A regional division of the Not For Sale Campaign

HUMAN TRAFFICKING OVERVIEW

NATIONAL HUMAN TRAFFICKING

On a warm morning in May of this year, federal agents conducted a raid on an agricultural plant in Pottsville, Iowa, sparking what may be the largest worksite case the US government has ever prosecuted. Arrested were 389 illegal immigrants, including 287 from Guatemala, on charges of possession of false documents. What is unclear but critical in this case and many others is how the immigrants were brought to Iowa and under what conditions. Allegations of debt peonage have been made, but facts have not been raised that point to Pottsville as a human trafficking case, even though it has been listed as such in the media. However, 57 allegations of violations of child labor laws were cited by authorities, violating just about every child labor law on the books in Iowa. Should this be classified as child trafficking? Who truly benefitted from that work? In addition to the children, eighty of those arrested have already been tried and been handed sentences between five and seven months for document fraud.

The problem of forced labor in the US is one that continually surprises the public with how invisible such operations are until they are revealed as a situation of involuntary servitude. While Pottsville is abnormal in its number of victims and possible traffickers, other incidents across the US have shown that cases with dozens of victims are not uncommon. Groups ranging from 20-40 victims have been discovered in Georgia, Florida, California, Texas, Washington and other states in the past 10 years. This type of forced labor is not sexual in nature, but becomes highly visible because of the number of victims rescued in a single raid. We can go back even further than 10 years to address cases like that of the Golden Venture from 1993 , where 300 Chinese foreign nationals were scheduled to be trafficked into the US when their ship ran aground in New York. It is estimated that these victims were told they would be charged as much as $30,000 per person and would work off that money through debt peonage in sweatshops and similar forced labor situations.

Such cases led to the estimate that at any given time, more than 10,000 people are in forced labor situations in the US . This, however, is a conservative estimate and does not include sexual slavery. In the US, forced labor most often means some form of worksite labor issue, such as people who are forced to manufacture goods, harvest agriculture, or work in construction. Sexual slavery can be complementary to such enterprises, but is often labeled differently by American authorities.

Between 2007 and 2008, the federally-funded Human Trafficking Reporting System logged 1,229 suspected cases of human trafficking in the country. It is our opinion that the information provided by the HTRS should be viewed as cautionary as it only identified 10 percent of the 1,229 cases as actual human trafficking cases, despite the fact that all of the cases in the FBIs Innocence Lost initiative are classified as sex trafficking cases by themselves it is unlikely that since they opened 125 investigations resulting in 106 convictions in 2007 that the actions in the years 2008 would be so distinctly different.

This, of course, brings in to question the methodology behind the certification by the BJS of just what a human trafficking case actually consists of and how it relates to the crimes as listed on the federal criminal code, especially considering that the BJS is a division of the US Dept. of Justice. It is important to note that the HTRS has only been collecting such data since January 2008. The most positive aspect of the HTRS is that it collects data nationally receiving information from federal, state and local law enforcement. We do find, however, that much of this data is derived from just the 38 federally-funded human trafficking task forces in the US. Georgia is host to one of these task forces. Another task force, operated through a grant to the Cobb County Sheriffs Office, terminated in 2007. Thus, a significant number of cases and investigations are left out of the overall count conducted by the BJS.

The federal governments human trafficking enforcement efforts saw a positive increase in trafficking case initiation, prosecution, and conviction. In the most recent data for 2007 (the data collection tends to run 1-2 years behind), the US government initiated the highest number of convictions since 2000.

The data show that while the FBI launched fewer investigations resulting in fewer convictions than in 2006, it continued to participate in the USDOJs Innocence Lost National Initiative aimed at sex trafficking of minors, which resulted in a high rate of arrests and convictions. This is a nationwide, interagency collaboration with state and local law enforcement organizations. Overall, the federal government has launched 2,205 HT investigations since 2001, with more than half of those opened in FYs 2006 and 2007 alone. These investigations resulted in 2,278 arrests and 785 convictions. This 36 percent conviction rate is only somewhat reliable as such information is not broken down per individual count per individual offender.

Federal Definition of Human Trafficking:

Federal law defines trafficking in persons as sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age; or the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.

GEORGIA