Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald are grassroots feminists, human right activists, and independent scholars, who in 1993 co-founded Persons Against Non-State Torture, (NST), a campaign to gain human rights and legal equality for women and girls who are victimized by family and non-family non-state torturers who also trafficked them to like-minded others, such as buyers and pornographers within organized local, national, or international criminal informal networks.

Their backgrounds in public and community health nursing provided the foundation for their innovative healing practices as well as exposing the modus operandi of perpetrators. Both Linda and Jeanne have received Excellence in Nursing Practice awards, achieved Canadian Federation of University Women’s (CFUW) International Relations Award for their advocacy that led to the CFUW national policy statement on non-state torture. This policy statement was later adopted in Istanbul as an international policy of the NGO Graduate Women International (GWI), and in 2017 they received the Women of Peace Award from Women’s PeacePower Foundation for their relentless campaign.

Featured in Hidden Horrors, a CBC radio documentary and on WMC Live with Robin Morgan, Jeanne and Linda are determined to break the silence around the well-hidden phenomenon of non-state torture. They feel privileged to be entrusted with women’s stories of victimization, including women who participate in their global participatory research. Linda and Jeanne lecture and present on non-state torture victimization at universities and conferences worldwide, as well as at United Nations Commissions in New York City, Vienna, Austria, and Geneva. Together, they have written dozens of articles and book chapters, and are authors of two books; Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal to Let Torturer-Traffickers Win, and Healing: Lynn’s Story, Getting My-Self Back.

In Canada, their advocacy is focused on efforts to have the Criminal Code of Canada amended to include naming and criminalizing non-state torture as a torture crime. In spite of providing expert evidence and briefs, sharing their their research and field work with victims of non-state torture with Canadian Governmental Standing Committees, the Criminal Code has yet to be amended.

This year, Jeanne and Linda established an international working group titled Network Against Non-State Torture (NNST) which will hold it’s first conference November 5, 2026, in Lisbon, Portugal.