Hot Spot Trafficking (Heil, Nichols)

Text Interpretation

A commonly accepted practice has been to
advocate for the removal of sex for sale
advertising in free media such as Craigslist
and Backpage
Why is this not already monitored and
prohibited? How many people would be
affected by this? Can the OP even be tracked?
My first thought is that this would remove
access without inhibiting supply or demand.

...targeted policing forces traffickers to simply
advertise elsewhere or become more creative
in selling the victims, thereby concealing the
act of sex trafficking and making it less
identifiable
The lack of awareness towards sex trafficking
is already one of its largest advocates. While
scrolling through a site like Craigslist and
seeing an illegal ad may not spur action for an
individual, the fact that it is so easily
accessible may be more of a battleground.

Since the 2010, the permanent shutdown of
Craigslist adult services section has led police
and anti-trafficking advocates to put forth
considerable effort in monitoring and
censoring other free advertising websites to
weed out sex traffickers
Comparing Craigslist and Backpage, both
cited in the article, Craigslist appears entirely
clean of sex for cash whereas Backpage has
made up for all its counterpart lacks. Sex for
pay did not disappear, the virus simply found
a new host where it could flourish.

Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) (Look further into)

A prostituted child under the age of 18 is Definitions

considered a victim of trafficking. An
individual of the legal age of consent who is
forced, deceived, or coerced into prostitution
is considered a victim of trafficking. An
individual who coerces or forces a woman
who is of the age of consent to engage in sex
for money is considered a trafficker. Finally,
anyone who entices a child to engage in acts
of prostitution is a trafficker, with or without
force, fraud, and/or coercion.

For example, in 2008, the FBI reported 2800 This number seems low.
advertisements selling children for sexual
services, which were posted on free
advertising Internet sites such as Craigslist

law enforcement officials and anti-trafficking See notes above.

advocates have centralized their focus on
targeting these sites and shutting down the
availability of adult services. However, we
argue that targeting and censoring these sites
will only move trafficking away from an
avenue in which it can be monitored and
identified

Crime Displacement Theory (Look further into)

Theoretically, displacement occurs in one of
six different manners, none of which are
mutually exclusive. [R]outlined the first five
types of displacement, namely time, tactic,
target, place, and crime type

Craigslist made up 40% of all Internet ads for Displacement in action.

prostitution that year. In 2012, the AIM group
estimated that Backpage made up 70% of
Internet ads for prostitution
The number of visitors to Backpage also
increased by 15.8%. Similarly, Eros.com,
CityVibe.com, MyRedBook.com, and
Escorts.com saw similar or larger growth rates
than Backpage. In fact, CityVibe saw a 63%
increase in listings

In the case of sex trafficking, the crime is so Adds to the perpetuity of the crime. Just as
lucrative that when one trafficker is arrested, physical companies can be replaced, so can
another is there to take his place traffickers.

Thus, if the offender has much to gain from Traffickers are arguably rational. There is too
her/his criminal activities, s/he is more likely much to gain from the crime for it to ever
to modify offending patterns and behavior in cease of its own accord.
order to reap the reward.

Because the study of domestic human Who are traffickers? Aside from income, what
trafficking is relatively new and a gap exists entices them? What make them targets of the
in our general knowledge of any trafficker industry?
profile, we have chosen to apply displacement
theory based on a priori knowledge of the
financial benefits and minimal risks
associated with the trafficking in human
beings

It is our theoretical claim that crime How does this differ from physical
displacement is inevitable with the targeting businesses? Are physical operations dying as
and censoring of online sex advertisements, the the result of online success? Online
primarily in terms of tactic, place entities are not restricted to location.

the FBI estimates that all forms of human How long do girls remain in the industry?
trafficking generate an estimated $9.5 billion What is the retention rate? Has firearm and
in annual revenue (www.fbi.gov, accessed drug trafficking decreased significantly as sex
March 2013). It has generated more revenue trafficking has increased?
than both gun and drug trafficking, making it
one of the most profitable criminal enterprises
worldwide. In addition to the potential profit
associated with trafficking, the product itself
is both reusable and renewable. While drugs
and weapons can only be sold once, humans
can be sold multiple times over long periods
of time

Given this, traffickers must devise ways in Why do traffickers face such little risk aside
which they are able to make a financial profit from displacement compared to other criminal
with little risk of prosecution or punishment entrepreneurs? Does it have anything to do
with loyalty from the victims?

We found that St. Louis police identified Why are local officials not trained in
trafficking co-occurring with rape and sexual recognizing these forms of crime? Especially
assault, particularly in cases involving surrounding heavy hubs like Atlanta or
identified prostitutes, as a priority area that Charlotte?
is in need of improvement. They believed that
if police investigated further, it was likely that
trafficking was co-occurring in some of those
cases

Prosecutors are predisposed to try cases they
are likely to win. If there is enough evidence
to establish rape, illegal immigration,
prostitution, domestic violence, etc., but not
enough to establish the coercive or fraudulent
nature of these crimes, they will more likely
choose to try a case as the lower offense
despite the presumable evidence of trafficking
Why stop here? Why not continue
investigations past the trial? This seems in and
of itself like an injustice to those affected.
This seems like it would also reduce resources
available as on paper sex trafficking is not
tried as frequently though it exists on the
perimeter.

Whether or not a trafficking case is What is being done to coerce cooperation?

prosecuted is not necessarily dependent on the How many girls who are rescued return?
prosecutor or bureaucratic decision-making. What can be done to help them?
In many instances, there is lack of
witness/victim cooperation
Even if the case does reach court, state level
penalties are not a real deterrent for the
trafficker. Looking at a penalty for purchasing
a minor for sex, under [an Oregon] law
passed in 2011, soliciting sex from a minor
carries a maximum of one year in prison or a
$20,000 fine
How is this even??? A thing??? What do u
mean
Look further into ridiculously lenient laws and
when they were introduced, by whom, how
effective they are, etc.

Code words included: fresh to the scene, Code words for minor sex.
cheerleader, and new to identify the girl as
a minor
traffickers once again have changed the
wording to move away from age (e.g.
cheerleader, daddys little girl )
How can these users not be tracked?
You have USAsexcat.info, where the Johns
will actually go on and rate anything from
street walkers to strip clubs to escorts. And
they talk to each other, and its like, these
guys are hobbyists. They just go from stripper
to stripper, or from hooker to hooker, or from
escort to escort, saying, Oh no. She was
great. She was all that she said she was. I
mean, they actually talk about this in an open
forum but its just so hard to infiltrate.

Understanding Human Trafficking (Logan)

Text Interpretation
Both women signed a contract 47.2% of people in Indonesia make less than
stating they would be paid US$100- $25 per month. (Asian Development Bank,
US$200 a month to work in a home taking 2015)
care of a family

when they arrived their passports Human trafficking parallels traditional slave
and travel documents were confiscated trade. It is modern day slavery but is not
and they were made to work close to 21 hr a treated as such in terms of judicial efforts.
day, to sleep on small mats in the kitchen of
the large home, and were given very little to
eat. They were threatened, physically
assaulted, and rarely allowed out of the house

on at least one occasion a witness Why were their conditions ignored when
saw Samirah crawling up the basement presented so blatantly to others?
stairs bleeding from the forehead and Samirah
and Enung both told the witness that Samirah
had been beaten by the homeowner. On
another occasion a landscaper at the home
was confronted by Enung who was raggedly
dressed and very hungry pleading with him
for his doughnuts. Even so, it wasnt until one
of the women ran away to get help that their
situation was discovered by authorities

Human trafficking, at its most basic level, is Definition. Sex trafficking and slavery is
defined by the Trafficking Victims Protection under the umbrella of human trafficking.
Act of 2000 as (a) the recruitment, harboring, Should I focus on human trafficking or sex
transporting, supplying, or obtaining a person trafficking with regard to the human
for labor or services through the use of force, trafficking aspect?
fraud, or coercion for the purpose of
involuntary servitude or slavery; or (b) sex
trafficking in which a commercial sex act is
induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in
which the person induced to perform sex acts
is under 18 years of age

Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) Legislation : look further into

Labor exploitation can include forced labor Labor exploitation and sexual exploitation
and debt bondage, whereas sexual exploitation often coincide.
includes compulsory sex acts within the
commercial sex industry. Although often
termed sex trafficking, sexual exploitation
in private homes by individuals who often
demand sex and work (in the home or even
outside of the home) is categorized by the law
as labor exploitation

the better organized human trafficking Debt bondage : one reason people stay in
operations include both components, unfavorable circumstances
and will actually use the fee charged for
transporting the individual into the United
States as a form of debt bondage to entrap
people into the trafficking situation

America is no stranger to slavery. There is a The original form of slavery in the United
rich history of slavery in America beginning States underwent much difficulty before
in 1619 with both White and African slaves eventual eradication. Does this new form of
being imported to Virginia (Davis, 2006; slavery have to endure the same obstacles?
Jordan & Walsh, 2007) and culminating in a
law to abolish importation of African slaves
(1807), a civil war because of slavery (1860-
1865), and laws that finally intended the
abolition of slavery itself (1863). However,
just as it took numerous laws
and even several constitutional amendments
and Supreme Court decisions to eradicate
race-based slavery, other more insidious
forms of slavery developed and have
flourished even in recent times

that slaves have very low value, they Does this apply to sex slavery? Are sex slaves
are cheap, and are only worth what they bring not inherently valuable as property to their
in terms of immediate profit to the owners owners?
rather than being valuable themselves as
property and that they are essentially a
disposable commodity

there is speculation that human trafficking is How is drug and gun profit measured? What
the third largest profitable trafficking activity makes the human aspect illusive to statistic?
after drug and gun trafficking (Hyland, 2001) Some sources differ in saying human
trafficking may be more profitable.

Congressional Hearing 1
 Text Interpretation

It is estimated that over 100,000 Runaways and victims of abuse are

American children became sex-trafficking susceptible.
victims last year and every year. Studies
indicate the average age of entry into
prostitution is 13. Many child-trafficking
victims are chronic runaways who are fleeing
sexual and physical abuse in their homes

This documentary forces us to confront this
reality and raises another challenge that we
will discuss with our witnesses at todays
hearing: the need to treat sexually exploited
children as victims and survivors, not as
criminals. In many States, child-trafficking
victims are often arrested rather than assisted.
These victims are badly in need of basic
services like medical care, housing, and
counseling, and a jail cell isnt the answer. We
must change the way our criminal justice
system treats the victims
Criminalizing the victim is not the answer. As
said in the documentary by PBS, the exploited
are arrested far more times than their pimps
are, sometimes traffickers or pimps
themselves are never apprehended because of
a sense of loyalty within the industry.
Focusing on rehabilitation and exposure gets
girls and women off of the streets and brings
justice to those that hurt them.

When we passed the Trafficking Victims Legislation.

Protection Act 10 years ago, we said that all
children who were involved in commercial
sex crimes are victims and should be treated
accordingly, entitled to protection, services,
and restitution

Nearly every State in the Nation allows
children of any age to be prosecuted for
prostitutioneven though children are too
young to consent to sex with adults. By
charging children with crimes, we compound
the harm
Why would children be open to prosecution?
Precedence of crime, a distorted form of stare
decisis, should make the initial or greater
crime the issue. Children who are too young
to consent are victims of exploitation and
rape, why punish them?

Now, the State of New York has been a leader Services, not sentences
in rising to this challenge. They recently
passed a safe harbor law. Under the law,
trafficking victims are given services, not
sentences. Safe harbor laws recognize that the
sexual exploitation of children is a child
welfare issue
We learned that a pimp can make $200,000 a
year trafficking just one victim. And, of
course, the pimps traffic multiple
victims at a time. So there is a huge upside, an
economic bonanza for these pimps in sex
trafficking
The figure $200,000 has been prevalent in
research but this is the only instance which
has made it clear that this is the result of
trafficking just one person. That number is
astounding and these victims likely never see
anything near that amount of money for what
they are subjected to.

Now, in the whole country right now, there 70 shelters for an estimated, and probably
are only about 70 shelter beds for sex- insufficient estimate, 100,000 current victims
trafficking victims. Only 70 across our 50 is not enough.
States. So the pimps are just playing the odds

Senator Cornyn and I introduced S. 2925, the Legislation. Is this in effect now?
Trafficking Deterrence and Victims Support
Act. We now have bipartisan support for these
efforts. Senator Franken and you both noted,
correctly, along with the inspiration that Paul
Wellstone gave us years ago, and through this
we are going to be able to set up a number of
block grant programs to test out the very best
approaches that are being used in our country.
These would be awarded on a competitive
basis to State and local government entities
that have developed models which we know,
once put in place, could be copied elsewhere

One-third of runaway children are lured into This is a shocking statistic but what other
prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home options do they have? Vulnerability is key in
sex trafficking

Our first witness has been at least indirectly Credibility

introduced. He is Ambassador Luis CdeBaca,
serves as senior adviser for the Secretary
of State and directs the State Department
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons. The Ambassador chairs the Senior
Policy Operating Group, an interagency
working group coordinating the Obama
administrations efforts to fight trafficking
not only abroad but here in the United States.
The Ambassador was previously a prosecutor
in the Justice Department where he worked on
the largest human-trafficking prosecution in
our Nations history. He received the John
Marshall Award, the Departments highest
litigation honor, and the Freedom Networks
Paul and Sheila Wellstone Award. He served
as counsel on the House Judiciary Committee,
graduated from the University of Michigan
Law School and Iowa State University.

sadly, we find children enslaved not just in The exploitation of children is everywhere.
commercial sexthe topic at hand today How could anyone do this?
but also in agricultural work, factories, and
private homes. And, sadly, one of the things
that we see in those cases, often looked at as
labor-trafficking cases, is ongoing and
continual sexual abuse of those children as
well.

Beth Phillips. She is the U.S. Attorney for Credibility

the Western District of Missouri in Kansas
City. She is the Justice Departments
representative at this hearing, and thank you
for being here. She has been a prosecutor at
both the local level and Federal level. She
served in the Computer Crimes and Child
Exploitation Unit of the office she now heads.
She has served on the Board of Directors of
the Metropolitan Organization to Counter
Sexual Assault and also the Board of
Directors of the Child Protection Center,
which provides crisis intervention to sexually
abused children. Ms. Phillips earned
bachelors and masters degrees at the
great University of Chicago in my home State
of Illinois, and she has a J.D. from the
University of Missouri.

It is not necessarily poverty that makes these Who is susceptible?

children vulnerable. Runaways, throwaways,
children who are chronically truant, or who
suffer physical or sexual abuse in the home
these are the types of children who are
targeted by pimps. The pimps purport to offer
these children the love and attention that they
never had but, rather, instead manipulate
them and force them into prostitution
the Western District of Missouri, Young and mentally insufficient: vulnerability
we prosecuted Don Elbert II, a street pimp to is what holds the cycle in place
three sisters a 15-year-old and two 13-year-
old twins. The defendant forced the
girls to work as prostitutes every night and
took all the money they earned in exchange
for providing them with food, clothing, and
housing. The girls were afraid to leave the
defendant because he frequently became
violent and threatened them. For example, on
one occasion he put his hands around the neck
of one twin and said, I will kill all of you.
After Elberts arrest, all three girls were
hospitalized and were treated for post-
traumatic stress disorder and sexually
transmitted diseases. They were given tests
which indicated that they had very low levels
of intellectual functioning

The heart of the initiative is the establishment What is being done?

of local task forces that bring together State
and Federal law enforcement agencies,
prosecutors, and social service providers to
establish and employ a multi-faceted, victim-
centered strategy designed to identify the
child victims, provide them the services they
need, and to prosecute the offenders. By the
end of last year, 34 task forces and working
groups had been established throughout the
United States. According to the FBI, in the
last 6 years the Innocence Lost Initiative has
resulted in the identification of almost 900
child victims of prostitution, some of whom
were identified as missing by the National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
The initiative has led to 510 convictions in
State and Federal courts and resulted in the
seizure of over $3 million of real property,
vehicles, and monetary assets.

one case involving conspiracy to commit sex
training of children in Anchorage, Alaska,
required daily commitment from the FBI and
the U.S. Attorneys Office victim witness
specialist and coordinators over 3 years, from
The job will never be easy but it will always
be worth it to get our children and our citizens
off of the streets and out of unhealthy
lifestyles
the beginning of the investigation until
completion of the trial in 2008. This included
five victim witness professionals who were
flown into Alaska for the months surrounding
the trial, not to mention the many agents and
three prosecutors who worked on the trial
itself

Compounding the difficulty is a dearth of This is why we need more than 70 specialized
secured housing and specialized services for housing units. How can we change this lack of
the young victims. Without secured housing, resources
it is difficult for law enforcement officers to
maintain the steady contact with the victims
necessary to build a rapport and build trust.
While general resources might be available at
the State level, there are very little resources
that are capable of addressing the full range of
trauma experienced by these children

From a law enforcement perspective, our Not enough training, many departments do
efforts are focused on building capacity not have trained officers in this arena
through the establishment and training of task
forces to successfully apprehend and
prosecute offenders who make money off the
backs of children

Anita Alvarez, who is the States Attorney in Credibility

Cook County, Illinois, which, of course, is the
home county of the city of Chicago. She is
leading the second largest prosecutors office
in America. She was elected to this position in
2008, a stunning victory in the primary, to the
surprise of many. She became the first woman
and first Hispanic elected as Cook County
States Attorney. She previously served in the
office for 22 years as a prosecutor and
supervisor. She has handled all kinds of cases
ranging from homicide to child sexual
exploitation. She has been named Person of
the Year by Chicago Lawyer Magazine and
States Attorney of the Year by the Illinois
State Crime Commission. She graduated
from Loyola University in Chicago and
Chicago Kent College of Law, and she is also
a Mom.

Illinois Criminal Justice Information Who is susceptible?

Authority funded a study of young women
involved in the sex trade in the Chicago area.
Seventy-three percent of the participants
surveyed reported that they had started in the
sex trade before the age of 18. Almost one-
third of those surveyed stated that the reason
they started in the sex trade was because they
owed the individual who had recruited them
because of the provision of food, clothing, or
gifts

One survey respondent related that she turned We need to build the family, the foundation of
to prostitution as a freshman in high school a good nation and a good democracy. There
and that she would turn tricks after school are too many children in America who do not
because her mother was addicted to drugs and have families, only absent parents.
she needed the money to buy food and
clothing. In a prostitution case that my office
handled recently, one juvenile related that she
did not wish to pursue criminal charges
against her pimp because, and I quote,
He gets me a Subway sandwich whenever I
want one.

survival sexexchanging sex for food, This should never be an option or even a
clothing, or a safe place to sleep thought to a child

our greatest setback to date has not been a Where can we get funding from?
lack of vision or resolve but rather a lack of Federal/State budgets? Community
funding. And I believe that the funding is donations?
important not just for State and local
prosecutors but for all the social service
providers as well, because we all work
together and it is essential that they have the
funding as well as us to make sure that we do
everything possible to attack this horrific
crime

And so if our response then ends up being let Foster care is not an option as it holds its own
us take this child and then put them into that mass of issues. Programs must be designed
system, that system is not designed for that specifically for survivors of this crime
child
Congressional Hearing 2

Text Interpretation

this crime has increasingly

moved from the street to the smartphone

The National Center for Missing and

Exploited Children (NCMEC) reported an
846-percent increase in reports of suspected
child sex trafficking from 2010 to 2015a
spike the organization found to be directly
correlated to the increased use of the Internet
to sell children for sex

Backpage operates in 97 countries and 934

cities worldwide

According to an industry analysis in 2013,

eight out of every ten dollars spent on online
commercial sex advertising in the United
States went to one websiteBackpage.

according to a leading anti-trafficking

organization called Shared Hope
International, service providers working
with child sex trafficking victims have
reported that between 80 percent and 100
percent of their clients have been bought and
sold on Backpage.com

Our report demonstrates that Backpage has

concealed evidence of crimes by
systematically deleting words and images
suggestive of illegal conduct from
advertisements submitted to their website
before publishing the ads. And some of those
ads involved child sex trafficking. Backpages
editing process sanitized the content of
millions of advertisements and hid important
evidence from law enforcement.

The evidence is clear that Backpage

deliberately edited out words
indicative of child sex trafficking and other
crimes from the ads. This list of terms is
chilling. Starting in 2010, Backpage
automatically deleted words including
Lolita, teenage, rape,
young,little girl, teen, fresh,
innocent, school girl, and even Amber
Alertand then published the edited
versions of the ads
to their website. Backpage also systematically
deleted scores of words that were indicative of
prostitution

Based on our best estimate, this means

that Backpage was editing well over half a
million ads each year

Senator TESTER. Well, thank you, Senator

Portman. I want to thank you and Senator
McCaskill for having this hearing. We have
some statistics from Montana: a 100-percent
increase in human trafficking cases between
2015 and 2016; the number of juvenile
victims rescued in Montana between 2015 and
2016 increased by 400 percent. We have a
problem out there.