Four systems exist to catch people in crisis. Survivors of forced marriage, trafficking, and related exploitation still fall straight through the space between them.
HKDI was founded in 2019 to close that exact space — one team, one case, both disciplines from day one.
Patricia Ho spent more than 13 years as a public interest lawyer in Hong Kong before founding HKDI. In that time, she saw the same pattern repeat, case after case, year after year.
Clients with strong legal cases. Real, acute trauma. And nowhere that could handle both at once.
Legal firms could not provide the wraparound psychosocial support their clients needed. Social services could not provide the legal strategy their cases required.
The two disciplines worked in separate silos — each assuming the other was covering the gap. Neither was.
The solution was not to refer clients between organisations. It was to build one organisation that housed both disciplines — in-house, integrated, and accountable to the same case.
Anchored to a law firm structure that could provide the professional indemnity and practising certificates needed to represent clients properly.
After 17 years working in Hong Kong's public interest space, Patricia Ho remains the organisation's principal legal and strategic adviser.
The HKDI team has since grown to include specialist lawyers, trauma counsellors, social workers, and operations staff — all working the same cases, together.
A Hong Kong in which no person entangled in forced marriage, trafficking, or related exploitation is left without access to expert legal representation and integrated psychosocial support — regardless of their means, their status, or the complexity of their case.
To provide free, expert legal representation and integrated psychosocial support to survivors who fall through the gaps of government Legal Aid — and to pursue the systemic legal reforms that protect the next generation.
Legal precision. Psychosocial integration. Institutional courage.We take the cases others decline, name the problems others avoid, and advocate for reforms others consider too slow or too difficult.
Every case we take. Every reform we pursue. Every client we accompany from crisis toward agency. It happens because people who believe in this work choose to support it.
