I think especially people who are new to the space, maybe they feel more drawn in when they hear about the traumas and hear about the rescues. That’s important. There are people who need to be rescued, right?

[00:29:13] And there are terrible situations that get very out of control, where we’re talking about life or death. But at the same time, there’s so much value in identifying what’s working, identifying the many, many instances of leadership on the ground, innovation on the ground, and also prevention.

[00:29:36] Sometimes prevention, maybe it’s not as exciting. It’s get the child registered, get the child in school, give the nutritional supplements, the development work and the systems-building work. That’s what allows us to prevent these terrible situations, and to greatly reduce and mitigate them.

[00:30:00] So we want people to understand that these different types of interventions are very much connected, and we want people to listen to survivors when they say, “Alternative livelihood activities in our community is what’s going to protect our children.” We don’t need to wait until the children have been trafficked to do an intervention.

[00:30:26] So I’ll give you an example of that, Sandie, because I know your listeners want to, we want to travel the world together, right? With Freedom Fund, I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Ethiopia and to visit with the team there. And Freedom Fund does a lot of work on the issue of child labor, forced child labor in some of its worst forms.

[00:30:48] I think we need to educate people more about forced domestic work. Even in all those years I was working in Malawi, I did not fully understand this issue. There’s a benevolent form of helping out in the household that is common, where a cousin who lives far away in a rural area, maybe that child’s mother died, and they’re going to come into the urban area, they’re going to help out a little bit around the home, and they’re going to school.

[00:31:18] They have a place to stay. There’s a loving family. There’s that version. Then there’s another version, and it’s invisible. It’s very hard to understand what’s happening. In Ethiopia, it was explained to me that there are even brokers who are connecting a child from a rural area with an urban family, and they’re making promises that that child’s going to get to go to school and have a better life.

[00:31:41] And some of these are areas where people maybe don’t have phones, don’t have good connections, so they’re not hearing anything for a long time. They’re not hearing how the child’s doing. There’s no accountability. And meanwhile, that child, in many cases, is doing the work in the household.

[00:32:03] The other people are not helping them. They’re eating by themselves. They’re working very long hours. And when you add up these kinds of things, it takes the form, we can call this trafficking. We can call it forced labor, right? So I visited with different partners. I began to understand this issue, and one of the things that they found is, when they do rescue a child and then get that child reunified with the family, they give the family some livelihood support.

[00:32:34] And that is because this whole thing happened in the first place because that family didn’t feel they could take care of their child. So that’s why I’m saying, a lot of this is development, livelihood. Some of it is also kind of socialization and accountability, but a lot of this is development.

[00:32:56] Making sure that families don’t face these precarious situations.

[00:32:59] Sandie Morgan: And prevention is at the forefront of that. I’m encouraged by our conversation, and I’m looking forward to watching you as you assume this new leadership, in a movement where we hope to hear women refugee voices amplified and learn from their experiences. So we’ll be in touch to schedule another opportunity to continue our conversation, Xanthe.

[00:33:32] Xanthe Scharff: Sandie, thank you. I will just point your listeners to a report we just released called At What Cost? We did this in partnership with Refugees International. It talks to the heads of women-led organizations in six places, from Sudan to Ukraine to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. And what it’s finding is that these organizations have been devastated by aid cuts.

[00:33:58] A year after these aid cuts, other research shows that half of women-led organizations are out of business. And these women are finding ways to cope, very much relying on volunteer labor, with huge mental health impacts. But also, the money they’re getting is not only less, it’s more restricted. They’re having to compete with the bigger organizations that also faced cuts but are better able to attract what’s left.

[00:34:25] And they are facing broken trust with their donors, but also with the vulnerable people they represent, people who have faced gender-based violence, trafficking. They represent those very vulnerable people, and when they have to close their doors, they break trust that takes years to get back.

[00:34:43] Sandie Morgan: How do we access that report?

[00:34:45] Xanthe Scharff: That is on our webpage, womensrefugeecommission.org.

[00:34:50] It’s in our newsletter. I encourage people to sign up off of the webpage as well.

[00:34:56] Sandie Morgan: We will put that in our show notes, and I look forward to further partnerships. I love research and prevention, so you’re using my love language.

[00:35:10] What a delight to spend time with you today. Thank you.

[00:35:15] Xanthe Scharff: Thank you so much.

[00:35:17] Elisha: Thank you, Dr. Xanthe Scharff, for showing us how something as simple as a birth certificate can protect a child, and how addressing these seemingly small gaps is crucial to protecting families facing displacement. Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org for tons of in-depth show notes and other resources.

[00:35:37] If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone and connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. And as always, thank you for listening.