Research Team: Paola M. Contreras, PsyD

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Paola is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who founded the Human Trafficking Research Hub (the Hub) in 2017.

Paola has been leading the team that designed, collected and analyzed data that informed the HTRH’s inaugural paper on the roles of attachment patterns and trauma-coerced bonding in the stages of survivors’ experiences of commercial sex (available online here). Paola continues to lead the development of additional papers from this research. Additionally, she advises dissertations on human trafficking of various types both domestic and international for the college’s clinical psychology department.

Paola’s career in human trafficking scholarship, including research, clinical work, and training providers started in 2007 when she worked as clinical coordinator for a program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. She has since provided cross-disciplinary training to several thousand providers across the United States and internationally. She has published extensively on the issue of human trafficking and with focus on psychological coercion and trauma bonding.

Prior to completing her doctorate in psychology in the United States, Paola completed a degree in psychology at Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala City where she studied the tenets of community psychology through the lens of liberation psychology and participatory action research, both of which she has carried forward into her work with the HTRH.

Clinical work with survivors of human trafficking has also been an essential part of Paola’s understanding of this crime. In 2007, she began to conduct psychological evaluations of victims of international trafficking in the United States who were involved in legal processes related to their trafficking. Subsequently she developed a psychotherapy practice in Cambridge, MA where she works with people who have experienced many forms of trauma, and especially those who have survived interpersonal traumas where coercion has been present.

Paola likes to paint multimedia art, garden, and cook and spend time with family and friends.