Leadership

Yasmin Vafa is co-founder and Executive Director of Rights4Girls. A human rights attorney and advocate, Yasmin’s work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, violence, and the law. She educates the public and policymakers on these issues and how they affect the lives of marginalized women and children. Yasmin has successfully advocated for passage of several laws at the federal level, testified before the U.S. Senate and international human rights bodies, and has been recognized for her legislative advocacy by Congress. She is co-author of several reports, including The Sexual Abuse to Prison Pipeline: The Girls’ Story, which exposed the widespread criminalization of girls of color in the U.S. as a direct result of their victimization. The report has not only shaped the national conversation around women and girls’ incarceration, but helped inspire national efforts to decriminalize survivors of gendered violence.

Yasmin and her work have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, PBS NewsHour, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters, and more. She currently serves on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Advisory Committee on the Sex Trafficking of Children and Youth, is an adjunct judicial educator for the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, and is a founding co-chair of World Without Exploitation— a national coalition of over 200 anti-trafficking organizations working to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation. She has also served on both the U.S. Department of Justice National Girls’ Initiative Core Advisory Committee as well as the National Task Force on the Use of Restraints on Pregnant Women and Girls Under Correctional Custody.