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ENDING THE BUSINESS OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Trafficking is the global practice of exploiting women, men and children for the sex industry, sweatshops, farm labor, or domestic service. |
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| Q. |
What is trafficking? |
| A. |
Trafficking is the buying and selling of women, men, or children, to be used in the commercial sex industry or in various forms of labor. Trafficking may or may not involve transporting the victim across a border, but it always involves the trafficker's exercise of control over the victim. A good anti-trafficking bill would define trafficking with reference to the typical kinds of coercion that traffickers commonly use on their victims. |
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| Q. |
Why does New York State need an anti-trafficking bill? |
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Existing laws against crimes such as rape and kidnapping don’t adequately address trafficking. Kidnapping requires that the victim be secreted, held, or confined; rape requires an imminent threat of force; and these elements are not always present in a trafficking situation. Traffickers use a range of techniques including deceit, intimidation, implicit threats, and immigration abuse to control their victims. A trafficker might, for example, lure a victim to the United States with a fraudulent job offer, take away the victim’s passport and money, surround the victim with accomplices who appear physically menacing, and threaten to report the victim to the police unless he or she follows orders. For a victim who has no resources and is terrified by the prospect of contact with an unfamiliar police force in an unknown country, such conduct might be enough to ensure the victim’s compliance so that the trafficker can exploit the victim in a brutal - and highly profitable - manner. The misdemeanor penalties for offenses such as promoting prostitution are too low to create adequate deterrence from a criminal enterprise for which the potential profits are huge, driven by the extensive demand for commercial sex and cheap labor. And these low-level penalties fail to address the highly abusive and harmful behavior that is specific to trafficking, and don’t address the devastating after-affects for victims. |
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| Q. |
Isn't trafficking a federal offense? Why isn't the federal law enough? |
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With trafficking and with all crimes, federal authorities pick and choose which cases to investigate and prosecute. Typically they choose larger-scale cases, which might involve multiple defendants, multiple victims, and extensive assets. This is in no way intended as a criticism of federal anti-trafficking enforcement; it is simply the nature of federal efforts against all types of crimes, including narcotics, weapons, and stalking, that federal law enforcement leaves many untouched cases for state authorities to pursue. And in the cases of narcotics, weapons, and stalking, there are strong state laws against these crimes as well. Moreover, it is often state and local police officers who come into contact with trafficking victims – for example, when they raid brothels. Without a state anti-trafficking law, these officers are less likely to consider the possibility that the women they arrest for prostitution may in fact be crime victims rather than criminals. State legislatures are quickly realizing that anti-trafficking laws are needed at the state level, as over a dozen states have recently enacted anti-trafficking laws. |
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| Q. |
What is the New York State Anti-Trafficking Coalition? |
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The Coalition is a group of organizations that have joined forces to advocate for an effective New York State law to criminalize traffickers and to protect and help victims of this abuse. |
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| Q. |
What would an effective anti-trafficking law include? |
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First, an effective law against trafficking would define trafficking comprehensively, taking into account the actual experiences reported by trafficking victims. Second, it would create strong penalties for the traffickers who coerce victims into commercial sex or into labor. Third, it would address those who patronize the sex industry. They create the demand that makes the industry so profitable and creates the motive for trafficking. Fourth, it would create remedies for victims of trafficking, including a defense for trafficked individuals who are sometimes arrested for the very acts of prostitution that they are coerced to perform. It would also allow victims to recover remuneration from traffickers. Fifth, it would clarify existing law on sex tourism in order to stop the sex tour operators who conduct business in New York State . These operators promote sex tours that drive trafficking in poorer countries, where victims have no recourse against those who profit from their suffering. Sixth, it would provide services to assist trafficking victims in rehabilitating their lives. |
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