Amanda Simmons Speaks at NAWJ 2024 Annual Meeting on Institutional Abuse
and Hidden Forms
of Human Trafficking

At the 2024 Annual Meeting of the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ) in San Diego, Amanda Simmons, founder of Ambika Law, joined an esteemed panel of judicial leaders, prosecutors, survivor-advocates, and national anti-trafficking experts for the session “What Every Judge Needs to Know: Best Practices for Hidden Faces and Forms of Human Trafficking.” The program was designed to help judges recognize trafficking where it most often appears—embedded, obscured, or mislabeled within ordinary court dockets—and to introduce emerging forms of exploitation that remain under-identified within the justice system. 

Amanda spoke alongside Hon. Deborah Cumba, Hon. Tilisha Martin, District Attorney Summer Stephan, Bella Truong, Esq. of the National District Attorneys Association, Caitlin Radigan, and Marisa Ugarte of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition. Each presenter offered a different vantage point into the complexities of child exploitation, trauma, and the operational patterns of traffickers. 

Amanda’s portion of the discussion focused on institutional abuse and the troubled-teen industry, a topic rooted deeply in both her legal work and lived experience. Drawing from national research, congressional findings, and her ongoing work with the American Bar Association’s SOGI Commission, she explained how residential treatment centers, wilderness programs, boot camps, and therapeutic boarding schools can become closed systems of coercion—environments that isolate youth, restrict communication, and create conditions where exploitation can occur undetected. She described the striking parallels between institutional abuse patterns and recognized trafficking dynamics, including force, fraud, coercion, deprivation of basic needs, and manipulation of psychological vulnerability.

Amanda emphasized that many youth enter these facilities already at heightened risk—including LGBTQ+ youth, foster youth, and children with trauma histories—and that the legal system often interacts with these cases without recognizing the underlying exploitation. She discussed how judges may see these children only through the lens of delinquency, dependency, truancy, or behavioral concerns, while missing the systemic harm inflicted by the very institutions charged with “treating” them.

Using examples reflected throughout the panel’s research materials—such as the documented recruitment of vulnerable youth, the use of control tactics, and the profound difficulty victims have in identifying themselves as harmed—Amanda highlighted the need for courts to scrutinize residential placement decisions, demand transparency from programs, and consider institutional abuse as part of a broader trafficking and exploitation framework. She urged judges to view institutional settings with the same level of scrutiny applied to more familiar trafficking contexts, noting that isolation, power imbalance, and deprivation are hallmarks of both. 

Amanda also spoke about the trajectory from survivor to advocate, describing how young people who escape coercive facilities often struggle to have their experiences recognized as abuse, let alone as trafficking. She encouraged the judiciary to create courtrooms where youth feel safe disclosing harm, where power structures are examined rather than assumed legitimate, and where judges actively inquire into the practices of residential programs that appear before them.

Her contribution complemented the broader session themes presented by her co-panelists, which included national trends in trafficking, the role of specialty courts in supporting commercially sexually exploited youth, and emerging legal frameworks such as commercial driver’s license revocation in trafficking-related offenses. Together, the session offered judges a multidimensional understanding of exploitation—one that extends beyond the stereotypes and into the institutional, relational, and systemic realities affecting vulnerable children.

Amanda’s participation reflects her ongoing mission at Ambika Law: illuminating hidden forms of child exploitation, advancing trauma-informed judicial practice, and advocating for accountability within institutional systems that too often escape scrutiny. Her work continues to elevate national awareness of how trafficking and institutional child abuse intersect, giving judges the tools to identify harm where it has long been overlooked.