Law gold medalist on a mission

Lauren Witten was still a political science undergrad at Trinity Western University when she first heard about the International Justice Mission (IJM) and its work to free children and women who are caught in a life of forced prostitution.

“When you hear about the little girls who are trapped in brothels, that sticks with you,” she recalls. “But at the time I didn’t have the skills to do anything about it.”

Now, after earning a law degree at UVic and this year’s law gold medal as the faculty’s top graduating student, Witten has the legal skills to help prosecute those who exploit girls and women.

This month she and her husband, fellow law graduate Mark, are travelling to South Asia to spend the summer helping IJM and local law enforcement agencies build prosecution cases against brothel owners.

“There’s an immediacy to the work we’ll be doing,” says Witten. “These little girls have no voice, but at the same time we have to work within the confines of the local legal system.”

She and her husband are the only two Canadians among the fewer than a dozen legal interns that IJM accepted this year, but her attraction to and success in law doesn’t come as a surprise to her family.

“When I was a little kid there were debates around the dinner table and people said then that I should be a lawyer.”

She says she was attracted to a legal education “because it’s a really good fit for me, it provides a breadth of opportunities and is transferable to other areas.” She came to UVic because “I’d heard really good things about the school, I wanted to stay on the West Coast and I wanted to situate my learning in a broader social context.”

After returning from their internship with IJM, Witten and her husband will both start clerkships with the BC Court of Appeal, and Witten has accepted an articling position with the Ministry of the Attorney General as a prosecutor with its criminal justice branch.

 When not involved in her law studies, Witten runs and does “recreational” triathlons and plays tennis. She’s also hoping to resume the creative writing that she set aside after starting law school. After a summer helping prosecute those who enslave children and women in prostitution, she’ll have no shortage of new material.