ABSTRACT
On May 11, 2009, the doors of “City of Hope,” a United Arab Emirates (UAE) based women's shelter, were closed following almost two years of public controversy. Beginning in late 2007, Cheryl, 1 the founder and director of the shelter, was locked in an almost constant battle with locals, the government, and other activists that was staged at the global level through the use of media outlets such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the BBC. An American woman who had married an Emirati and created the organization “in her living room,” Cheryl was a very vocal and outspoken activist in Dubai who began with domestic violence as her primary cause, but became passionate about “fighting trafficking” when trafficking became part of a sensationalized media and political frenzy following the passage of the U.S. Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) in 2000 and, later, its international component, the Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) (U.S. Department of State 2001). Through conversations with reporters, researchers, and antitrafficking advocates in EuroAmerica, Cheryl publicly castigated the UAE for what she viewed as major governmental shortcomings in the “war on trafficking.”
