New JVTA law sets up perverse incentives to treat everyday prostitution as sex trafficking.
Lots of "victim" organizations in Arizona applying for grant money to go after prostitution under new law.
New JVTA law sets up perverse incentives to treat everyday prostitution as sex trafficking.
June 01, 2015 POLITICO Magazine Key points:
Just passed: Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (JVTA), a massive package of grant appropriations, criminal penalty enhancements and other items aimed at fighting sex trafficking in America and abroad.
With almost unanimous, bipartisan support in Congress and fans ranging from evangelical Christians to Planned Parenthood, it's easy to see the JVTA as a rare win-win in Washington. The fight against sex trafficking—plus federal funding to do so, contingent on arrests and convictions—sets up perverse incentives to treat everyday prostitution as sex trafficking.
All over the country, we're now seeing what would have been deemed "vice" work reframed as human trafficking stings. And who gets swept up in these stings? Willing, adult sex workers and their patrons.
For example, during last year's Operation Cross Country, an FBI spearheaded initiative "to recover victims of child sex trafficking," Newark, N.J. cops identified just one 14-year-old sex trafficking victim but it arrested another 45 people for normal prostitution. In Portland, one minor was recovered while 20 adult women were arrested on prostitution charges and three adults were arrested for promoting prostitution.
Also unnecessary is a real victim: the main catch in many “sex trafficking stings” are men who agree to pay for sex with a police decoy.
Take, for instance, Hortencia xxx, 71, who was recently arrested on federal charges as the “ring leader” of a sex trafficking syndicate. Arguello’s crime seems to be owning a bar where she allowed prostitution upstairs. Bartenders and other employees were also charged as part of the sex trafficking “conspiracy.”
Under the new banner of human trafficking even relatively minor crimes related to sex work can come with serious felony status, a sex offender registry requirement and a mandatory minimum prison term.
Mandatory minimums are strictly fixed sentences that leave no room for a judge's discretion —swelling prisons with nonviolent offenders.
Rep. Bobby xxxxx(D-Va.), co-chair of the Congressional Human Trafficking Caucus was one of only three members of the U.S. House to vote against the JVTA. The bill "contains a new mandatory minimum that someday will require a judge to impose a sentence that violates common sense," he said in a statement.
xxxxxt is wary of the "the possible scope of defendants who could be prosecuted" under this provision. Known as the SAVE Amendment, it prohibits not just placing an "escort" ad for a minor or someone forced into it but also benefitting financially in any way from the ad—meaning that classified-ad hosting sites could be held criminally accountable as sex traffickers. And the penalty for this trafficking? Mandatory minimum imprisonment of 10 to 15 years.
While this may be justifiable in some cases, those prosecutable could include "all of the employees of the ad company, including the receptionist or the computer guy," said Sxxxx "The judge should have the discretion to consider all the facts and the culpability of the particular defendant."
Every time members of Congress create a new mandatory minimum, they end up disproportionately punishing offenders they never intended to."
The alleged increase in domestic human trafficking fuels the sense that these laws are proportionate. Yet there’s no credible research showing that human trafficking has been increasing the U.S. While federal agents speak of the hundreds of thousands trafficked in America annually, federal anti-trafficking task forces only confirmed a little over 120 cases between 2007 and mid-2008, including only 14 victims under age 18. The Government Accountability Office has called federal statistics on domestic trafficking "questionable" due to "methodological weaknesses, gaps in data," and the fact that “the U.S. government's estimate was developed by one person who did not document all his work.” And the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” has recently dismantled several dubious but oft-relayed trafficking stats.
Whenever a new threat, real or imagined, captures the national mood—now sex trafficking—with every state and city and senator ready to prove they care by pushing ever harsher penalties and ever broader parameters for who should be penalized.
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