H. R 4980 : Preventing Sex Trafficking And Strengthening Families Act Of 2014

The Council crafted the following operational definition to guide policy development on trafficking in persons: Trafficking is all acts involved in the recruitment, abduction, transfer, harboring, auction or acceptance of a person or persons; within national or across global limits. These types of recruitments are done through force, fraud or trickery; to place persons in a circumstance of slavery or slavery-like conditions, forced labor or services, such as prostitution or sexual services, domestic servitude, bonded sweatshop labor or other debt bondage (E.M. Gozdziak, 2005)

Have there been any major recorded votes on the bill? If so, did the vote take place in the House or the Senate and what was the result?

Human trafficking is one of the largest growing criminal activities. The commercial sexual exploitation of children, also known as CSEC, is often perceived as a hidden atrocity that occurs in an international setting. However, this manifestation of sexual abuse has increased and has become a recognized health issue in the United States. You may hear this problem to be known as domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST). Domestic minor sex trafficking is defined as the “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act” where the person is a citizen younger than the age of 18 years by the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000. This includes sexual acts like survival sex, prostitution, and stripping, where the child is the victim of criminal exploitation in exchange for remuneration in the form of money, food, shelter, or other valued entity. Approximately twenty-eight percent of US minors living on the streets are reported to exchanging sex for drugs or money. The estimation so far is that 150,000 to 300,000 children are falling at risk of being victimized each year, and the average age at which they are recruited is twelve to fourteen years of age. By raising awareness we are avoiding children suffering from long-term health consequences such as severe sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. By raising awareness a family may not lose their little boy or girl to human trafficking. Consider how many young women have been kidnapped, drugged, tricked or even sold by

While the Colorado legislature should be applauded for greatly improving its human trafficking laws with HB 14-1273, local victims of child sex trafficking would probably take little comfort in knowing the new bill has special provisions limiting the legal defenses their traffickers can mount while offering no such protection to labor-trafficked children. The societal focus on sex trafficking, often at the expense of labor trafficking is ideological, not logical, and certainly not based on any reliable data.

Ronald Weitzer states that human sex trafficking is defined as “recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for a commercial sex act.”

Kotrla, K., & Wommack, B. A. (2011). Sex Trafficking of Minors in the U.S.: Implications for Policy, Prevention and Research. Journal of Applied Research on Children: Informing Policy for Children at Risk: Vol. 2 (Iss. 1), article 5.

millions and “Human Sex Trafficking” has been termed the most common form of “modern-day slavery” (Leary). It is an industry that is “woven into the fabric of everyday life”. (Leary) The reasons for human trafficking range from forced prostitution, pornography, forced labor, organ harvesting and drug smuggling. In 2000, the U.S. Congress passed the “Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA)” (Gouty) and as defined in this act of legislation, human trafficking does not require transportation of victims from one location to another and it does not require the crossing of an international border (Gouty). President Obama signed the latest

The Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) of 2000 aims to combat human trafficking within the United States as well as abroad. On October 16, 2000, President Clinton signed the bill into law (Ryf, 2002). This statute states that slavery continues through the 21st century and is an issue that must be addressed. There is a three-tiered method to target human trafficking: prevention, protection, and prosecution. Additionally, this law requires the President to assign an interagency task force to monitor and combat trafficking as well as the responsibility to release the Annual Trafficking in Persons Report (Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act, 2000). Throughout this policy analysis, these areas of the law will be discussed in greater detail.

Furthermore, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 was best known for providing the framework to respond to human trafficking (Feldman, 2011). Likewise, it also helped for the redesigning of the laws in the United States by making sex trafficking an individual crime and allowing the government to focus on the victims. Even though this law has been reauthorized in 3 years the latest time, 2008, is the one that actually strengthens protections for the victims as well as, improves the protections for the victims. While this law already helped to develop people to prohibit the crime, the reauthorization of it, created a new set of criminal tools to reach unscrupulous labor recruiters (Feldman, 2011). Although the revisions of this law

The bill I chose for this paper was proposition 35. This proposition was proposed in the fall election of 2012. Proposition 35, also known as “Californians against Sexual Exploitation Act”, was primarily about increasing the penalty for sex trafficking. The bill would increase prison sentences for human traffickers, require convicted human traffickers to register as sex offenders, require all registered sex offenders to disclose their internet accounts (such as Facebook), require criminal fines from convicted human traffickers to pay for services to help victims, and lastly mandate law enforcement training for identifying human trafficking. The fiscal impact of this bill was estimated and

Shaun Boyd’s article explains that a new law in Colorado is trying to be passed to protect children in the sex trafficking industry. Ms. Boyd is an award winning reported with more than 20 years of experience. Shaun Boyd is a political specialist, because she has covered Colorado legislature and has covered some of Colorado’s biggest political stories, I trust her expertise in this region of reporting. Boyd is a reporter from CBS Denver, which is based in Denver, Colorado. CBS is a well-known local and national commercial broadcast network. I triangulated the new Colorado law mentioned in Boyd’s piece with both the Colorado Legal Defense Group and the Denver Post and confirmed that Colorado’s Attorney General pushed for a law that allows law

The issue of child sex trafficking is difficult to compromise with. When looking at the big picture of child sex trafficking it is taken into account that this is, in fact, a crime. With the consequences and effects this crime has on the children involved the opinion held by many is that it should be stopped immediately. There are current anti-trafficking laws in place to protect victims and children at risk. In 2000 the U.S. Congress passed the “Trafficking Victims Protections Act 2000” and is updated and reauthorized every two years, but TVPA only applies to federal cases tried in federal courts (Californians Against Sexual Exploitation, 2012). With these type of laws children are protected from potentially being trafficked. On the NPR website an interview took place between NPR interviewer Arun

Congress passed a law known as the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act. (Victims of criminal activity, n.d.). The U.S. Congress created this law as a form of immigration relief that is available aliens who are victims. The Congress wanted to aid law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting human trafficking by providing a way for alien victims to remain in the U.S. to assist in an investigation.

With a lot of the world creating laws and restrictions against trafficking of the person over the years, the United States decided to focus on the children that were being affected by these crimes. In 1984, the US passed the ‘Child Protection Act of 1984’, which brings larger penalties to those convicted and found guilty of child exploitation. It was a huge milestone in stopping the threat of human trafficking of a child and not just adults, because before this child exploitation was not looked at as a separate crime from exploitation of adults (USSC,

Today, many people say that slavery has ended many years ago, however, there is a hidden population that were being exploited in exchanged for financial and economic gains of others. The victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act(TVPA) of 2000 defines human trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transporting, provision or obtaining of person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery.” (Hachey and Phillippi, 2017, page 31) Sexual trafficking and labor trafficking are two types of human trafficking. With sexual trafficking, an individual is utilized for commercial sex acts; with labor trafficking, an individual is utilized for