A regional division of the Not For Sale Campaign

HUMAN TRAFFICKING OVERVIEW

THE PROBLEM IN GEORGIA

Dancers from India, locked in a house in Lilburn and only allowed out under guard. Young women, imprisoned in a home in Cartersville and forced to prostitute themselves. Mexican nationals brought to Norcross to serve as sexual slaves. South Africans kept in a garage and forced to work stone at a Newnan marble company without pay. Dozens of Latinos trafficked by Asian temporary labor firms all over Atlanta. Hundreds of minors prostituted on the streets of Atlanta each month, bartered and sold like cattle. And an older case, though not old enough to be forgotten 133 Asian slaves smuggled in the ballast chamber of a tanker through the port of Savannah.

These are not the multinational merits Georgia has come to enjoy as an International city open to all cultures. These are but a handful of many instances when the pride of the Peach State has been sullied by modern-day slavery. The state is a transportation hub - Georgia is home to the nations busiest airport, seeing more than 90 million domestic travelers in 2008, with 9 million of those on international flights . Hartsfield-Jackson ranks third in the nation for international flights behind only New Yorks JFK and Floridas Miami International airports.

Involuntary servitude is a growing industry in Georgia. Since 2001, the National Institute of Justice reports that there have been 27 cases of human trafficking in the state, all prosecuted at the federal level, though we have been unable to locate a few of these cases. Those we have found are entered into www.slaverymap.org, a wiki-style online mapping tool. Typically, the number of historical convictions does not indicate a small problem if compared to statistics for crimes such as burglary or auto theft as human trafficking cases often take multiple years to prosecute. Further, most human trafficking cases require the willingness of the victim to participate in the prosecution not true of most criminal cases.

What we cannot identify are cases that may have been human trafficking, but were prosecuted under other related statutes, such as prostitution, escorting without a permit, immigration violations and similar offenses. This is one of the key indicators, we believe, for greater research and record-keeping in the area of human trafficking.

This does not imply that local law enforcement is not participating in enforcement operations but that federal agents have greater resources, more extensive subject matter training and are tasked, both by the US Constitution and federal law, to investigate human trafficking as a matter of course. The FBIs Innocence Lost National Initiative is a collaborative effort spread across many FBI regional offices working in concert with a host of local law enforcement agencies including state agencies, sheriffs departments and police forces throughout the targeted jurisdiction.

GEORGIA