Part I: The Task Ahead - Improving the United States' Task Force Model to Better Serve Victims and Survivors of Human Trafficking.

• Author: Rodolph, Alicen

CHALLENGES IN HUMAN TRAFFICKING CASES

Demand for cheap services, labor, and commercial sex create a lucrative market for individuals willing to commit human trafficking crimes. (1) Traffickers target vulnerable populations, such as homeless and runaway children, persons with disabilities, minority groups, undocumented migrants, temporary workers, and low-income individuals. (2) Then, traffickers manipulate and coerce vulnerable persons, inducing them to provide labor, services, or commercial sex acts for little to no payment. (3) Tactics most often used by traffickers include false promises of love, education, employment, or stability. (4) While physical abuse and threats may occur, much like domestic violence situations, these are often only used after the trafficker has successfully enticed the trafficked person into performing the desired tasks.

Compounding the problem is underreporting, as human trafficking, like sexual assault, is grossly underreported. (5) Contrary to the narrative of traffickers kidnapping random people off the street and forcing them into slavery, traffickers usually exploit a prior connection or relationship with the victim. (6) Leveraging the victim's trust, gained from prior interactions, traffickers coerce and control their victims, most often through false promises of love, housing, money, employment, or education. (7) Whatever promises are made, the trafficker uses the victim's vulnerabilities to maintain control and power over the victim. Thus, victims of human trafficking, like sexual assault and domestic violence victims, encounter many of the same factors contributing to underreporting--fear, skepticism they will be believed, love for their abuser, mistrust of law enforcement and the justice system, stigmas attached to victimization, and not seeing themselves as victims. (8) As a result, these incidents are thought to be grossly underreported.

Contributing to the issue of misidentification and underreporting is law enforcement's identification, investigation, and charging of only facially evident crimes. (9) Law enforcement, investigators, and prosecutors are trained to look at the offense directly in front of them.Theft, robbery, property crimes, etc. are often as they appear at face value. Yet, because of the concealed nature of human trafficking and the various categories of crimes to which it is often related, the trafficking crime often remains unnoticed. (10)

Like misidentification, the inadequate reporting of identified offenses also produces skewed human trafficking statistics. (11) For instance, it a trafficker is arrested and charged with kidnapping, simple assault, rape, or other similar charges, but not trafficking, the result is inadequate charging and reporting. While the charged crimes may have been included in the trafficker's acts, the incorrect or incomplete labeling and misreporting then contribute to other potential issues. Among the potential issues are shorter sentences, victims left unidentified, victims left without recourse or services, and other connected perpetrators unimpeded. Therefore, it is imperative for law enforcement, investigators, prosecutors, and judges to remain vigilant in the identification, processing, and reporting of cases not only to facilitate proper reporting, but also to ensure that victims and survivors receive adequate justice and are not re-traumatized by system failures.

THE CURRENT UNITED STATES MODEL

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